Producer Spotlight: Scott Rudin

Scott Rudin is one of the most prolific producers in Hollywood with 87 movie credits including Wonder Boys, The Darjeeling Limited, The Social Network, and True Grit. Anne Thompson at IndieWire sat down with Rudin recently. Here are some excerpts from that feature:

Most weekdays, producer Scott Rudin, 52, starts off with an early breakfast meeting or two at a Madison Avenue cafe. One recent week, he met at 8 AM with Lena Dunham, the young filmmaker he plucked to adapt and direct Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, well before Tiny Furniture became a film du jour, and met me the following day at the same hour. How did he find out about Dunham? He has a deal with former assistants Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen, producers at Parts and Labor (The Exploding Girl): he covers their overhead in exchange for them sending him their talent discoveries. That’s how he got to see Tiny Furniture. As he was watching it, Rudin realized that he knew Dunham’s artist parents, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham. Rudin thinks their daughter is “a total star.”

Rudin is fun, because he’s enthused about so many projects. Among them are two Oscar contenders, David Fincher’s The Social Network (which has not only passed $90-million domestic, but is the consensus fave among critics groups), and the Coen brothers western True Grit (Metascore: 82) which opens Wednesday.

Fincher’s next, the English-language version of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, adapted by Steve Zaillian, is filming in Stockholm with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara (December 21, 2011). In the editing room is Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis’s baseball expose, starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Robin Wright, which Rudin has yet to see cut together. Sony plans to open the film on September 23, 2011.

In January, Stephen Daldry (Rudin’s The Hours, The Reader) starts shooting Eric Roth’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tin Drum-inspired Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock and Kid Jeopardy winner Thomas Horn, for Warner Bros. “That was a hard script to resist,” says Rudin.

And Rudin’s third film directed by Noah Baumbach, While We’re Young, is set to go next summer with Ben Stiller and James Franco as two New York husbands — Baumbach is chasing Cate Blanchett and Greta Gerwig, respectively, for their wives.

 — — 

While many see Rudin as a powerful player who can get movies made, many of his projects collect dust because no one will back them, and he has had to adjust to the changing fortunes for sophisticated adult fare. “I’m doing a lot of adapting,” he says. “It’s harder than it’s ever been. I keep my overhead as low as I can. I want to be able to go wherever I want to go, do whatever I want to do. I guard the material and the filmmaker. I do what I feel I know how to do and don’t do things that I don’t. I’m a product of my sensibility.” One career that he admires more than anyone: Dick Zanuck. “That’s what it means to stand for quality.”

There are all sorts of producers — producers who focus on sourcing funds, producers who excel at developing and sustaining relationships with talent, producers who actually go out on production with the movie movie, etc. While most movies need producers who can handle all those aspects, from a writer’s perspective this is one you definitely want to have on your side: “I guard the material.” In other words, a writer’s producer. Rudin has a reputation for being smart and he is drawn to literate material as reflected by the many movies he’s produced that are book adaptations.

For more of the feature on Rudain, go here.