Jason Blum Talks Weinstein Throwing A Lit Cigarette & Why ‘There Will Be Blood’ Is The Best Film In Two Decades

Despite his most recent controversial statements, Jason Blum has built an empire on the back of his Blumhouse Productions. Through the use of micro-budget horror films, Blum has been able to make a name for himself as the go-to guy for profitable filmmaking. And in a new interview with THR, he goes over just what makes Blumhouse so different, his early (turbulent) career with Harvey Weinstein, and why Paul Thomas Anderson is his favorite filmmaker.

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The question of everyone’s mind, and specifically those studio heads in Hollywood, is how Jason Blum has been able to release a long list of hugely profitable films. While many chalk it up to his desire for low budgets yielding big rewards, he claims that the budgets allow for something great — freedom and creativity.

Explaining how low budgets help the creative process, Blum says, “The artists get so much more power and so much more say. And when you give them power, they want your notes; it’s not a fight. They get final cut. It’s fundamentally a very different way to make commercial movies.”

One of those recent successes is Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.” While not the cheapest film Blumhouse has ever released, Blum was able to allow Lee the creative freedom to fully embrace a tone that not many filmmakers would have been able to pull off when talking about a Black police officer going undercover in the KKK.

“The Ku Klux Klan are fucking idiots, that’s what the movie is about, and it shines a light on how stupid they are. And part of the way it shines a light is making fun of them. There are 99 ways it could have gone wrong and there was one way it could have gone right, and [Lee] got it right,” says the producer.

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Blum also talks about his early career with Harvey Weinstein over at Miramax. For those that don’t know, the producer was an acquisitions executive under the controversial Weinstein. While Blum doesn’t know of any information about the sexual assault allegations, he does have some up-close-and-personal stories that show just how crazy it was working with the mogul.

He explains, using an example of when Harvey Weinstein threw a lit cigarette at Blum:

“The worst was the psychological pressure. He was very clever at getting people to kill themselves for him. Manipulating the carrot and the stick. Alternately taking you up and bringing you down. That took a toll psychologically. When he threw the cigarette it’s because we lost [1998’s] ‘Run Lola Run’ [as an acquisition]. It was a very complicated negotiation but it was definitely 51 percent my fault. And I felt very badly about it. It actually still bothers me. Because I felt that there was injustice in the way that the negotiation transpired.”

He continues, “What I question is my tolerance. Why did I tolerate that environment as long as I did? I know why: because I was ambitious. But when all this came out [the allegations about Weinstein’s sexual behavior], it made me question that. I don’t want to use the word abuse, but I definitely was under an enormous amount of pressure and being treated in a very, very tough way. Knowing now that all this other stuff was going on, it wasn’t just tough, right? There was a lot more happening.”

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Moving onto more happy subjects, Blum is asked who his favorite filmmaker of all time is. Not all that shocking given the director’s pedigree, the producer says it’s none other than Paul Thomas Anderson. “His movies are so precise. He can make a movie about pretty much anything and the movies seem flawless to me: the performance, the production, every aspect of the filmmaking is so good. ‘There Will Be Blood’ is probably my favorite movie in the last 20 years,” revealed Blum.

Blumhouse Productions is set to release “Halloween” on October 19.