Jason Blum Quotes
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I love South By because people are more relaxed here, and people are a little more off guard. They say things and react more freely than Sundance or Cannes. I love the feel of this festival.
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I think if you went to a studio and pitched the first 'Insidious,' it never would have gotten made because it was so offbeat.
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I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.
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Halloween is woke, and there's nothing we can do about it.
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We make a lot of movies, and we make them fast.
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People complain about Hollywood movies being similar. That goes right down to the fundamental green light process, because the process involves having to compare it to three other movies.
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I have a real kind of fundamental philosophical belief that movies are better if everyone gets paid when they work, and if they don't work, the people who worked on them make a little bit of money, and the people who finance them, they lose, but they don't lose too much. I believe that that creates better work.
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Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne made very good money from both 'Insidious' movies. Word travels fast, so as soon as you have a success and do what you say you're going to do in a contract and pay out that money, we had a lot more established actors come to us and say they want to work with us.
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The thing I'm most proud of about - not all of our movies, but a lot of our movies - is that you might love 'em, you might hate 'em, but most of the time, they're trying to be different or trying new things, which I think is really important.
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The key to a good horror movie is what happens between the scares. The scares aren't the tricky part. If you're involved in what's going on in between, the scare is going to trick you. If you're not, the best scare in the world will not be scary.
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If you go to business school, and you put a product out there in the world, and it's working, the logic is to keep putting the same product out there. And I think that really bumps up against the creative process - and moviemaking, generally. And I think that our company really pushes against that.
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One of my favorite things about making horror movies is, the first time you screen them in front of an audience, it's very fun to hear people audibly react to the work you put into a movie. You don't wonder at the end of the movie whether it worked or not.
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The one thing I try and do, when people say, 'What kind of movies do you guys look for,' the one thing I look for is 'different.' And I think that's very antithetical to Hollywood.
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I didn't grow up loving horror.
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I think scary movies work best when they're relatable, and I think one of the scariest things to young people now is bullying. Either doing it, being on the other end of it, being caught doing it.
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As an entrepreneur, one of my biggest struggles is that you have to focus, but you also have to expand.
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I love scary movies and respect the filmmakers of scary movies, and it's just as hard to make a great scary movie as it is to make a great comedy or drama or anything else.
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When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.
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In big movies, interests are not aligned between those above the line and the financier, because above the line gets paid whether the movie works or not. The financier only makes money if the movie works, and that fundamentally sets up a contentious relationship.
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I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.
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There are a lot of parallels between doing a sequel and doing low budget movies, which is they give creative parameters. As a creative person myself, I work better with parameters as opposed to anything goes.
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I wish that more people were willing to turn down upfront money in exchange for doing things that are more original. Turning down a seven-figure check has a ripple effect on the budget, which has a ripple effect on the storytelling. The higher the budget gets, the fewer storytelling risks you're able to take.
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Occasionally I'll be a producer for hire on a larger budget movie, but with Blumhouse Pictures, we mainly focus on micro-budget, under-$5-million-dollar movies. That's what we're in business to do, and that's what we're in business to make.
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I really love 'Poltergeist.' I think that's a great, terrific movie. I did really love the first 'Friday the 13th.' I thought that was such a crazy movie.