'The Home': Pete Davidson goes dark in retirement home horror movie from 'Purge' filmmaker James DeMonaco

Yahoo

4 days ago

DeMonaco talks Davidson's horror skills, teases 'Purge 6' and recalls the impact of watching Francis Ford Coppola 'handcuffed' by the studio for 'Jack'
The man behind the Purge franchise, writer/director James DeMonaco, put fellow Staten Island talent Pete Davidson into the horror genre for his new film The Home (now in theatres), a thriller set in a retirement home. Davidson plays Max, who's fulfilling his court-ordered community service at the facility, when he start suspecting there's something sinister happening in this, frankly, creepy residence.
"I saw certain people in my life getting older and some of the facilities that they were put into, I found the facilities quite creepy in and of themselves, ... especially to a little boy who saw these things growing up," DeMonaco told Yahoo about where the idea for The Home started. "I saw a very scary one when I was a young man, and that stayed with me."
"And then there were various things that played into that, I think, over the years, [but] that was probably the seed. And my writing partner, [Adam Cantor], ... something happened with his grandparents that mirrored my experience when I was a very young man. ... And then for me, there was a movie that had a great influence on me, it was Robert Altman's 3 Women, which is set at an elderly spa in the desert. ... I think it's one of the greatest films ever made, and it has incredible creep factor."
While The Home leans into its "creep factor," the majority of people still associate Davidson with comedy, but DeMonaco knew that he had the ability to take on a different genre of storytelling.
"He literally lived down the street from me here in Staten Island, ... his mom still lives down the street," DeMonaco said. "People know him as a comic, but I knew him as something else. ... He surprised me at how good an actor he was outside of the comedy."
"I wrote it during COVID and my buddy Adam, a local guy too, ... we were writing and thinking, well who's of this age, 26, 27, there's not many names out there. ... We're not going to get Chalamet. I was writing with Pete before that. We were, ... oddly, writing a comedy right before COVID hit, and we were keeping in touch during COVID. ... There was something natural in ... the character of Max in The Home that I felt that Pete could tap into. ... Pete had some trauma in his life, a lot of trauma in his childhood, so I felt he could relate to what Max was going through. Pete's an artist, Max is an artist. And he, I think, purges some of that trauma through his art, and I felt Max was doing what Pete does also. So I felt there was something there."
'I need to be invested in the character's plight'
The most lofty task for DeMonaco in The Home is achieving this slow burn of the story, but also building tension effectively to give the audience a powerful final act.
"The Purge, I always say, is like a punch in the face. I thought here ... we were building something with various layers and twists and turns that The Purge really doesn't have," DeMonaco said. "I wanted to get to this point where the audience would need a cathartic release, ... as Max did. ... I also wanted them to be so angry at certain characters in the film, without giving anything away, that I felt that they would be looking forward to this last 20 minutes."
"Sometimes I think filmmakers, ... when we work in certain parameters, we have to pull punches. We can't show everything we want to show. And I was like, no, no, if I'm going to do this, we're going to go, we're going to turn it up to 11. ... It's a matter of always giving [the audience] enough, but not too much, especially when you're dealing with somewhat of a mystery."
DeMonaco added that having the audience engaged in Max's journey was critical to the build up of tension in the film
"I think, hopefully, Pete's engaged in the mystery of what's happening in The Home, and the audience will stay with him and want to follow him," DeMonaco said. "I know that there are some horror films that kind of work just as visceral rides, but I think for me, I need to be invested in the character's plight. So we took a lot of time, I think, trying to build what Max went through, the trauma of his past."
"And I think when you get to the editing room, that's where everything changes. And you could throw out all your ideas and say, alright this is going too slow, we need to move this faster. Let's move this scene up here, because we need a little jolt for the audience to give them a little more. ... My producer says it's almost like a Swiss clock. It's got a lot of moving parts and you've got to make sure they're all fitting, and we're just giving enough to the audience, and not letting them sit there in the dark for too long."
Big budget vs. more control
But when it comes to filmmakers having to "pull punches," DeMonaco highlighted that there's a trade off between working on a big budget film, with more "parameters," or having more freedom, but working with a smaller budget. Taking advice from famed producer Jason Blum, DeMonaco was told, "the smaller your movie, the more control you have."
An example of that for DeMonaco was working on the 1996 film Jack, which DeMonaco wrote with Gary Nadeau, and the film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring the late Robin Williams.
"I was always writing to direct, that was my path to directing. And I wrote a couple of big movies, big budgets compared to what I'm working with now, ... big directors, and I noticed how they were handcuffed by the studio system, because, somewhat understandably, you're dealing with tens of millions of dollars, and that doesn't include marketing budget," DeMonaco explained. "When I worked with Francis Ford Coppola on my first film, I don't think any of us were truly excited by the film. ... He was really handcuffed by the studio. There was a cut of that film that was much darker, much more interesting to Francis and I and my co-writer at the time. Yet, because of the budget level, they even reeled in Francis Ford Coppola."
"And so when I saw this [I thought], what are they going to do to me? ... So when I started getting closer to directing, when I met Sébastien Lemercier, my producer, ... we always had somewhat kept the control. ... When we made Purge one we shot it in 18 days, and it was not easy at all. Even This Is The Night we shot in 25 days. ... At the end of the day, I think that not having people tell you what to do, there's a great benefit to that. Having said that, I do wonder what it's like to make a $100 million film and have all those toys."
James DeMonaco teases 'Purge 6': 'We meet some really cool women'
As DeMonaco shared that he's finished the script for Purge 6, he also addressed navigating the pressure of continuing the franchise, but also doing it from a place of passion.
"I did one job, literally, for money, ... and it was terrible. What I wrote was terrible. ... And this probably really limits me, but I have to work from something that comes from another part of me, that is not just motivated by money or just product," DeMonaco said. "So I knew Jason was calling, studio's calling saying, 'Yeah, we want another one.' ... I'll be honest, I wrote one before this one. I had written another one, but the budget was too big. ... We were going to try something different and go big, and that didn't really work out."
"So I told Jason, and he gets it, Jason's great, he's a wonderful producer. So he's like, 'You've got to feel it.' But I think there's always part of Jason that's like, if you don't feel it, we may have to hand off the reins to someone else. [Sébastien and I], we always said we do have a fear that if we hand it off to someone else, it could be turned into something that we don't like. We always see it as a morality tale, and not that everybody has to see it like that, but ... we want to continue what we see. So it was a little pressure of, I'm afraid what someone else will do with it, but I did stick to my kind of internal guns, like make sure you feel something in your soul, because you know you're not going to do good work otherwise. And I think it worked out, meaning everything kind of came together timing-wise where I had an idea, there was some time to do it, and I just finished The Home, so it all kind of came together nicely."
As fans are anxiously waiting to see what DeMonaco has in store for Purge 6, the filmmaker stressed that he always said he wouldn't go back to the franchise if he "didn't have something to say," but particularly in today's political climate, he had a story to tell.
"There's always a sociopolitical commentary within the Purge movies, and I try not to be preachy, although I think I got preachy in four and five, but I try not to be that preachy," DeMonaco said. "We're in such a weird political time now that something hit me about, I guess five months ago when I pitched the studio my new idea, and they seemed to be really jazzed."
"I would say that we get to see some of our old favourite characters. ... We meet some really cool women in this one. That's the tease. We meet some really, really cool women, and I think that's all I probably should say, but that's a big part for you, 90 per cent of it. So I'm pretty excited."