Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 77

HUFFINGTON
06.17.12

Van Hoy and Knudsen
were collecting unemployment checks, and their benefits were set to run out on
December 31, 2004. If they
didn’t have their funding by
then, they’d have to give up
and go back to work.
The bleakest moment came
on Christmas Day, when a
prospective investor who had
been stringing them along for
weeks sent an email saying
that he had opted out.
“That’s when I made my
mom cry,” Knudsen recalls.
“She called from Denmark,
like, ‘Merry Christmas,’ all
that stuff. I just said, ‘Look,
I’m not celebrating Christmas today.’”
But the following week,
something miraculous happened: a fellow aspiring producer named Anish Savjani
came through with the funding they needed. The deal was
sealed on New Year’s Eve and
filming began on Van Hoy’s
30th birthday, February 27,
2005. The shoot was hectic
but successful, and as the year
drew to a close, it looked as if
Gretchen might take off.
“Everyone was like, ‘This is

the next Napoleon Dynamite.
You guys, you’ve made it.
This is gonna be a big thing.
You’re going to get into Sundance,’” Knudsen recalls.
By then, he and Van Hoy
had signed on as producers of
two smaller films that were
in post-production: Old Joy,
a haunting tale of two old
friends who spend a weekend
reconnecting in the woods
near Portland, Ore., directed
by Kelly Reichardt; and Wild
Tigers I Have Known, an experimental film about a crossdressing 13-year-old boy, directed by Cam Archer.
Knudsen and Van Hoy got a
memorable lesson in the fickleness of the film world when
Sundance turned Gretchen
down — and accepted Old Joy
and Wild Tigers to the festival’s new, cutting-edge Frontier section. “That’s when we
knew we wanted to be very
active and have several films
in production at the same
time,” says Knudsen. “If you
juggle a lot of things, every
day you get good news. You
may get a lot of bad news, but
there’s one thing that’s good.”
After that, the pieces of

LEAN
TIMES

THE NUMBERS
BEHIND A TYPICAL
SIX-FIGUREBUDGET FILM

18
20
100
80%

Total days spent shooting (3 6-day weeks)

Crew members

DOLLARS

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CINEMA VÉRITÉ

Industry minimum
wage day rate

Percentage of
investment covered
by foreign sales
estimates

20%
Percentage of
investment covered
by tax subsidies or
incentives