A Quote by Timur Bekmambetov
I also have experience working with American producer Roger Corman who knows a lot of secrets in making movies look bigger than their budget.
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Peter Fonda was just this clean, cookie-cutter kind of a guy. Roger Corman turned him into the motorcycle man with The Wild Angels. Jack Nicholson, all of them, they all had these images that Roger Corman fueled, and Easy Rider, it was a big surprise to understand how much creative influence Roger had. A lot of people dismiss him as just launching famous people's careers or being a penny pinching producer, but he's so much more than that.
I also got to know Roger Corman a bit while we were on location in Mendocino. And then, subsequently, a woman who also worked on The Dunwich Horror named Tamara Asseyev and I teamed up and co-produced a picture that I wrote and directed, called Sweet Kill, that Roger Corman's then-new company distributed.
If you take a movie like Easy Rider which everyone counts as the beginning of New Hollywood, that is a big movement. And then, when you really dissect that film and the people that were behind that movie, you realize that it has Roger Corman written all over it. Easy Rider is a hybrid film, taking The Trip and The Wild Angels and making a new explosion. And the people that were making it, guess what, they were all [people who had worked with Roger Corman].
My very first professional writing credit was on a movie called The Dunwich Horror, and Roger Corman was the executive producer.
The difference between working on Asian and American films is in the producer and director; everyone has their own style. But, Hollywood has a lot more money; they can spend a lot on films, and time. In Europe, there's a small budget and thinking about commercial. Only budget and taste is different between there and Hollywood.
Everybody's got to work with Roger Corman. You can't leave out that experience.
Roger [Corman] didn't actually hire me, though. I was hired by AIP [American International Pictures], the studio that made the picture, which was Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson. It was a great learning experience for me, because not only did I work on the script, but they hired me back to go on location when they were making the movie, to write new scenes and so forth.
Honestly, I had a kid, so you watch the movies your kids want to watch. I'm also a producer, so when I watch movies, I look at them from the genre they are, the budget they had, and the time they had to produce it. That's how I evaluate their success.
Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget.
First of all, on a cinematic [level], the film answer to that is that Roger Corman was creatively responsible for a lot of cinema history.
I feel like I'm a graduate of the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking. I went and visited Roger on the set of Dinoshark and that's in the movie. That's where I really got a big whopping taste of what it's like to be on one of his sets.
There hadn't been one done since the late 70s. I was living in Brooklyn, had no connection to Roger Corman, to no one in this movie. I didn't go to film school. I'm like the person who should have never made this film. But I just decided to put one foot in front of the other. I was writing film articles for magazines at the time. I convinced an editor from one of the magazines that I was working for to give me a shot to do a piece on Roger. This was an excuse to go meet him.
But one of the rules I don't like to break is we still do - 95% of our movies are low budget. We're offered bigger, larger budget movies to produce a lot, and we don't do them. That's not to say there aren't exceptions, there are a few exceptions, but I try and stick by the rules that produce what I think is the highest quality, most innovative work and try and let the rules go that make us feel like we're retreading.
Occasionally I'll be a producer for hire on a larger budget movie, but with Blumhouse Pictures, we mainly focus on micro-budget, under-$5-million-dollar movies. That's what we're in business to do, and that's what we're in business to make.
Look, I've done some low-budget movies and I've done some big-budget movies, and the big-budget movies were always kind of disorganized.
I'm all for art-house foreign directors - I think they make terrific films - and I'm also for the bigger budget movies. It just depends on what the character is, the director, the script.
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