Jason Blum Quotes
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Let's keep making inexpensive movies.
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I really like to work with theater actors. Theater actors tend to do lots of independent movies, and those are the actors that I like.
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People love being scared, even for long periods of time.
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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.
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We have creative freedom because of budgets. Ever since I have been doing low budget movies, we've really had creative freedom.
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The only way I think about kids in production is practically, the younger the kids are the harder it is to shot the movie.
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I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.
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But one of the rules I don't like to break is we still do - 95% of our movies are low budget. 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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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.
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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.
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I think there's a limit. People want to be scared, but not every weekend, maybe every third weekend.
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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.
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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.
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The scares are the easier part of scary movies. The hard part of scary movies is what leads up to the scares.
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For me it's much more like a little kid rebelling. 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. I come from the business side and Mark comes from the creative side, but every time a decision came up about Creep it was two emails, and we agreed. I've not had that ever with someone on the creative or the business side.
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I love musicals. I love horror movies and I love art movies.
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For some reason, people value being scared less than they value laughing.
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I love being the underdog. It's one of the reason I like making horror movies, because a lot of people don't like them or are prejudiced against them. So it's one of the many reasons I like horror and it's also the reason I like low budget, because it automatically makes us the underdog.
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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.
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When you raise the budget, you make creative compromises. The higher the budget goes, the more cuts in your movie happen. When people talk about how movies are watered down, that's a direct reflection of money and budget. The less money you spend; the more risks you can take. That doesn't mean it will be successful, but at least you can try different stuff. The higher your budget is, the less you can do that.
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My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.
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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.
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I really am passionate about making low-budget movies. You can try new stuff and unusual stuff, and you can break the rules.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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