:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11636139/purge2.jpg "the first purge")
I can get the money.” I can’t speak for him, but I think he wants Blumhouse to become so much more than horror. He read the script and was like, “I can do this. He always knew I had this other side to me that I wanted to explore. The other was a real drama, a character study about a retired cop on Staten Island.
THE FIRST PURGE SERIAL
One was a serial killer script, very dark.
Back then, he was a young producer and I was a young writer.
For me it’s more like the first film I directed. He knew me personally to know I wasn’t the right guy to be on-set again.įilmmaker: Do you get a sense that Blumhouse is evolving post- Get Out - that it’s the kind of place you’d take a personal project like Once Upon a Time in Staten Island?ĭeMonaco: It’s definitely a departure for them. I was excited to write it, but I think it was time. I wasn’t ready to spend two more years on another Purge. When you both write and direct something, it’s a couple years off your life. I don’t think I had any more Purge directing in me.
THE FIRST PURGE MOVIE
For me, after the Purge movies, I knew making a personal movie would be a great way for me to get out of that dark world and into something a little lighter. Instead, we talked about the drain of directing nihilistic violence, working with those skimpy Blumhouse budgets and reading some surprising (and disturbing) comments from test screening audiences.įilmmaker: Was Jason Blum cool with you passing the directing duties for The First Purge to someone else?ĭeMonaco: I think he was. As a mental break for both of us, neither of us much mentioned a certain sitting president, whose administration increasingly resembles the New Founding Fathers of America, the ultra-conservative party from DeMonaco’s series. He’s not happy that America seems to be turning into the movies that made his name. Like the original Purge, it also starred Ethan Hawke.įor DeMonaco, the future is an open road, even if that may not be true for the rest of us. (With The First Purge, that’s director Gerard McMurray.) This frees him to stretch other muscles, like going back to one of his pet obsessions: his home borough, which he’d previously explored in his 2009 directorial debut, a crime drama known as either Little New York or simply Staten Island.
THE FIRST PURGE SERIES
DeMonaco is now more like a showrunner, guiding the series along while passing the reins to trusted accomplices.
Not that he’s has completely moved on: he did write it, as well as the forthcoming TV show spinoff, which will tell more tales of that dystopian hellscape in which all crime, most emphatically murder, is legal one night a year. His latest is even funded by his boss of the last several years, Jason Blum, the namesake head of horror unit Blumhouse Productions, making it only the second non-genre picture they’ve handled since Whiplash, and their first overtly topical movie since Get Out almost won the Best Picture Oscar.ĭeMonaco didn’t direct The First Purge, a prequel that’s somehow bloodier and bleaker than its predecessors.
THE FIRST PURGE PLUS
The film that exists because DeMonaco wrote and directed 2013’s The Purge, plus its two sequels. It’s a personal movie, a coming-of-age drama starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale. DeMonaco has two production days left on his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Staten Island. When I speak to James DeMonaco, The First Purge is only 48 hours from hitting theaters, but the franchise’s creator is otherwise engaged. Donald Trump, Ethan Hawke, James DeMonaco, Jason Blum, Once Upon a Time in Staten Island, The First Purge, The Purge
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