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.
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.
We don't decide how a movie will be distributed until it's finished. It might be on iTunes, it might be on 3,000 theaters, but we make that decision after the fact.
Anyone who has any kind of success in Hollywood wants to make more expensive movies and spend more money, be bigger. I think it's unusual to have success and want to stay small.
There are movies that we have done that haven't come out very well. That doesn't feel very good. But 'Jem' is in a different category. I'm proud of the movie. I stand by the movie, but I'm obviously sorry it didn't do any better.
Not all of our movies work, but we take shots, and we're able to do that because we really stick to low budgets.
When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.
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.
Great stories and acting always win the day. If the story behind the scares is dramatic and the filmmaking is great, it works. If those things aren't great and the scares are secondary, it doesn't.
One of the things is that you need to space out scary movies.
It's hard to make a movie that's very expensive and not be thinking of the results all the time.
I think, generally, the creative process is hurt if you're thinking about the end as opposed to focusing on day-to-day decisions.
Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.
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.
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 one thing I try and do, when people say, 'What kind of movies do you guys look for,' the one thing I look for is 'different.' And I think that's very antithetical to Hollywood.
John Carpenter had a lot to do with putting social messages into genre movies.
'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.'
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'm not interested in making horror-comedies, but I'm very interested in making scary movies with funny parts.
