Quotes

Success is always a surprise. Maybe I lose a little less sleep, but still I lose sleep. There's the movie itself obviously, there's marketing, there's the weather, current events. Everything can be right and then you have bad weather and you're suddenly in trouble. There are so many factors that go into having a successful movie.. too many that you can't control. I'm always thrilled and always surprised.

[on making horror films with an open ending] That I really discourage our filmmakers to do. On a micro-budget movie, I always tell them to make a great movie. If you make a great movie that succeeds, we'll figure out a sequel.

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. Sequels force you to work creatively so that you don't make a movie that people say, 'That was so original, why was that a sequel? That should have just been its own movie. It had nothing to do with the first movie'. You don't want them coming out saying, 'Well, that movie felt exactly like the first movie. Why did I waste $14.50 on that?'. I think that's fun. I really like the challenge of that.

We have a lot of data for everything, so it's not to say we don't give lots of notes on the script, lots of thoughts about casting and lots of thoughts about the cuts of the movies. But the directors are free to take what they think makes the movie better and not use what they think doesn't make it better. And surprise, surprise, when you give a director total control, they listen more, they solicit us more. The dialogue becomes healthier.

If I was giving someone $30 million to make a horror movie, I would want every decision to be looked over by many, many people. But if you keep budgets down, you can let James Wan do what he does, fast, and let him focus on making the movie he wants to make. And if he wants to do something that seems a little out of the ordinary, if the budget is low it's okay to let him do that.

There's a real correlation between not spending a lot of money and having fun.[2015]

[his advice for aspiring filmmakers] Raise whatever you can and shoot whatever you can for whatever amount.[2015]

At this time last year, I had 9 out of 10 movies that I categorized as a sure thing...Of course, none of them worked out the way we thought they would. [The flop] Jem and the Holograms (2015) was a sure thing and in fact, it did the worst of all of them. It's very tortuous, and it also should say that anything that any of us say today should be taken with a big grain of salt.[2015]

[on the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal] I think it's really important that women come forward, and hopefully more women will come forward. I think it's sad, and I was a junior executive there [at Miramax from 1995-2000] so I heard rumors [about Weinstein, but I] didn't know any of the stuff that's coming out, so it's alarming. [Oct. 2017]