Jason Blum Quotes
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When I was a kid, I really loved game shows. For whatever reason, I was fascinated with them and watched them a ton.
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I was lucky enough to have made a tonne of mistakes and be kind of frustrated. I was working in the movies for 15 years before I did 'Paranormal Activity,' so I was lucky enough to have that experience. So instead of trying to make, like, 'Godzilla' after 'Paranormal Activity,' I said, 'Let's keep making inexpensive movies.'
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For some reason, people value being scared less than they value laughing.
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I think being snobby about the kind of storytelling people do, it just irks me. It irks me. And in fact, it's one of the things that drives me to make as many horror movies as I do.
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You've got to think of fun stories, and if the fun story happened to have a lesson, that's a great thing. If you build a movie around a lesson, you're in real trouble.
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I love to go see big movies, I just don't make them. It's just a different business.
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Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.
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Most people who've had a big hit movie like 'Paranormal Activity,' the next thing they say is, 'I want to make a $100 million movie.' I have no interest in making more expensive movies.
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I do want to grow our company, so the way I've been doing that is moving 'scary' to different things.
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Anyone who has any kind of success in Hollywood wants to make more expensive movies and spend more money, be bigger. I think it's unusual to have success and want to stay small.
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Great stories and acting always win the day. If the story behind the scares is dramatic and the filmmaking is great, it works. If those things aren't great and the scares are secondary, it doesn't.
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Ryan Murphy and I share our love of horror and musicals. I think those things somehow go together.
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I love musicals. I love horror movies and I love art movies.
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I liked stuff like 'Halloween,' but I wasn't a horror fanatic until I was in my 30s and then made 'Paranormal Activity.' Now, having a company, I can't imagine doing anything else. But it took me a while to find my love for it.
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With most other genres, you need movie stars. With horror, you just need a story.
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Sundance is such an acquisition-frenzied, industry-centric experience, and at SXSW, many of the movies have distribution. And the focus is more on positioning the movie as opposed to selling them. People are more relaxed.
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We're offered bigger, larger budget movies to produce a lot, and we don't do them. That's not to say there aren't exceptions: there are a few exceptions, but I try and stick by the rules that produce what I think is the highest quality, most innovative work and try and let the rules go that make us feel like we're retreading.
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In every art form, nothing exists in a bubble. It exists because of what came before it. A lot of bricks were laid. I think if it weren't for 'The Purge,' 'Get Out' wouldn't resonate as a mainstream movie. You push on the taste of the audience, in a way, get them used to something, and then you keep pushing on it.
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YouTube is found footage. It's here to stay, and people will always come up with new concepts that will make sense for found footage.
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Success stems from the producer creating the optimal conditions for the filmmaker's own creative process. Not from steering the filmmaker through a one-size-fits-all approach.
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When you have less risk, you have more fun. You can take risks. It's much easier to take risks when there's less money on the line.
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I wasn't a fanboy of horror. I didn't grow up on horror movies. I grew up loving all movies. I still love all movies, but I particularly love scary movies - as much for the culture around them as the movies themselves.
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You know how on movie sets there are specific chairs for each person? I hate that. We don't have names on our chairs. We have five chairs. Anyone can sit on them. I think the idea of names on chairs on a set is terrible. It's so dumb. So we got rid of that.
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One of the benefits of doing low-budget movies is you don't have to release them wide to recoup. You can release it in a smaller way, make your money back, and keep going.