The Purge is already off to a lively start at the box office this weekend, having scared up $3.4 million Thursday night. And on a weekend when the other big release is buddy comedy The Internship, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, this early take just goes to show the appeal of horror/thriller genre films for oft scare-starved movie fans.
In The Hollywood Reporter‘s interview with Ethan Hawke and Jason Blum, they reveal that they’ve actually known each other for more than 20 years — first working at a theater company together and most recently, teaming up on two motion pictures: Sinister and, of course, The Purge.
“The Purge has a lot of crazy socio-political ideas underneath it, it’s kind of charged with almost a Clockwork Orange-like weirdness,” Hawke says of their latest collaboration. “I think there’s a fun idea to play with which people, when they get out of the movie, they talk about a lot, which is cool,” adds Blum.
The film touches on multiple societal and political issues of today, and Hawke addresses the question of this “event’s” plausibility come the relatively near future (the film takes place in 2022), citing the consistently predictive literary works of George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxly (Brave New World).
“This movie is a strange entity. It’s an extremely ultra violent film that ultimately advocates a non-violence position, which is kind of a catch-22.”
