For some reason, people value being scared less than they value laughing.

My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'

The model we established was to give creative people complete creative freedom in exchange for betting on themselves, so they work for the minimums you're allowed to work for, and if the movies work in a big way, everyone does very well. If the movies don't, nobody loses too much money. The benefit to doing all the movies low budget is we can tell different types of stories and take creative risks. The Purge would have been irresponsible to do for $20M, but to do it for $3M makes sense.

Directors typically have three choices - you do a studio movie and get a paycheck up front, you do an independent movie, which is for your heart and you don't get paid up front and probably don't make any money on it, but it hopefully goes to Sundance and is more of an art movie, and then you do TV.

Horror is great storytelling with scary elements on top of it, but if you don't have great storytelling, you can have all the scares in the world, but the movie won't work.

The scares are the easier part of scary movies. The hard part of scary movies is what leads up to the scares.

I'm a believer in screening movies early, and using the movie itself to help sell the movie. If you can't do that, I feel like you shouldn't be releasing the movie.