Jason Blum Quotes

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.

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 a believer in screening movies early, and using the movie itself to help sell the movie. If you can't do that, I feel like you shouldn't be releasing the movie.

I love musicals. I love horror movies and I love art movies.

I try to work with people who you're not used to seeing in scary movies. I think it makes for a more interesting mix, when you're watching the movie.

Currently there's no other way to get a movie into 3,000 theaters except with a studio. We have a first-look deal with Universal, and it's been fun to work with them. But studios are a part of our life. I think they'll always be, but they'll play a different role. The consumer and the creator are getting closer together.

It's really hard to make an original movie of any kind that succeeds in the theatrical market place, in the wide release market place.

We have creative freedom because of budgets. Ever since I have been doing low budget movies, we've really had creative freedom.

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.

When there's a great horror movie, people are like, 'Horror's back!' And when there's a series of not so good ones, 'Horror's dead.' I think it's all about the quality. When there are one or two good horror movies in a row, people come out interested again.

The minute I was told what to do at any age, I did the opposite. Hopefully I'll do that for the rest of my life.

People love being scared, even for long periods of time.

My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'

I think horror movies are still - this can be said of all movies - but being with a group of people scared together is more and more something unusual and fun. Especially for kids who are going out less generally.

I think the most honest responses to the movies you get to watch are in houses and people's most private spaces, like the bedroom or in your own intimate space. I think that's where you feel safest, so when you're threatened in the place you feel safest, it makes for the scariest situations.

The only way I think about kids in production is practically, the younger the kids are the harder it is to shot the movie.

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.

Directors typically have three choices - you do a studio movie and get a paycheck up front, you do an independent movie, which is for your heart and you don't get paid up front and probably don't make any money on it, but it hopefully goes to Sundance and is more of an art movie, and then you do TV.

Horror is great storytelling with scary elements on top of it, but if you don't have great storytelling, you can have all the scares in the world, but the movie won't work.

I try not to put pressure on filmmakers to come up with a big scare at the beginning. I think that helps let the audience settle in and get to know the people they're about to spend 90 minutes with. Once the scarier stuff happens, it's scarier because of that.

The scares are the easier part of scary movies. The hard part of scary movies is what leads up to the scares.

I think the location is almost as important as casting the leads of the movie. The location on 'The Purge' was crucial to that movie working.

There's S-VOD, which is 3 1/2 months after the theatrical release. The windows are going to get closer and closer, and the sooner they collapse in my mind the better it'll be for everybody. It's coming, but change is hard. It will be more profitable for everybody, including exhibitors.

I think the mistake people make with horror movies and what makes them successful is a lot of horror movies get made by people who don't really like them, so they don't respect them. And when you like horror and have admiration for it, that community knows that what's important for a horror movie is important for every other kind of movie.

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

I never wanted to get paid by the hour. If I was going to do more work than another guy, I wanted to get paid more.

You can't be a creative person and not fall in love with everything. Every movie I've made there's a complicated, twisted love affair with.

A lot of the reasons why people are annoyed at found footage movies is because people look at it like it's easy and that they could do it, too.

But, it's much easier to do that than produce the movies from scratch. It excites the same thing in me, whether we build it from the ground up, or whether we come on when the movie is done or almost done. The idea of supporting the underdog and getting a smaller movie out there in a big way is equally exciting.

I think there's a limit. People want to be scared, but not every weekend, maybe every third weekend.

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.

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.

For some reason, people value being scared less than they value laughing.

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.