Jason Blum Quotes

You make a movie for 9k for the freedom it allows you.

I would still encourage somebody, if they wanted to make a movie, to just go take a movie camera. That's clearly been shown to work.

Get out and make films. There are so many cameras now to suit any budget, so there are no excuses.

As long as you keep your budgets small, there's a way of making films.

Most of my comedies were low on budgets - certainly by American standards.

I don't choose to make low-budget films. But that is the reality of surviving in the Japanese film industry. However, the trade off is, since we're working on small budgets, we have freedom. You can't buy this freedom with money. With this freedom, I think there are an infinite number of possibilities.

I didn't have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.

I'm not trying to be self-serving, but you know, you get to Hollywood, and if you want to make something big and loud and dumb, it's pretty easy. It's very hard to go down there and make a film like 'Sideways,' which I thought was a great film. They don't want to make films like that anymore, even though that film was very successful.

I used the principles of Kickstarter to make 'She's Gotta Have It.' We filmed that in 1985 to 1986. The final cost was $175,000. I didn't have that money. It was friends, grants, donations. We saved our bottles for the nickel deposit.

In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.

I have zero strategy for my career - like, zero. I could get as much satisfaction about doing a $20,000 shot film the same way I could do a $100 million film with a bunch of effects.

My mother gave me this book called Feature Films at Used Car Prices by a guy named Rick Schmidt. I gotta credit the guy, cuz he gave me the most practical advice. It empowers you.

I think that there's a lot more freedom in the low budget, the independent films where, unfortunately, you don't have the money, necessarily, to get the orchestras in there to play a lot of stuff. But, you have a lot more freedom, very often.

Since Star Wars, that film's success led to bigger budgets, more hardware, that the great movies like the ones I did, which were studio movies, are now independent movies. They range from half a million to several million, and a lot of those have very interesting roles.

More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down.

The more you keep costs down, the more freedom you have creatively.

On Lock, Stock, we didn't know where the money for shooting the next day was coming from.

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.

Many people came out and said, 'Boy I'd love to make a film that way.' Well, borrow some money, get some people together - you can get people to work for nothing, just treat them right, treat them as human beings, not stars, give them all an equal share, make them feel a part of what they're doing. There's no big secret to it.

When you do a low budget movie, you get a little over-ambitious.

What's frustrating to me is when, on a low-budget movie, people don't take chances. A big-budget movie, that script's your bible; nobody's going to risk going off the page. But when you're doing a very low-budget film, why not take some chances, intellectually, artistically?

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.

I just want to make films that have enough of a budget to pull off high-level imagery but also have a budget that is low enough that I can do what I want.

When you're making an independent film what you don't have in time and money you have to make up with creativity and diligence.

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.