HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
CINEMA VÉRITÉ
open, he’s standing there,”
Knudsen says. “And he takes
two steps back, and there’s
some other people that live
in the apartment, and he’s
like, ‘Did you guys see that?’
From that moment on, he
saw me in a different way.”
If Knudsen was obsessed
with making an impression,
Van Hoy was focused on
hoovering up as much information as possible. Before
working for Rudin, he had
interned for a production
company called The Shooting Gallery, where he’d spent
all day eve ry day filing legal papers — but not before
reading them start to finish.
After three months with Rudin, he took an internship
at Killer Films, the indie
studio founded by Christine Vachon, because “there
were no doors in the office
and you could hear everything that went on. I figured
I could learn a thing or two.”
Vachon was impressed
enough to ask Van Hoy to
coordinate post-production
on Todd Haynes’ 2002 film,
Far From Heaven.
Not long after the “take-
home bin” incident, Rudin
made Knudsen his executive
assistant, an experience the
younger man likens (apologetically) to Ralph Macchio’s
training in The Karate Kid:
“He pushes you and pushes
you. I think you don’t know
until you leave what it is that
you learned.”
“What I learned working
for Rudin,” adds Van Hoy,
“was that you’d better
find your limitations before
he does. If he finds them,
you’re fucked.”
Eventually, Rudin put
Knudsen in charge of the publicity and awards campaign
for Stephen Daldry’s The
Hours. “It was just fascinating
to see how political the race
is,” Knudsen recalls. “It was
the year of Harvey and Scott.”
Rudin had developed The
Hours with Paramount, but
Harvey Weinstein, then in his
glory as the head of Miramax,
controlled foreign distribution. The two larger-than-life
producers went to war after
Rudin got the picture into
the Venice Film Festival and
Weinstein, who hated the
score and Nicole Kidman’s