Producer Jason Blum on The Lazarus Effect, Paranormal Activity, and loving horror
Though Jason Blum’s company, Blumhouse Productions, made several earlier movies, it wasn’t until the smash success of Paranormal Activity that the producer discovered his ideal business model. Blum creates films independently, then releases them through the studio system, partnering with the major studios to effectively create wide-release campaigns. It allows him to retain the atmosphere of creative control appealing to many artists, while simultaneously keeping the mainstream qualities that help get movies into a large number of theaters, with the attendant promotional budgets. It’s been incredibly lucrative, while also making Blum one of the most influential people in contemporary horror cinema. The recent Blumhouse film The Lazarus Effect is out now on Blu-ray and DVD, and The A.V. Club took the opportunity to speak with the gifted producer about what he looks for in horror movies, and how producing is not unlike handing a director a list of menu options.
The A.V. Club: The Lazarus Effect feels very much in the Blumhouse vein because it’s a traditional horror story, but with a twist. You’ve said that the first thing you look for in a film is “scary,” not necessarily “original.” But it does seem clear that this deviation from what has come before is important to you on some level.
JB: Yeah, I think the first, and most important thing, is that it’s scary. If there’s one unifying principle of everything we do—and I say this a lot—the biggest benefit of doing low-budget movies is that you can do different things. And I think I said at one point that scary is the most important and original is the second-most, but original is really important. The Purge is a really great example of a movie that was kicking around for eight years or whatever and no one would ever make it, and a lot of the stuff that we’ve done is different. Really now, more than anything else, it’s got to feel different and, of course, it has to feel scary, but Lazarus had both of those things, which I was happy with. I was really happy with how that movie came out.
AVC: Once you sign on to produce a film like this, how involved do you tend to be?
JB: Every movie is different. Some movies we’re super involved in and some movies we’re much less involved in. The directors have much more freedom with us than with typical Hollywood jobs and also sometimes they have final cut. But when you give them that creative control, they’re very solicitous of advice, so we actually provide a lot of information all the way through the process, from the script to casting to shooting to editorial, distribution, and marketing. But I guess we offer it as a menu and we let the director choose rather than fighting and arguing about it endlessly. Not to say we don’t have fights—we certainly do sometimes—but they’re a lot less often than typical Hollywood movies.
AVC: Do you find it difficult to structure how many films you’re working on at a time, given that you don’t know in advance what you’re going to be needed for in each one?
JB: Yeah, it is, and they always come in waves. There will be times when we’re doing no movies and then, suddenly, we’re doing four or five. There’s not a lot we can do about that. We work with people that fit our movies in around big movies, so we have to go when they want, not when we want. So we have a pretty big organization of people, and we’ve learned air-traffic control pretty well, but it is hard how they come in waves.
AVC: Even with tighter schedules, a big advantage of the low-budget production model seems to be that it’s much easier to do re-shoots and rewrites. Is there a film that came together in the reworking process because you had more freedom with this model?
JB: You know, most of our movies we do re-shoots on. I guess Paranormal Activity is the best example; on that movie there were like 50 re-shoots. A re-shoot meant Katie [Featherston] and Micah [Sloat] would drive to San Diego and shoot for 20 minutes then go back to L.A. It was very homemade, it was just them and Oren [Peli, the director]. But we really tinkered with that movie forever, and I guess I drew on that. I think it really helps to watch the movie with an audience and then work with a director on shaping it. And we do that on most of the movies that we produce.