Top 75 Jason Blum Quotes

I think if you went to a studio and pitched the first ‘Insidious,’ it never would have gotten made because it was so offbeat.

I’m proud of ‘Sinister’ because Scott and Cargill did a great job on the movie, and I set up a framework for them to make what they wanted to make. They gave me the idea, and I figured out how to get it out into the world.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

The way we structure our backend, we key the payments to the box office – so that cuts the negotiating way down, and it’s very transparent. One of the things I’m most proud of is that we’re really transparent with our process.

I think, generally, the creative process is hurt if you’re thinking about the end as opposed to focusing on day-to-day decisions.

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.

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.

Unless you’re making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.

As an entrepreneur, one of my biggest struggles is that you have to focus, but you also have to expand.

I wouldn’t be creatively satisfied if all we did were sequels, but in the same breath, I’ll say that I wouldn’t be creatively satisfied if everything was an original. It’s good to use the different parts of my brain. Very different rules apply.

We were producing ‘La La Land’… and then we weren’t. So it was a very painful topic, but I’m happy the movie was as successful as it was. And, of course, I wish we had produced it.

I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.

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.

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.

I think scary movies work best when they’re relatable, and I think one of the scariest things to young people now is bullying. Either doing it, being on the other end of it, being caught doing it.

I read an interview where someone said, ‘It’s a shame that anyone can make a movie now,’ and I feel the exact opposite.

I do want to grow our company, so the way I’ve been doing that is moving ‘scary’ to different things.

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.

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.

Blumhouse Books is not an outlet for us to mine intellectual property for movies and TV.

Rotten Tomatoes is the best thing that happened to the movie business because it means you have to make good movies.

I’m not interested in making horror-comedies, but I’m very interested in making scary movies with funny parts.

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.

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.

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

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.

‘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.’

One of the things is that you need to space out scary movies.

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.

People complain about Hollywood movies being similar. That goes right down to the fundamental green light process, because the process involves having to compare it to three other movies.

If you go to business school, and you put a product out there in the world, and it’s working, the logic is to keep putting the same product out there. And I think that really bumps up against the creative process – and moviemaking, generally. And I think that our company really pushes against that.

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.

We make a lot of movies, and we make them fast.

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

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.

Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.

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.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s when my dad had an art gallery, one of the things that frustrated me was the world seemed so tiny, and to appreciate contemporary art, you needed a history of art, a formal education. I was more interested in the people, and that’s why I went into the movie business in the first place.

The most effective tool I have to work with artists I admire is to point to other artists that I admire and show that I’ve worked with them many, many times. It’s not because I have option deals; it’s because they want to keep working with us.

It is hard to make a movie funny and scary at the same time.

Our company, it’s, uh, really un-sexy. And I think most people get into Hollywood to be showy. We first of all make horror movies, which people turn their noses up at. Second of all, we make cheap movies, and Hollywood’s a lot about ego and money and, ‘My movie cost $200m!,’ you know?

I love to go see big movies, I just don’t make them. It’s just a different business.

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 the location is almost as important as casting the leads of the movie. The location on ‘The Purge’ was crucial to that movie working.

Not all our movies have a social message, but I love the ones that do, and I’d love to do more of them.

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.

John Carpenter had a lot to do with putting social messages into genre movies.

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.

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.’