‘The Purge’ Creator James DeMonaco On The Franchise’s Legacy

James DeMonaco is the man behind The Purge franchise, which has captured the terrified hearts of America as the series delves deep into the horror of our sociopolitical moment. But, DeMonaco, while always an avid horror lover, got a very different start in the film world, involving Robin Williams and Francis Ford Coppola. But how did he get from point A to point B?

Since The Purge celebrates its 10-year anniversary this year, we spoke with DeMonaco about that very question, as well as the franchise’s cultural impact, why he can’t ever watch The Exorcist again, and more.

Dread Central: It’s been about 10 years since the first Purge came out. Did you ever expect it to have the impact that it had when the first film came out?

James DeMonaco: Absolutely not <laugh> with no hyperbole. There is no one more surprised at how it’s entered into the mainstream. I was watching the Yankees game last night and they played The Purge siren during the game. I’m like, this has gone almost overboard.

I’m still kind of pinching myself, like did this really happen? Because it was oddly conceived, oddly. I had made a film before that I wrote and directed that did moderately well in the festival circuit. It was called Staten Island, New York with Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio. We did some festivals around the world, but it didn’t blow anything up. So I knew I needed something small. So The Purge was conceived as being what I thought would be this kind of art horror, very Michael Haneke, Funny Games kind of thing that might play a couple of theaters in Manhattan and LA. I did not think it would have any mainstream appeal. The script was rejected by, my god, I think we counted one day, it was over 50 different production entities. The main rejection was that it was too anti-American.

So we were hoping for European financing because my first film was European financed. And so when Jason Blum saw it as something that might have mainstream appeal, we were kind of shocked. But we were like, “Okay, let’s go for the ride.” So, very strange, so truly shocked.

DC: That’s so interesting that you initially made The Purge as art house horror. And now it is a huge franchise. That is crazy.

JD: That’s what I mean, wholeheartedly absolute shock because of the reaction to the script. I’ll say this, I thought the conceit was kind of big. It’s a small movie with a large conceit. It was an indictment, too, not to get too political, of the lack of gun control laws in society and the treatment of the disenfranchised by whatever government system was in power at the time. So it had these sociopolitical underpinnings. I just never saw what it could become. So that’s why Blum is one of the best because of what he sees.

DC: It’s both sad and incredible how pressing The Purge and the entire franchise continue to be.

JD: Isn’t it though? I’m with you. It’s great on one level because it continues the franchise. But in a perfect world, I wish that it had no reflection on our current society. That’s my childish view of the world.

DC: So you’re making these movies and then everything in US politics falls apart even more. Does it feel like you’re predicting the future? <Laugh>

JD: My producer once said, “Stop, you’re like Nostradamus. Please predict something happy.” It’s been weird. Especially when we did The Forever Purge, the strangest thing was we had shot it a year before January 6th. But we delayed the release because of COVID. When we finally screened the movie, everybody thought we shot it after January 6th.

I think sad is actually a really truthful word that I often use. People feel like The Purge could happen. That’s such a sad thing.

DC: And you’re like, “I don’t want it to happen. I didn’t write this cause I wanted it to happen. It’s actually really terrifying.” <Laugh>

JD: Exactly. So the whole thing’s incredibly strange.

DC: So I do wanna know what it was like working with Ethan Hawke. Obviously you worked with him on your first film and it’s really cool to see Ethan Hawke in a genre movie. So what was it like directing him in The Purge?

JD: As an actor and as a human being, there’s no better actor to have on set. And I’ve had the opposite. So now after, you know, my six or seven films I’ve directed, I look back upon working with Ethan with great joy because he’s the type of actor who’s so committed to the project. He stays on set. He doesn’t retreat to his trailer, he’s there for everyone, the other actors, the director. So he’s part of the process in a way. He just weaves himself into the DNA of the process. And I’ve worked with a lot of actors and I get it. They retreat to their trailer as soon as their scene is over and some more than others. But he is the opposite.

It’s wonderful. He brings so much to the table on the script level too. He has amazing thoughts. He’s a writer himself, a director himself. We did Assault On Precinct 13 together. That’s how we got to know each other. I didn’t direct that, I just produced and wrote. So I got to just watch him work.

I said to myself, “I have to write and direct a movie that he’s in.” So to get to do that a couple of times has been a privilege.

DC: That’s so cool. So in creating The Purge, what has that been like to expand on the lore?

JD: Yeah. In a weird way, going back to the previous stuff you said, the current state of the political landscape I think began to fuel the series as it went along.

The only thought I had beyond one was, and I jokingly would say on set not thinking this was gonna happen at all, that there’s gonna be people in the audience that are gonna be a little angry that we’re stuck in a house on Purge Night. The Purge one didn’t show show what was happening on the streets of America. So in my head, I’m like, “If a miracle happens and we get a chance to make a second one, I know I want to be out and about.”

That was the one thing I knew I wanted to explore more of. And I always knew I wanted a Warriors-like structure, one of my favorite movies as a kid, where someone was crossing a city to get from point A to point B on a Purge night. Beyond that though, other than I knew I would at some point deal with revolutionaries, I had nothing else. And so that’s why I say I think that the emergence of MAGA and Trump really fueled it.

When I saw the political discord in the country and the great split that was starting to happen, it just started to fuel, I think specifically Election Year, The First Purge, and even more so in The Forever Purge where one might say we pushed the political content too far. I was so angry.

So it was never really thought out upfront because I didn’t have the confidence that there would be more than one. But once it started flowing, I think the current political landscape of each time period fueled the writing of each piece.

DC: Why shift from directing and writing to just writing?

JD: It’s weird. I didn’t think there’d be more than three, to be honest. It was like my trilogy. It ends with the Senator getting elected President and stops the Purge.

So I was like, “Oh, I told my trilogy.” So I had another movie that was green-lit. I made this tiny film with Bobby Cannavale, Frank Grillo, and Naomi Watts about my love of cinema. This Is The Night, it’s on Netflix

So I had that passion project, it was kind of my way to do something a little uplifting to encourage my own feelings about living in the Purge world. But then The Purge continued, so I figured, let me stay with it because I had a lot more to say. But I was so committed to doing my other projects, like This Is The Night and I had just written The Home, too, which I just did with Pete Davidson.

So I had a couple things lined up, but I did want to keep writing. So I was kind of torn, but I said, “Maybe I can write them and we can find some directors that we love. Because the fear with The Purge is how I think it could easily fall into the wrong hands. People might feel I have the wrong hands, but in the wrong hands, the series could become very exploitative.

So luckily Universal and Jason Blum were like, “That’s fine if you write them and produce them, we can find directors who are in line politically.” And Jason always loved the political content.

DC: It sounds like you are a huge cinephile. I wanna hear more about how you got into movies, how that all started, and how you specifically got into horror movies.

JD: Oh God, yeah, I was obsessed. I dunno if anyone cares about this, but I’ll say it to you anyway. When I was a kid, there was a soap opera on at 4 PM called Edge of Night.

Then, there was something called The 4:30 Movie. And I would say The 4:30 Movie was my film school every day of the week. They’d have Monster Week, they’d have Frankenstein Week and they’d show every Frankenstein movie from back in the day. My dad’s a big movie fan, so I guess it was his influence on me. But he introduced me to The 4:30 Movie.

I’d be out in the streets and then my parents would yell, “It’s 4:25.” So whatever we were doing on the street, playing roller hockey, stickball, the neighborhood people knew I was leaving to watch the movie. And that became <laugh> my childhood.

DC: That’s so cool, though.

JD: Yeah, it’s fun. Then I found Syd Field’s book The Art of Screenwriting and started writing. I think when I was 11. I just wanted to watch devour every film ever made and all I would talk about. Even in high school, every day in home room I’d write the quote of the day. It became a thing in high school where people would come to visit to see what my quote movie quote of the day was.

I think it was my escape, too. I grew up in a world where there were a lot of mobsters around me. It was Goodfellas meets Stand By Me because State Island has more forest than Brooklyn. But it was very <laugh>. All the mobsters from Brooklyn moved to Staten Island. So it was, I think, an escape from a very hyper-masculine world.

I wasn’t a tough kid. I wanted to read and watch movies. So that’s how it all started. And I got very lucky and I sold this script very early when I was at film school. And that was the beginning. It was a terrible film, but it got made.

DC: Which one? Jack?

JD: Jack. Yeah.

DC: <Laugh> Jack. Okay, when I was growing up, I loved that movie.

JD: You know, it’s weird. People tell me that to me, who were kids at the time. I always bad-mouthed it. So the entry into the business was so magical. But when I saw the end product, I was like, “Oh, this is kinda bad”. <Laugh> So when I hear people like it, it’s very sweet.

DC: OK, but having your first script sold with Robin Williams starring and it’s for Francis Ford Coppola? What a wild way to get your start.

JD: I wish I could do it justice. I wrote it with a buddy from film school. I had written a hundred scripts before that, all very genre, very horror and action.

Then I met this guy at film school who had just won a couple of short film awards and he had seen my short films. He asked, “Would you write something with me for my senior thesis film?” He had money. And that’s the reason I quit film schoo. You had to have a lot of money for your senior thesis film. I was bartending at the time. My parents had no money, so I was maybe gonna get a thousand dollars together to make it short. I can’t compete with these people at 50 grand.

So long story short, we won the Student Academy Award. He directed, I wrote and produced, and then he got William Morris off that. They said, “Do you have any scripts together since you just won the Student Academy Award?” And I had all these dark scripts, but he was a more Spielberg and Zemeckis.So they said write something together. We wrote Jack in like 16 days, just to have something. It sold to Disney in this bidding war, and then they fired [Morris] and brought Francis on with Robin. Then I was living at Francis’ house for a month.

It was truly insanity. It was truly the strangest kind of up and down. Luckily I had a parallel kind of career going on where I had written the movie The Negotiator. That kinda set me off more into the genre world, which was more my home. But it was a very strange entry to the business.

DC: What a wild career you’ve had.

JD: Thank you. It’s weird. I always say cool people appreciate what a weird entry. I’ll tell certain people the story and they just look at me like, “What’s the big deal?”

DC: It’s a Francis Ford Coppola movie about a kid who ages really fast! <Laugh>.

JD: It’s so bizarre. And I heard there’s actually a Broadway show right now that just won the Tony that has the same conceit.

DC: James DeMonaco shaping culture one script at a time. So my last question for you is, what was the movie that terrified you the most as a kid?

JD: It’s the most standard answer.I hate saying this, but I have to say it because it was more of a traumatic experience and not a movie to me: The Exorcist. I know it’s so standard, but it’s so true.

DC: No, it’s a universally terrifying movie. There is nothing wrong with saying The Exorcist.

JD: I don’t know if it was growing up Roman Catholic, or what but I never felt anything like that. I don’t think I slept. My mom worked as a paramedic on an ambulance and she had the night shift. I would stay up all night waiting for her, I couldn’t sleep. I literally couldn’t sleep for years. To this day, if I see a still frame from the film I get, I’m thinking about it right now, and I’m getting chills.

DC: How old were you when you saw it?

JD: I was very young. I shouldn’t have seen it. I think I was 10 or 11

DC: Oh boy, the formative years.

JD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. <Laugh> I saw a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have seen. I wrote to my dad a note when I sold my first script. He took me to see Apocalypse Now, which is the movie that changed my life. It’s the one that made me realize I wanted to be part of the cinema.

DC: Wait and then you worked with [Coppola]. That’s so cool.

JD: That’s what’s so weird about this whole thing! I must have been nine. It was completely inappropriate of my dad to do, but thank God he did it. When we left the theater, I turned to him and said “I don’t know what I just watched, but I have to be part of it. I have to do that.” It felt like I was watching someone else’s dream and I thought that was so beautiful that you can get inside someone else’s psyche like that. That’s what it felt like to me.

DC: Oh, I was the same way. I saw Jaws at the age of four. <Laugh>

JD: I made my mom take me to Jaws seven days in a row. She said I was kicking and screaming every day. So she just gave in and took me seven days in a row to the local theater.

Categorized: Interviews