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.
— Jason Blum
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.
Halloween is woke, and there's nothing we can do about it.
I think when people are scared, they like to see movies where the scares are not real.
The business of horror movies goes up and down, and people are always like, 'It's working,' 'It's not working,' but generally, I think if you make a good movie that's scary, people will come.
The first thing I learned as a producer is that you have very little control over the life of a project. Anything can stall a film from financing to scheduling to casting. Things fall apart all the time. Don't waste time on something that just won't get made. Try to have as many projects going at one time as you can handle.
I love to go see big movies, I just don't make them. It's just a different business.
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.
Working with kids is always hard because you have to have very limited hours. They have to have breaks, and they have to have a tutor, and they have to have a lot of - good things! But it makes it hard to shoot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've grown to love it, but I'm not like a lot of other people who were always crazy horror fans like Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino.
Blumhouse Books is not an outlet for us to mine intellectual property for movies and TV.
What I loved about 'War Dogs' was the fact that the tone - turning that story into a spectacular two hour ride is just such a complicated thing to do.
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.
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.
My favorite thing about horror is that it attracts this great group of nuts, of which I include myself in. I was always kind of an oddball. I collected my fingernails, for instance.
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.
I love horror movies, obviously; otherwise, I wouldn't make them.
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.
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.
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.
When you work in low budgets, you can do weird stuff.
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.
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.
I do want to grow our company, so the way I've been doing that is moving 'scary' to different things.
We make movies for the cineplex. They're designed for wide release. They're designed to be seen by a lot of people and eventually make money.
People look down on it, but I love the community of horror. Writers and directors are a tight group of people, and we help and support each other.
I didn't grow up loving horror.
Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.
'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.
The real scares on CNN, etc. and the scares in a movie, like 'The Purge,' are totally different. One of the ways you can tell when someone, whether it's a film maker or executive or producer, wants to make a scary movie but doesn't understand that distinction is they'll want to recreate too much of what's on TV.
It is hard to make a movie funny and scary at the same time.
Halloween was definitely the biggest holiday when I was a kid. We started making our Halloween costumes in August. Me and my mom. My mom was a single mom; it was just her and I.
It's harder and harder to scare people, and filmmakers are aware of that, and they're making the movies better, and I think they feel more original, which I always like.
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.'
If you are still thinking about a script after five or ten years, that's a sign that it's good - not that it's stale. And the opposite is true - if everyone wants to make your movie, that's a sign that it probably sucks.
I started out producing theatre in New York.
I think if you went to a studio and pitched the first 'Insidious,' it never would have gotten made because it was so offbeat.
Ryan Murphy and I share our love of horror and musicals. I think those things somehow go together.
'Paranormal Activity' had fifty versions because it was $250 to reshoot. We'd screen it, see one thing wrong, shoot for an hour, fix it, and then screen it again. You don't have to be disciplined about it. On a regular movie, you have to screen it and think of every problem, reshoot for three days and solve every problem, and then you're done.
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.
When I was a kid, I really loved game shows. For whatever reason, I was fascinated with them and watched them a ton.
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.
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.
As an entrepreneur, one of my biggest struggles is that you have to focus, but you also have to expand.
Rotten Tomatoes is the best thing that happened to the movie business because it means you have to make good movies.
