Quotes from Jason Blum

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.

I think when people are scared, they like to see movies where the scares are not real.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

I think movies are overdeveloped in Hollywood. There's a big benefit to not overdeveloping and not being so precious about what you're doing. I think you lose a kind of vitality if you develop something into the ground.

When you work in low budgets, you can do weird stuff.

Not all of our movies work, but we take shots, and we're able to do that because we really stick to low budgets.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'm attracted to things that make a point or have a certain point of view, but it's not a conscious thing that I decide to do every morning. Unconsciously, what I like has a social commentary in it, or it's about race, or it's risky to do. That's what I like doing.

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.'

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.

I started out producing theatre in New York.

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

It's hard to make a movie that's very expensive and not be thinking of the results all the time.

There are so many factors that go into having a successful movie.. too many that you can't control.