Jason Blum Quotes
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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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It is hard to make a movie funny and scary at the same time.
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I think there's room for people to love 'Transformers' and love 'Insidious.' They coexist in a happy way; in other words, my movies wouldn't exist if 'Transformers' didn't exist, because they're an alternative to that. They're not better or worse, they're just different.
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All of our movies are lower budget, and that makes them more interesting, too: we have to come up with solutions other than throwing money at problems.
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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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There are so many factors that go into having a successful movie.. too many that you can't control.
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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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I'm always trying to make movies that are better than the ones that we've made before. We don't always succeed at doing that by any means, but we're always trying to raise the stakes, raise the bar, make the movies better, and that's hard.
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I love going to see musicals. That was one of the major reasons why losing the chance to produce 'La La Land' was so painful.
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Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.
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What I love about low-budget movies is my interests and the director's interests and the actors' interests are aligned. No one makes money unless the movie works, and that informs every creative decision.
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The one thing I am very strict about is that I don't like spending a lot of money on movies because the more money you spend, I think the worse that they get.
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My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'
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'The Purge' is really about America's crazy relationship to guns and guns gone wild, essentially, and it kind of laid the groundwork for 'Get Out.'
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John Carpenter had a lot to do with putting social messages into genre movies.
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Ethan Hawke is not a horror movie fan, but he's a really good friend of mine, and I finally cajoled him into doing 'Sinister.' Later, he said one of the reasons he was really resistant to doing a horror movie is he thought it'd be really scary on set.
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I think because Skype is becoming so much more prevalent, and you're looking at someone else on a screen, it's going to work its way into movies and TV shows in all different ways, which I think is really cool.
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It's easy to get a theatrical release that shows in one theater for a week. But there's no advertising, and no one sees the movie. It's hard to get a real theatrical release. The distribution of independent films is, to me, extraordinarily frustrating.
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You shoot yourself in the foot when you think, 'We have to get a good scary movie director to do a script by another scary movie writer.'
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Most of the most successful films Blumhouse has made have been rejected by everyone else. No one wanted to make 'Get Out.' Nobody. Nobody wanted to make 'The Purge.' I think it was floating around for three years before it came to us. Nobody wanted to make 'The Gift,' when it was a script called 'Weirdo.'
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When you work in low budgets, you can do weird stuff.
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I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.
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I think it's frightening for all of us to contemplate that there's more to the universe than just us, in whatever form it takes, that there are higher forces at work, and to me, that's always a scary notion.
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I don't believe in ghosts or paranormal activity, but one time I think I saw - I might have seen - no, I think I did see a ghost.