Jason Blum Quotes
-
'Paranormal Activity' was the first of our independently made/studio-released films. It was also the ultimate low-budget high-concept movie, which is what we are always looking for. 'Paranormal Activity' was the genesis of our model, of which I am so proud.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There are so many factors that go into having a successful movie.. too many that you can't control.
-
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.
-
It is hard to make a movie funny and scary at the same time.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.
-
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.
-
My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'
-
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.
-
'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.'
-
John Carpenter had a lot to do with putting social messages into genre movies.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.
-
When you work in low budgets, you can do weird stuff.
-
When I was working for Miramax, before Sundance, a videotape of 'The Blair Witch Project' - of the full, completed movie - went to a lot of the buyers. And so we all saw it before the festival, and I passed, a bunch of people passed... Then I watched the movie marching toward success, and was reminded by my bosses what a dope I was.
-
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.
-
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.'