HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
CINEMA VÉRITÉ
tually became Rudin’s executive assistant, and he once
fired you 16 times in a single
day, but you emerged from all
of that with a powerful admirer and partner.
“Lars was unbelievably industrious and smart and fun,
and incredibly ambitious,”
Rudin says. “I think they’re
both super talented guys.”
Rudin gave you a deal with
enough money to rent an office and pay an assistant, and
thanks in part to that you
have produced more than a
dozen films, most of them
budgeted at $1 million or less
(chump change, for example,
on the set of Disney’s $250
million bomb, John Carter).
Recently, you have begun
pursuing more expensive projects, while putting your own
former assistants in charge
of smaller films. You are, in
other words, building your
own road map in an industry
notoriously averse to maps, to
entrepreneurs, to being small
and lithe and daring.
“They’re doing the hardest thing there is to do in the
movie business, by far,” says
Rudin. “They’re doing it all
on their own, without any
institutional support. Every
movie is from scratch, every
movie is starting again. It’s
brutally, brutally tough.”
You made Beginners for
$3.4 million, and it became
a modest summer hit, taking in $15 million worldwide.
Now you’re upping the ante,
producing a film called Dirty
White Boy about the late Wu
Tang Clan rapper Ol’ Dirty
Bastard’s stranger-than-fiction
friendship with his last manager, a 22-year-old former VH1
intern named Jarred Weisfeld.
You have announced
that Michael K. Williams —
known to pop-culture addicts
as the gay stickup man Omar
Little in th e HBO saga The
Wire — will play Ol’ Dirty
Bastard. The news was received with a mixture of enthusiasm (“What a combination!”) and dread (“Will they
really get it right?”) within
the overlapping Wu-Tang and
Wire fan communities.
“It’s this beautiful harmony of icons colliding,” says
Van Hoy. “It could potentially have that sacredness in
a way. But that’s also enough
WE’VE HAD
THIS IDEA, THAT
IF WE TRUSTED
EACH OTHER
WE WOULD HAVE
LEVERAGE IN
AN INDUSTRY
WHERE NOBODY
TRUSTS EACH
OTHER”
— Jason Van Hoy