Do you find that there’s something in common that they all share? And do you develop a shorthand that’s unique to each filmmaker’s sensibilities?

The answer’s yes to both of those questions. There’s definitely a shorthand. I really prefer to work with people we’ve worked with before again, because they know how the company works and we know how they work. I would definitely say that people that we’ve worked with multiple times are visionaries. They’re entrepreneurs because they’re able to think about the movies that we do in an entrepreneurial way, and I think that they’re definitely visionaries. Our budgets are low, and when you have a lower budget the director has, actually in some ways, a lot more to do. They have a lot less help and the people that we’ve worked with over and over again are people that we think are just extraordinarily talented and, like I said before, very entrepreneurial.

There are also a lot of great up-and-coming actors out there, but is it harder than people might think to find someone who can really carry a picture completely the way Jessica does?

Yes. It’s very, very hard. I think we put more emphasis on the importance of actors than some of Hollywood does. The way that we do that is, our casting department is in-house. Terri Taylor runs the department, but she’s got a few people under her. She just won the Artios Award (for excellence in casting). What’s unique about our company is, most producers when they work with a director, the director brings the casting director that they work with. We don’t work like that. When a director comes to us they use our casting department and they use Terri. That’s because we have a real specific idea about actors. We have, obviously, very, very specific deals that we make with the actors on the movie side. When Terri calls, everyone’s very familiar with those actors. We’re able to get very well-known actors to work for scale because we’ve clearly paid out a lot of actors over the years, and it’s important to me that one person is always fronting that, which is Terri.

But none of these movies work without performance. We don’t have special effects and stunts and CGI to lean back on. We have story and performance, so without Jessica Rothe, Happy Death Day does not work and there certainly would be no Happy Death Day 2U.