Demi Moore felt making St. Elmo’s Fire was “more important” than anything else during the Brat Pack era.
Spoilers for Brats ahead.
Andrew McCarthy sat down with former Brat Pack members for his Brats documentary, set to premiere via Hulu on Thursday, June 13. Moore, 61, spoke candidly about her “beautiful” experience working on the film with director Joel Schumacher.
“He really stuck his neck out for me because it’s not like I had any box office draw; we were all just beginning,” she recalled. “They paid to have a sober companion with me 24/7 during the whole shooting. They could have easily found someone else.”
Moore, who has been candid about her past struggles with addiction, turned down “going to treatment” for St. Elmo’s Fire.
“They said, ‘Yes, what’s more important: the movie or your life?’ I said the movie,” she explained. “For me, I didn’t have any value for myself. I think I was so fearful of failing, fearful of losing and desperate to fit in, belong and my need to please was definitely on high alert.”
McCarthy, 61, spoke with Us Weekly exclusively about Brats ahead of its release and admitted he didn’t really know what Moore was going through at the time.
“When you’re in your early ‘20s, you’re pretty self-absorbed. So the world is seen through the prism of you and these big players around you,” McCarthy shared. “I was aware that Demi was getting sober, whatever that meant — I didn’t even know what that meant at the time.”
He was “vaguely aware” that Moore was “getting her act together” because that’s how it was presented.
McCarthy also spoke with each interview subject about how being dubbed a member of the Brat Pack impacted the trajectory of their career. The term first came about in a 1985 New York Magazine article written by journalist David Blum, who is also profiled in the film.
McCarthy speculated that the biggest “surprise” from Brats is the revelation that none of the Brat Pack members liked the moniker. In the doc, Moore remembered reading Blum’s article and thinking, “What the f—k?”
“[The term] definitely really irritated me. I felt like a sense of it being unjust. I felt like it didn’t represent us and I felt like it was a real limited perspective. It stayed with me for a while,” she said. “I don’t know if I took it as personal over time.”
Brats premieres on Hulu Thursday, June 13.
