Screenwriter James DeMonaco On Collaborating With Director Everardo Gout
The Illuminerdi: This film’s also directed beautifully by Everardo Gout; my God, his imagery in this film is amazing. I got to ask you though, how important was it for you guys to have a Mexican director directing The Forever Purge?
James DeMonaco: It was weird. I always say like, people ask me that, I’m like did we plan it? It’s so strange. I don’t have any access to agents or anything like that, so Couper Samuelson, who works with Jason Blum, he always sends me names of directors and links to their films, and I think the first director or second, I think there were two directors in the running, I won’t say the other person’s name, was Everardo.
They showed me his film, States of Grace, and I watched it right here in my little room, and I was blown away by the film, so there was no discussion upfront about, oh, it needs to be a Mexican person. Although, if you say that out loud it makes absolute sense, having a Mexican point of view.
I’m an Italian-American kid from New York writing Mexican characters, I can only take that as far as I can take it on the page, having Everardo come into it, so my hindsight says, yeah, we planned a Mexican director. I saw his film and I was like, he’s interested, I want to talk to him. He saw a lot of sociopolitical elements within The Purge that made a lot of sense to him that he wanted to bring out even more, which excited me, and he then became the perfect person, that he would yell at me like DeMonaco, that’s not how Mexican people speak.
It was a great relationship in that we called each other out on each other’s bullshit, and I think we hopefully made something that feels real, but his influence, his Mexican perspective was priceless. No amount of research could have got us close to making it as real as he did.
The Forever Purge’s Original Climax Had To Be Cut For Budget Reason; Not Political
You talk about feeling real and, like I said, immediately after watching this movie, it immediately brings up that imagery that we saw in the storming of Capitol Hill, and it’s stunning. But now that we’re here on the home entertainment release of the film, was there anything in the film that you wanted to include that maybe you didn’t get a chance to, whether it be for political reasons or it just didn’t fit in the film or feel right?
James DeMonaco: Yeah. There was stuff, I’ll say, without getting in trouble, I always push it very far politically and me and Everardo together, we really went far. Then, obviously, we have a check and balance system of Sebastian, producer, Jason Blum, Peter Kramer at the studio going, whoa, whoa, whoa. Guys, hold on. This is a genre piece that’s coming out on July 4th, so let’s still entertain and not just proselytize and preach to the audience your political views about the inequality in the American political landscape, so they keep checking us.
The only thing I can say is the movie used to end on what was the border wall or the Trump-wall. It used to end with the wall burning, literally burning, and people climbing the wall to get to Mexico. That’s what my big finale was, and people are climbing over, it’s on fire and there are Purgers trying to stop people from leaving America. It wasn’t cut for political reasons, it was cut for budget though. That’ll always break my heart that we didn’t get to do that border wall scene. Maybe one day, if there’s future Purge’s, maybe we’ll get there, but that was a heartbreaking kind of loss.
We didn’t even get to shoot it, so we couldn’t even include it on the DVD. They got some good extras on this DVD, but the budgets are so tight that usually what we shoot goes into the film, so we kind of get it all in there. Hopefully, I’ll get the border wall scene in another movie.
The Forever Purge is currently out on Digital, 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD now and there’s no better time to check the film if you haven’t seen it or revisit The Forever Purge for the Halloween season. Have you seen The Forever Purge? What did you think about the film? Where do you want to see The Purge franchise go next? Leave a message in the comments below or on Twitter.
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