TWoP: How do you choose a movie to do a tie-in to?
David Michael Latt: Well, we look at the genre, our perception of the box office, and how we feel it will be received in the general marketplace, but primarily it's dictated by our buyers. We'll talk to Blockbuster, Hollywood [Video] and all our international buyers, and say "Hey, is this an idea that you want us to pursue?" and they're gonna say "yes" or "no" to it. Because they're gonna have a better idea about what the consumer wants to buy. Or not. So we'll ask them, and they'll give us a directive, and we'll look at the numbers, and we'll say, "Yes, we want to do a robot movie," or a giant creature movie, or whatever it is. It doesn't have to be a mockbuster, it can be anything. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is an example of a concept that came from our Japanese buyers, who said, "We want you to make this movie," that doesn't tie into anything. And we went to Blockbuster and asked them if they wanted us to make this movie, and we went to Hollywood, and they said "yes," and so we made this film.

Has nobody asked you to make a superhero picture? It seems like that's a pretty lucrative genre right now.
Latt: The problem with superhero films... we've definitely been approached with superhero concepts, but we're not gonna do a mockbuster of a brand like Batman or Superman, things which are highly protected. And if we made a film called Ratman, nobody's gonna go and see it, because there's no mythology behind it, no history behind it, it's just a superhero film that could be called Sandbag Man. It doesn't tie in to anything except the genre. Unless we have the rights to a particular comic or superhero, there's no real incentive to do it. We just don't know how it's gonna perform. Our company is a cash flow company, which means that our films have to perform every month, or our doors close. And so we have to be very specific and clear about the films that we make, and we take a gamble every time we make a film, but we're trying to lessen the gamble by making the films that we make. And we aren't necessarily convinced that an unknown superhero film is going to perform well for us.

I assume Transmorphers 2: The Fall of Man, which came out a few weeks ago, has greatly benefited from the success of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen...
Latt: You would think!

Has it not been meeting expectations?
Latt: No. We're coming to the very hardcore reality check that sequel films, for us, do not play well. And that's across the board, and I think we're kinda done with making "Part 2s" for any kind of movie. Consistently, they pretty much always underperform... on the rental market. On the sales market that's not necessarily true, but this is strictly on the rental market.

This week's release, a new adaptation of the Burroughs novel The Land That Time Forgot, is the third film directed for you by C. Thomas Howell, and it also stars him. How did he get involved with you guys?
Latt: We hired him as an actor for a film I directed called War of the Worlds, and we really bonded and started a nice, long friendship. He comes in with a lot of history and a lot of knowledge of making movies, and he has a lot of enthusiasm. He loves being behind the camera, and he is exceptional at being behind the camera, and he works really well with actors, so it's a real good mix. He doesn't have any pretense or ego to try and throw his celebrity around; he's rolling up his sleeves and hauling the lights, and he knows what it takes to make a low-budget, guerrilla-style film, so he has a lot of energy for that, and we benefit from it. So we've actually made four or five films together, he's directed two, and he's coming out with The Land That Time Forgot this week. With every film he makes with us as a director and an actor, he seems to get more comfortable and better, and it's just really exciting. Our personalities just work well together.

In the wake of Land of the Lost underperforming at the box office, how does that affect your release or marketing for something like The Land That Time Forgot, which is another dinosaurs-in-a-strange-land movie?
Latt: Well, a couple things: We don't market our films. The only marketing we do for our films are the box cover and the title. So we don't have a marketing department, which is bizarre given how widely distributed our films become, but that's really based on the mockbuster concept and really strong key art that we have and great titles. So we've definitely seen a correlation between if a studio film does well, ours will do well, but that being said, Transmorphers 2 doesn't follow that model, and The Land That Time Forgot is really not a mockbuster of Land of the Lost. They're really two different films, and we think that the audience will feel that way as well, and will just see a pretty picture of a big dinosaur on the cover, and want to rent it. Dinosaurs do very well.

How do you personally decide what you want to direct? The upcoming Megafault is your first film in a couple of years.
Latt: That's true. I love directing, and I would direct every film if I could, but it needs a producer, these films, and I just have no time for it. There's a timing issue as well -- we knew about Megafault a year in advance, so it gave me a little more time to kind of get my house in order, and make sure that the films that I was going to abandon during the process would be able to be produced and get made, so that took a while. And the other thing is that Megafault is a different kind of movie for The Asylum. It's an enormous show, and we're in co-production with the SyFy Channel on it, so we don't want to screw it up, and even if I do screw it up, at least I screwed up, and I don't throw that onto any other director. It'll be on me if it doesn't perform well. But it had to be kind of a no-excuses movie, we've had to give it the best effort that we could. Like I said, if I screw up, I screwed up, and not some director I hired. But I think it's turning out pretty well, and SyFy's happy with it, so. So it was a film I had to direct, but I wanted to direct.

It seems like one noticeable difference between Asylum films and the movies they're inspired by is that yours have more lesbian scenes. Would you say that lesbianism makes every movie better?
Latt: Sure! No, it depends on the show, whether it works or whether it doesn't. We give a lot of leeway to the filmmakers; we try not to be too onerous with what our needs are as a company, but we want to make sure that the director gets their vision across and the writers get what they want to get across. As long as we get our selling points, we pretty much let them go with what they want to do. And, look, there's a lot of guy directors who like certain elements in their movies, and that includes lesbianism or whatever, so it's gonna be in the movie if it works for the show. Our hats are off to them.

What's your favorite Asylum title? Mine's Bram Stoker's Dracula's Curse.