HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
CINEMA VÉRITÉ
name, his eventual victory
gave the producers something far more valuable.
“There’s interest in us in
a new way,” says Van Hoy.
“It demonstrates that we’re
capable of producing a film
that will be recognized by
the Academy, and that we’re
able to do it on films that
aren’t so expensive.”
Those Days Are Over
Last October, your deal with
Scott Rudin expired. Rudin
had moved to Sony and no
longer needed all that granular intelligence you provided
about the indie world.
You make up the difference
by cutting a first-look deal
with a foreign-sales company
based in Germany. In addition to powering the lights
and paying the assistant,
the arrangement helps you
improve your foreign-sales
estimates and provide your
investors with even more accurate forecasts.
Now you have to find a
financier — be it a studio,
hedge fund, or anybody with
deep pockets who loves independent films — so you
can stop shaking your tin cup
every time you want to make
a movie. You’re also planning
to launch a sister business in
Denmark to take advantage
of European subsidies. You
wouldn’t mind becoming the
go-to guys for Scandinavian
directors looking to make international films in English.
You have five films due
to be released this year —
among them, Shit Year, starring Ellen Barkin as an actress who retires from the
business, and The Loneliest
Planet, with Gael Garcia Bernal and newcomer Hani Furstenberg as backpacking newlyweds — and at least eight
more in the works, including
Dirty White Boy, which will
be directed by commercial
and music-video veteran Joaquin Baca Acey; Ain’t Them
Bodies Saints, a modern
Western with Casey Affleck,
Rooney Mara and Ben Foster;
The Womb, directed by New
Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg
Araki; and Red Light Winter, New York writer/director
Adam Rapp’s $3.5 million
adaptation of his own stage
play, starring Kirsten Dunst.