David Latt is the co-founder of mockbuster mavericks The Asylum, the company behind such infamous titles as War of the Worlds (starring ex Brat-pack star C Thomas Howell - who also directed the sequel!), Snakes on a Train, The Da Vinci Treasure, Transmorphers, I Am Omega and The Day the Earth Stopped. The latter cash-in has won the company a lawsuit with Fox (who distributed The Day the Earth Stood Still) putting Asylum back in the public eye, albeit perhaps not for the reasons they would want. Latt recently sat down with Calum Waddell for the following exclusive one on one…

How do you feel about the term “mockbuster”, which is often used to describe your company’s productions?

I am amazed at how it caught on (laughs). Listen, we are not the first people to do this kind of stuff - we are just the most obnoxious about it and our content is driven very aggressively. But it is not as if we do a film every three years - we do one every few months and, through that, we make a lot of noise. What we do is a lot more obvious than other studios but when we began the Asylum none of this was planned.

So how did the whole mockbuster thing begin?

We always wanted to do our own version of War of the Worlds but then we found out that Dreamworks were doing it and Spielberg was the director. So we did not proceed with the idea. However, when we brought this up with Blockbuster, who we have a very good relationship with, they said, “It would be great if you did that!” So War of the Worlds came out and the business it did was insane.

We had never had anything that successful so we thought, “Okay let’s do this again.” And later that same year, which was 2005, we did King of the Lost World, capitalising on Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong. Now, that did not do as well as War of the Worlds but it certainly did bigger rentals than if we were just doing a generic horror film.

So we kept going with it, but moving very cautiously, and the whole mockbuster thing kept doing better and better business for us. It sounds very whoreish to go where the money is, but when you are a little company you need good cash-flow to exist and you need to make something that will turn a profit. That is why we have to release a movie every month. If we do not do that then our money source dries up, we can’t make anything else and the doors close. So we have to make a large quantity of titles and we want to hedge the gambling process and produce what will do the best numbers.

Now that does not mean that we have to produce crap – it just means that we have to produce within a certain genre. It is like what we did when we were starting out and doing horror films. Just because they were low budget did not mean they had to be crappy and with the mockbuster we attack a genre and exploit it to the best of our abilities.

Do you take onboard the criticism that audiences are being confused by these mockbuster titles and, for example, accidentally renting the Asylum version of War of the Worlds when they really mean to be picking up the big studio release?

I really don’t think so. I think the film audience is a little more sophisticated than that. It might catch their eye but they will turn the DVD box over and say, “Oh, OK, I get it, this is C Thomas Howell and not Tom Cruise.” But, with that being said, I cannot necessarily control that aspect of it and I hope that no one feels we are going out there and deliberately ripping people off.

Nobody here likes to think that people are renting our movies because they are being confused, and I believe everyone comes to our titles for a different reason. For example, in the case of War of the Worlds it might be the cover art, the fact they like C Thomas Howell, enjoy sci-fi or maybe they just loved the Spielberg movie…

You made Snakes on a Train to capitalise on Snakes on a Plane. The problem is that the Samuel L. Jackson movie did not do so well at the box office. How did this affect your release?

I guess not surprisingly our film did not do too well either (laughs). But I rarely get involved in the distribution side of things. I learn about the numbers later and how well the campaigns went but my main concern is, “OK, where is my pay cheque this week?” and “How much money do I have for my next movie?”

However, when a big Hollywood production fails at the box office the mockbuster variant tends to do badly on the video shelves. It was certainly a surprise to us when Snakes on a Train failed. Now, ironically, the critics compared us very favourably to Snakes on a Plane – which ended up disappointing a lot of people.

When we did Snakes on a Train we were in production with something else at the time and for whatever reason we had to switch it and change everything at the last minute. So we had two weeks to think of something and that is how Snakes on a Train was born. These things happen in the world of low budget filmmaking and we try and make the gamble as small as possible. But I think the great thing about mockbusters is that it allows us to do a lot of genres. This year alone we did Sunday School Musical and Allan Quatermain and the Kingdom of Skulls, which was shot out in South Africa.

What is the budget like on an Asylum movie?

Our budgets are anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 and I am in production 24/7. We are a very small company and things move quickly!