LARS KNUDSEN AND JAY VAN HOY SIGN DEVELOPMENT DEAL WITH K5

By Dan Schoenbrun

Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy, the producing duo behind Gotham Award Best Picture winner and Oscar nominee Beginners, have signed an output and development deal with sales, finance, and production company K5 Media Group.

The deal marks an alliance between two rising indie powerhouses. Knudsen and Van Hoy have been building their reputation for the past ten years. In 2004, they founded production company Parts & Labor and steadily accumulated a body of festival circuit sleeper hits including Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I Have Known, and Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still. More recently, the duo produced Bradley Rust Gray’s Exploding Girl, Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather, Braden King’s Here, and of course, Mike Mill’s Beginners.

K5, whose offices are located in London, Munich, and Los Angeles have recently put out Vehicle 19 starring Paul Walker and Night Train to Lisbon starring Jeremy Irons. On the sales front, the company handled international sales on recent indies such as Buck, The Visitor, and Get Low.

This news marks another leap forward for Knudsen and Van Hoy, who previously had a three-year first look deal with Scott Rudin. The first titles the duo will offer up as part of their new K5 deal will be Mysterious Skin director Gregg Araki’s The Womb and Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter, to be produced with Rudin and starring Kirsten Dunst and Mark Ruffalo.

“Jay and Lars have clearly learned from one of the best in being mentored by Scott Rudin and they are at the forefront of the new wave of important indie producers,” says K5’s Oliver Simon.  “They’re ambitious too, like us, and we see this deal as a great opportunity to grow together.”… Read the rest

KICKSTARTER: “IN THE FOREST ONE NIGHT”

By Scott Macaulay

A number of former “25 New Faces” are involved with the production of Sarah Daggar-Nickson’s short film, In the Forest One Night. They include the cinematographer Sean Kirby and executive producers Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy. Also involved are producers Tory Lenosky and Andrea Roa, and production designer Amanda Ford. Rewards include the director’s own DVDs and books of poetry, and a pitch-meeting with the two exec producers.

According to her Kickstarter bio, Daggar-Nickson “specializes in stories from the darker side of life, where hope shines a little brighter.” I like that. Check out the video and consider supporting.

… Read the rest

“HERE” | co-writer-director, Braden King

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 5:30 pm -- Library Center Theatre]

Looking back, the process of creating Here, which is ultimately a pretty romantic, landscape-obsessed road movie, was probably about as close you can get to some kind of Fitzcarraldo or Heart of Darkness experience anymore. I suppose I’m surprised that the finished film doesn’t seem to reflect that more.

There are no massive battle sequences in the film; I didn’t get to play with any pyrotechnics (damn it), but Here was the first American feature film ever to shoot in Armenia. That provided fantastic advantages and disadvantages: unimaginable challenges, inspiration, magic, trial, hardship, awe and wonder.

I directed the six-week shoot with two broken ribs sustained on the third night of shooting (quickly learning to keep Ben Foster on my good side); we were detained at gunpoint by the Russian military on the Iranian border; encounters with snakes whose venom could kill a human within 15 minutes were not uncommon; the crew rotated through horrible sickness throughout the shoot. After 40 days on the road we staggered back into Yerevan exhausted and battered but triumphant. Eight crew members and one lead actor left the country with new tattoos.

Every independent film has to overcome the impossible. They all have stories, but Here has stories. Setting up in an unmarked minefield near the DMZ between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan? Check. Any one of these situations (and there were hundreds more) could have been enough to crack an average crew. I feel truly blessed to have been working with Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy as my producers — a fearless, unstoppable duo if there ever was one — and the incredible international cast and crew they helped me assemble. This group sustained, inspired and taught me while performing with incredible passion, professionalism and creativity under extremely difficult circumstances. We made a film I feel proud of while pushing our internal envelopes to the limit. I don’t think anyone came back exactly the same. In the end, Here is no more my film and experience than it is ours, collectively. I … Read the rest

“HERE” PRODUCERS JAY VAN HOY & LARS KNUDSEN

Originally printed in our Fall 2010 issue, we asked a number of leading independent producers about their producing models and how they’re finding everything from financing to material to office space. Jay Van Hoy & Lars Knudsen’s latest film, Braden King’s Here, premieres at Sundance on Friday.

For Parts and Labor’s Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen, independent film success is all about work. Very hard work.

Midway through our conversation about their recent producing successes, Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen realized that they hadn’t had a day off in 18 months. “You did seven-day weeks for a year-and-a-half?” I asked. “Well, there was one weekend during SXSW…” Jay replied.

For Van Hoy and Knudsen, whose Parts and Labor is one of New York City’s most active and auteurcentric production companies, getting films made is simply about doing the work. (And no, a weekend of downtime while attending a film festival doesn’t qualify as “days off.”) The duo’s recent marathon production stretch began in spring 2009 with Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather shooting in Portland. Next up was Cannes and then, for Knudsen, Armenia to shoot Braden King’s feature, Here. Van Hoy planned to go to China with Julia Loktev for her new feature, The Loneliest Planet, but financing didn’t come together and the project was pushed. But in the fall Mike Mills’s Beginners did go into production, shooting up until the Christmas holidays. By then Cam Archer’s Shit Year was in the can too. “We spent the holidays mixing Cold Weather and Shit Year,” says Van Hoy, “and then we had to get Cold Weather ready for SXSW. We were doing post and reshoots on Beginners in L.A. and we had production meetings in Cannes [where Shit Year premiered] for Loneliest Planet, which wrapped [in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia] on Labor Day. I felt such relief that weekend. Mike’s film was finished too, and I took four days off.” Of course, just days later was Toronto, where the well-received Beginners was picked up by Focus Features in a reported $2 million deal.

Such … Read the rest

New Model Army

By Filmmaker Staff

Making a business out of independent film is harder than ever. But still, great films are being made. In this series of short profiles, Filmmaker asked a number of leading independent producers about their producing models and how they’re finding everything from financing to material to office space.

“SHIT YEAR” DIRECTOR CAM ARCHER AT CANNES |
By Scott Macaulay

It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into the full-blown sadness that seems just a beat away. It’s a performance that reminded me a bit of Tuesday Weld’s similarly dazed heroine in Frank Perry’s under-seen adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays. Both films — along with more recent work like David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive — view Hollywood more as a corrosive mental state than an actual place.

But the film is also about other things that exist beyond the outlines of its plot and its often dead-on dialogue. What those other things are, however, is up to you. Freeing himself of the melodramatic conventions of the midlife crisis movie, or the Hollywood cautionary tale, Archer, shooting in beautiful black-and-white with his usual cinematographer, Aaron Platt, has captured a state that we all pass through at some point in our lives, a time in which the outside world recedes and all we are left with is what’s inside of us — and, perhaps, the company of an exotic space alien (played here by Theresa Randle) who would like to know just what it is that makes us tick.

I spoke with Archer for a few minutes at the American Pavilion in Cannes.

Filmmaker: What were the origins of Shit Year?

Archer: After making Wild Tigers I Have Known, the first [movie], I started to feel disenchanted … Read the rest

JESPER JUST’S TRENTEMOLLER VIDEO

By Scott Macaulay

Artist Jesper Just, who Shari Roman wrote about for Filmmaker in 2007, directed this video, “Sycamore Feeling,” for the band Trentemøller. It was produced by Lucas Joaquin, Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen and shot by Kasper Tuxen. (Hat tip: Antville.)

… Read the rest

AARON KATZ’S “COLD WEATHER”|
By Scott Macaulay

The group of filmmakers dubbed “mumblecore” is known for many things, but visual resplendency is not one of them. In fact, some of the movement’s biggest names proudly announce their disinterest in design, careful framing, and the dramatic effects of controlled lighting. From the outset, however, Aaron Katz has been an exception. Even when operating on the tiniest of budgets — as he did when shooting Quiet City for $2,000 — he has paid careful attention to the expressive potential of his characters’ surroundings. The nighttime industrial Brooklyn streets of Quiet City are not the harsh jungle of much urban storytelling but instead a poetically rendered space for an irony-free examination of chance encounters and possible romance.

If the pleasurable prettiness of Quiet City snuck up on you, that’s not the case with Katz’s latest, Cold Weather. Gorgeously shot in deliberate compositions by Andrew Reed on the RED camera, Cold Weather finds Katz working his Portland, Oregon locations for all they are worth. This time, however, it’s the story that sneaks up on you. Cold Weather is about a directionless young twentysomething, Doug (Cris Lankenau), who moves in with his sister (Trieste Kelly Dunn) after abandoning plans to become a scientist. He begs her to accompany him on day trips, reads detective novels and, finally gets a job at an ice factory. Up until this point, about 30 minutes in, Cold Weather is pleasant and diverting character study of a man grappling with that uncertain post-college, pre-adult time of life in uncommonly beautiful surroundings. Narrative intrudes when Doug meets a visiting ex-girlfriend (Robyn Rikoon), who soon goes missing. Partnering with his sister and a co-worker (Raul Castillo), Doug becomes a kind of Millenial gumshoe, tracking her down while slipping into the role of his fictional detective hero, Sherlock Holmes. In doing so he finds not only a sense of purpose but also the self-image that allows him to connect again with his sister.

Sliding from character study to offbeat comedy to the kind of casual anti-mystery made by Wayne Wang (Chan is Missing), Jim Jarmusch and, in … Read the rest