Exclusive – We Purge With Director James DeMonaco; Details on The Purge 4!

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When The Purge came out in 2013, it was much-anticipated – the dark, dystopian horror story about man’s inhumanity to man seemed to really have a sociopolitical message about violence and what it can do to people. It turned out to be more of a home-invasion thriller, but as the series progressed, the characters and situations become more complex (not unlike the trajectory of the Saw films).

The Purge: Anarchy came out a year later, and The Purge: Election Year is debuting this week on Blu-ray and DVD. We had a chance to catch up with the man behind all this murder and mayhem, James DeMonaco. DeMonaco has written and directed all three of the movies and he just might to another one: he gave us a little hint as to what Part 4 might look like. Read on for details.

Dread Central: We’d like to know how the story has evolved from the first Purge movie, and whether you knew or even hoped it would spawn a franchise.

James DeMonaco: The first one we were bound by budget, to be quite honest. We were well aware, even in the middle of making it, that the concept was even bigger than we were giving. We even tried to create a crane sequence that showed a little bit of what was happening outside the house on the evening. We felt a little bit of a backlash, even with preview audiences, people wanted more so I knew going into 2, if I had a chance to make a second one, that I’d want to go outside. The idea was always to do this Warriors-like tale where there’s a group of people facing off in the city on Purge night, with all of its countermeasures and whatnot, so I think that’s how two evolved, what we and the audience felt, leaving the confines of that house, especially when the promise of the evening is nationwide, it’s not just on the street. So while I was editing two they started asking me about three and then I stumbled onto the idea of three, like let’s get to the heart of the matter, meet the men who created this. The idea was to do some seventies political conspiracy thriller, in the vein of Three Days of the Condor, something like that, and meet the founding fathers and I wanted to tell a more moralistic tale, where someone wanted to stop the Purge and the community was fighting against the Purge and creating safe zones and have this movement that was sort of fighting against this awful idea that has been perpetrated all over the country.

James DeMonaco

Related Story: The Purge TV Series Being Actively Developed; First Details

DC: If you do a fourth one, where do you see the universe set?

JD: I would love to go back in time to be honest, that’s my pitch to the studio, to show the beginnings of it all, to go back and see the inception of the Purge and how it came about, this awful kind of night and get into that a little bit. They’re talking about it, they’re happy with the results of this so they’re asking me what my ideas are. I don’t know if I want to press forward because we’re at a trilogy right now, it feels complete to me but I’m not the studio so ultimately they’ll dictate what they want.

DC: That could work. Horror fans usually rail against origin stories – at least for individuals like Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, but since this more about how Purge Night itself begins… do you think fans will accept it?

JD: I think so. At first I was against it but for then for the exact reasons you said, the origin stories seem like cash grabs but this seems like the opposite. It would be nice to go back and do a little explaining on how a country could have got to such a terrible place where this is an accepted reality, there might be something interesting to play there.

DC: You’ve been in The Purge world for years now. Would you say it’s helped or hindered your creative side?

JD: It’s expanded I think. I directed one movie before The Purge but before that it was just screenwriting, which wasn’t entirely financially successful. I love the movies obviously, it was the first thing I directed, so the idea was always to direct and it’s been incredible, whenever you have any financial success in this marketplace, especially with a smaller movie, compared to most Hollywood films, it’s incredibly lucky. What I realized more than anything is when you have some success that is what attracts people to want to work with you more so on that front it’s been very nice, to get offers to direct movies and other people’s material. Unfortunately, right now I do like directing my own material and my agent gets very mad at me but it has opened some doors to people saying oh, you made money for other people, you can make money for us, which is I guess how this business works.

DC: Seems the ‘extras’ on disc are getting to be less and less prominent. Can we expect at least a few goodies on The Purge: Election Year?

JD: Yeah. There’s actually a lot of stuff on the DVD. There is an alternate ending on there, I won’t say what it is… but it’s on there, there is some other purging we did but because it was a little too violent, it got cut — so people can see that and people really like the Joe Dickson, the Michael G. Williams character, we had a lot of humorous moments with Michael that we had to cut from the film because he was actually too funny, so I think people can enjoy him being extremely funny. I think I got very lucky with my cast, I don’t want to single anyone out but especially Michael, and yeah it was amazing to work with someone of that caliber and have them on set, and people can see more of him on the DVD, it was a lot of fun. I didn’t do a commentary. I was told Universal don’t allow commentaries on their films, I wanted to, I did one on the first film I directed but no, no commentary on all three movies.

The Purge

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