HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
CINEMA VÉRITÉ
The Oscar Knife Fight
Not many kids dream of being
producers when they grow
up. But Lars Knudsen, now
33, knew. He knew when he
was a teenager living in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, that he wanted to
make movies. “I knew I didn’t
want to direct, I can’t write,
I’m not going to be an actor,”
he says. “I knew that producers enable films to get made,
and that’s something that
stayed with me.”
Knudsen, whose mother
is American, moved to New
York in 2001 with a simple
objective: to secure an internship working for Scott
Rudin. Knudsen had read
about Rudin’s explosive temper and tendency to unload
on his assistants, and that’s
exactly what attracted him.
“If I was as an intern, if
I was there every day from
early morning to evening, I
knew there would be a window at some point where an
assistant would get fired and
I could step in,” Knudsen explains. “And that’s kind of
what happened.”
Jay Van Hoy, 36, grew up in
Galveston, Texas, and studied
film at the University of Texas at Austin.
He was already working
as an assistant for Rudin
when Knudsen arrived. “In
that world, it was very much
about pleasing the assistants,” Knudsen says, “so my
first impression of Jay was,
like, he needs to like me.”
“What I remember,” says
Van Hoy, “was that he would
just be there until 9 p.m. He
would be there as long as
we were. And the reason, it
turned out, why he was hanging around the office was that
he was living in a hostel across
the street, on 45th Street.”
On the surface, the pair
were nothing alike. Fairhaired and slightly built,
Knudsen has a Scandinavian
aversion to being the center
of attention. (The photo shoot
for this article was sheer torture for him.) Van Hoy is tall,
burly, dark-haired and at ease
with the sound of his own
voice. But when they met they
had one thing in common:
unlike the vast majority of
20-somethings in New York,
they knew what they wanted