Producer Jason Blum is the guiding force behind the highly successful ‘Paranormal Activity’ franchise, his ‘Insidious’ film is a cult classic, ‘Sinister’ is available on DVD, and his latest ‘Dark Skies’, opens in wide release on 22 February 2013. Here, Jason shares insight on bringing the latest project to the big screen, and the overall theme of his production company Blumhouse.
Jason Blum’s latest, ‘Dark Skies’, stars Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton who play a couple that witnesses an escalating series of disturbing events involving their family, causing their safe and peaceful home to quickly unravel. When it becomes clear that the family is being targeted, they take matters in their own hands to solve the mystery. (PG-13 - 100 minutes)
Jason shares this insight on bringing ‘Dark Skies’ to the screen…
“You’re exactly right, projects do come to us in one of two ways, and I’m lucky enough to say that this project found me! I really admire Scott Stewart’s work, called his agent and asked to meet with him, and he pitched the movie that comes out on February 22nd!
“I’m going to pretend that you’re me and you’ll know what I responded to when Scott pitched me on ‘Dark Skies’! The way Scott pitched me was that, ‘It’s a story about a marriage that is kind of in trouble, and a family that’s kind of in trouble, and, a dark force show’s its face in the first ten to fifteen minutes, and, its about how that dark force changes the relationship of the family it has to each other, the relationship of the family has to the outside world’, and with that he hooked me!
“We pretty much only do low budget movies by keeping the budget down we’re able to maintain total creative control which to me is the fun part about making movies so most of our movies shoot in L.A., they almost all shoot for about 4 or 5 weeks, and we’re doing about 3 to 5 pages of script a day, and I think that schedule forces the filmmakers and the people who are involved with the movie to focus on what’s important which is an emotional relationship between the characters, and that’s pretty much our mantra.
“I’ve spent a long time working on all different types of movies. I’ve worked on very expensive movies, independent low-budget movies, and when I worked on ‘Paranormal Activity’ it is kind of, and it’s easy to say this now, but I didn’t know it at the time. In retrospect everything fell into place for me, which is, and this is how our company works: there is a way to make movies independently, and have them released by studios and that for me is a lot of fun! And that’s all that we’re focused on now, we have a ‘first-look deal’ with Universal to do that, obviously Dimension is releasing this movie, Paramount does ‘Paranormal’, and Sony FilmDistrict does ‘Insidious’ and so we work with all of the studios to release our movies but we make them on our own. So really, the movies that our company does are really ‘hybrids’, they’re half independent, half studio movies!” – Jason Blum
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