Two days ago, TheWrapbroke the news that Quentin Tarantino had cast Australian actor Damon Herriman as Charles Manson in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but sources say he wasn’t the first auteur to have that idea, as Collider has exclusively learned that David Fincher already cast Herriman as Manson in the upcoming second season of Netflix’s Mindhunter.
A representative for Netflix declined to comment.
Sources say that while Herriman will appear as a 1969-era Manson in the Tarantino film, his appearance in Mindhunter will be in the ’80s, when Manson was already behind bars. That lines up with previous reports that the second season will feature the Atlanta Child Murders, which took place between 1979 and 1981. Other serial killers expected to appear include the Son of Sam and, of course, the BTK Killer, who popped up throughout the first season, though he was never mentioned by name.
Sources say that while Herriman’s casting in the Tarantino film was announced first, he was actually cast in Mindhunter much earlier, and in fact, already shot his scenes in July. Either way, the fact that he booked projects from Fincher and Tarantino back-to-back should speak highly of his take on Manson. I mean, when masters of casting like Fincher and Tarantino vouch for you, who else do you need to impress in this town?
David Fincher‘s knuckle-biting Mindhunter series for Netflix is based on the true-crime book, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, an autobiography centered around the establishment of the FBI Investigative Support Unit, the foundation of which would become modern day criminal psychological profiling.
Each hour-long show (from the 10-episode run) was graded by colorist Eric Weidt, who navigated between ultra-modern capture technology, the time and place of late 70s cinema and the very specific needs of Fincher. Weidt started with Fincher as a visual effects beauty artist for the 2014 film, Gone Girl. Before that, he had worked in post production in the world of Parisian fashion.
With considerable experience in Photoshop and the Adobe infrastructure, Weidt brought his retouching talents to motion as photography and filmmaking began to bleed together. Weidt even created custom film-emulation ICC profiles and scanned grains for photographers transitioning from film to digital capture.
Colorist Eric Weidt.
Meanwhile, Fincher and his team had been working with FilmLight‘s Baselight color grading tools and plug-ins since The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and on the Netflix series, House of Cards. Adding an editorial and visual effects team at his facility in Hollywood, Mindhunter was the first time that the auteur established his own in-house DI. Weidt was brought on to lead color.
“It’s important to note, we had a lot more time to work on this show than most grades,” Weidt pointed out during a special HDR presentation by FilmLight, Dolby, and Red Digital Cinema at the Dolby Cinema Old Vine theatre in Hollywood. He was given a simple brief: The show was set in the late 70s, centered on the FBI interviews of serial killers.
“The 70’s and serial killers backdrop brought to mind David Fincher’s Zodiac, which is an absolutely brilliant movie; a masterpiece in terms of both content and color,” he says. “The 70s has a distinct color palette. You say 70’s’ and everyone already has an image” he continues. Street photographers William Eggleston and Stephen Shore are personal sources of inspiration for initial color grading.
Post and edit began as production rolled in Pittsburgh. Dailies were usually available to Fincher by the following day. The production used FotoKem‘s nextLAB dailies system and the PIX asset and data management and delivery platform.
Due to overlapping shoot and post production schedules, “David looked at things on his iPad for two-thirds of the season,” says Weidt, explaining that he had a complex rendering process that allowed him to manage new HDR footage as well as sending regular corrections from Fincher to view in SDR. The Baselight workflow file was separated into two timelines, one for any creative color adjustments, and another that had stabilizations and lens emulations applied. Weidt would daisy-chain them, run it through the Dolby Vision HDR professional tools, which automatically take his XML trims, and using that, create offline files to view on an iPad or monitor.
“All you really need to do is add a trim pass layer to each shot, then hit analyze. It might take 40 minutes to analyze the whole hour’s episode. You come back, and you have your SDR version. It’s done, except that you are able to then do lift/gamma/gain, or some saturation adjustments on the trim pass. I found that maybe 85 percent of the time it looked like there wasn’t really anything to do. Out of the box, it’s pretty amazing.”
He continues that, “You don’t want to grade with both monitors, because you’ll go nuts. You have to learn to accept that the REC 709 compared to the HDR is going to look more dull.” Weidt says that Fincher’s color design for Mindhunter was heavily influenced by the organic palette of several classic films, such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, All the President’s Men and the more chromatic yet grittier look of The French Connection. They also wanted a low contrast, information-rich picture, and had first experimented with low contrast optical filtration on set but preferred in the end to “set up the digital chain in a way that Fincher was getting the type of image that he wanted.”
The RED Xenomorph custom camera for Fincher.
“Low contrast does not mean low detail,” Weidt carefully points out. That required a camera with outstanding capabilities for the production. Cinematographers Erik Messerschmidt and Christopher Probst, ASC, employed a one-of-a-kind Red camera with a 6K Dragon sensor called Xenomorph, developed by Red to Fincher’s specifications. Weidt’s starting point for dailies, as well as any color work on the master, began with a low-contrast log curve based on REDgamma3 that maintained as much of the dynamic range provided by the Red Xenomorph as possible, and gave the SDR monitoring on set an approximation of Weidt’s HDR workflows.
“When you grade something, the tone curve can be your initial contrast,” says Weidt. “It’s a bit like choosing a film stock. With Red, at that time, the most current tone curve was REDgamma4. It’s a nice, contrast-y curve, but David wanted to go back to a previous tone curve, which was REDgamma3. It’s a softer curve, and it rolls off quicker and easier in the highlights and also in the shadows.”
With the Dolby Vision HDR toolset, custom color transforms helped manage the monitoring during production. From 6K .R3D files to linear OpenEXR files, they were able to go straight to grade in Weidt’s and Messerschmidt’s preferred ‘flat’ log. For Dolby Vision HDR mastering, Weidt used the Dolby Pulsar 4000-nit professional reference display, while the Rec709 passes were done with automated mapping to SDR from Baselight. For SDR, they used a Dolby PRM monitor at 120-nits.
The HDR look was developed in post production: “In HDR, we initially came across a lot of scenes where the light sources were taking too much prominence,” Weidt says. “David and his post supervisor Peter Mavromates really wanted an elegant balance. Mindhunter‘s HDR is not trying to strike you or slap you in the face. Just like the sound mixing, or cutting, it is not trying to blow your mind, but rather convey the story content. The latter is really what’s going to punch you.”
Areas of focus circled using PIX.
After the grade.
Many of Fincher’s notes require simple dodging and burning, performed primarily through Weidt’s use of shapes, masking and tracking in Baselight. Using PIX, Fincher would circle subjects or areas of a frame, giving suggestive chromatic terms like ‘sallow’ or ‘ruddy,’ and ‘equidistant’ or ‘symmetrical’ in regard to reframing. Mindhunter used a 5K working area extracted from the full 6K frame, ultimately downconverted to a 4K deliverable, a Netflix requirement. As a 2.2:1 center extraction, the editors were able to reposition the image subtly, as needed. The image was stabilized further as necessary by using sophisticated tracking for repositioning and resizing without loss of resolution upon deliverable at 4K.
“David is famous for having a visual style where he is going to stabilize two-thirds of the shots in an episode, or in a movie, so that everything is absolutely perfect,” says Weidt. “What he wants is that the camera, the gaze into the image, is totally unconscious, and you’re really in there without distractions that most people take for granted.” After Fincher returned to Los Angeles, their standard workflow on a scene together would start with a master shot that incorporated the characters as well as background, timing color and light levels for other shots and angles in scenes to be timed from that reference.
Fincher’s eye for detail goes far beyond that, though, and Weidt noted several corrected items that would have escaped his attention, like plants outside a prison that were too vibrantly green, or highlights in reflections that needed to be turned down to match light sources. “There are certain colors that David needs to suppress, and that’s mostly pink,” he continues. “Pink appears in people’s skin tones, and if you get it wrong in the grading suite and ends up on a monitor outside of that environment, it’s going to appear like they have pink faces and it looks really bad. David wants to control that.”
Before / After
Using Summilux-C primes from CW Sonderoptic, XML information was created for every focal length. This was a requirement on Mindhunter as simulations of grain, lens barreling and chromatic aberration in Baselight were tailored to the specific focal length throughout the show. Weidt even created anamorphic effects for the spherical lenses.
“David wanted to refer to 70’s in what could be called ‘the anamorphic wide-screen era,'” he says . “Unfortunately, that focal length is not something that’s carried through in metadata. It’s tallied by the camera assistant with name of the clip and the focal length and put into a database. I had to find a way to apply the right settings for every single clip, in the absence of metadata.”
Weidt was able to merge this information by teaching himself the Python scripting engine for asset management adding the focal length as a variable in the comment field. That enabled him to classify and organize shots by telephoto, standard and wide, then multi-paste effects into an alpha-numerically sorted timeline which came in handy throughout the production. “It worked beautifully,” he says.
He also added pseudo chromatic aberration “on every shot and every episode of Mindhunter,” which he developed himself, as the vast majority of plug-ins and filters will simply shift one of the primary color plates, stretching from center, resulting in bi-color aberrations. These created results that Fincher found lackluster, when for example given a cyan-red, he’d really only want the cyan. “I found the solution in Baselight, which essentially took 20 layers, using blending modes that are usually the purview of a compositing tool,” Weidt says.
Creating a specific ’70s look.
Mindhunter
is graded on Baselight.
“David directed four episodes of Mindhunter, but he’s the executive producer for the show, and he’s definitely the director of the DI,” he adds. “All of the color, he directed himself, with contributions from Erik.”
Weidt notes that next season will be shot using a Helium sensor, and HDR monitors will be on set along with a new ACES color space workflow. “We’ve got 20 layers just for chromatic aberration. We’ve got lens warping. We’ve got three different types of grain as well, because you couldn’t just have one,” Weidt adds, regarding the final rendering process.
“Season 2 is going to be just like a real walk in the park compared to season one. We learned so much.” Season 2 of Mindhunter is currently in production.
At the core of any story is the relationship between protagonist and antagonist, especially in a story where the protagonist must understand his enemy in order to find him. The best battles between good and evil are convoluted with characteristics that could be categorized as either, or neither. When hero and villain are more alike than either would want to admit, that makes for a dynamite struggle between them. There are so many books out there that explain how to achieve that element in storytelling, but few movies ever do it as well as David Fincher’s serial killer masterpiece Se7en (1995).
Honestly, we’ve learned to expect nothing less than greatness with a Fincher + serial killer collaboration, and Se7en was his first. This almost neo-noir thriller follows the investigation of a serial killer using the seven deadly sins to justify brutal killings all over an unnamed city. Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is an aging homicide detective on his way out of the department when he’s assigned the worst last case. He’s paired with his replacement, an idealistic and determined young detective named Mills (Brad Pitt). They’re forced to work through their differences to solve the case, which is more horrifying and unpredictable than either could imagine.
There are viable arguments for who is the true protagonist in this movie, Somerset or Mills. For the sake of reading the rest of this article, just humor me if you disagree that Somerset is the protagonist in this story. He begins and ends this movie, most of the struggles are his own, and he’s in 90 percent of the scenes. While Mills has a major relationship with the killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) as well, what convinces me that he is not the protagonist is the connection and similarities between Somerset and Doe.
The Netflix series’ breakout guest actor reveals what it took to pull off his haunting performance as the murderous Ed Kemper (hint: lots and lots of director David Fincher’s infamous takes).
You can’t always pinpoint exactly the moment when a show makes its big qualitative leap, but with Netflix‘s Mindhunter, it’s easy. Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), an FBI agent experiencing frustration at his colleagues’ antiquated approach to murder investigation, goes to prison to visit a notorious killer and comes face-to-face with Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton).
Towering in stature, soft-spoken, viewing the world inquisitively through thick glasses, Kemper is intellectually vicious, yet unfailingly polite. By the end of one 10-minute conversation, we understand completely why Holden has been pulled into Kemper’s gravity and how this giant has instantly transformed his worldview.
It’s a show-changing character and a career-changing performance for Britton, making his first major TV role and earning his first career Emmy nomination. The actor talked with The Hollywood Reporter about his approach to the real-life killer, director David Fincher‘s notoriously exacting standards and more.
Cameron Britton (‘Mindhunter’) chats with Gold Derby editor Daniel Montgomery: It was difficult to get into the mind of a killer, and to get out of it.
Mindhunter’s Cameron Britton tells us how he was able to get into the mind of serial killer Ed Kemper, the toll it took on him, and how he ultimately got him out of his system.
Emmy-Nominee Cameron Britton On Becoming Ed Kemper In ‘Mindhunter’
Mindhunter‘s Cameron Britton talks to Awards Daily about how he became serial killer Ed Kemper, how the role impacted his life, and what his Emmy nomination means to him.
When Netflix’s Mindhunter premiered last fall, critics and audiences alike approached the dramatic series with respect and awe, thanks to the influence of the great director David Fincher. But everyone, literally everyone, was talking about Cameron Britton. His take on infamous serial killer Edmund Kemper captivated audiences. If you were talking about Mindhunter, then you were talking about Cameron Britton’s brilliant performance.
Here, Cameron talks to Awards Daily about how he wrestled with Edmund Kemper. He dove so deeply into Kemper that it took time to exorcise the role from his system. He also talks about what the role meant for his career and how he prepped for it by running lines with his close friends. It’s a fascinating conversation with an actor clearly on the rise in Hollywood.
David Fincher’s film chttps://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-david-fincher/areer behttps://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-david-fincher/gan at the age of nineteen as an assistant cameraman at Industrial Light & Magic. In 1983, he relocated to Los Angeles to direct TV commercials and music videos. His commercial clients include Adidas, AT&T,Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Pepsi, and Nike. David has directed music videos for various artists including Madonna, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, and A Perfect Circle. In 1987 he cofounded Propaganda Films with Dominic Sena, Greg Gold, and Nigel Dick, and has since become a motion-picture director with Panic Room, Fight Club, The Game, Se7en, Zodiac, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button among his credits. His next film, The Social Network, is slated to be released this month.
Mark Romanek was born in Chicago. Romanek has directed numerous award-winning music videos for many artists including Fiona Apple, Beck, David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Coldplay, R.E.M., and Sonic Youth. Romanek wrote and directed the feature film One Hour Photo starring Robin Williams. The film had its world premiere at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and received the Prix du Public, Prix Premiere, and the Prix du Jury at the 2002 Deauville American Film Festival. His new film, Never Let Me Go, will be released this month.
Fincher and Romanek first met in 1990, when Romanek was signed to Satellite Films. Satellite was a “boutique” division of Propaganda Films, where Fincher was a director, and a music-video legend. The two directors spoke by phone for The Believer in early August 2010.
Season 1 brought us many familiar serial killer faces with the likes of Monte Ralph Rissell, Jerry Brudos (The Shoe Fetish Slayer), Richard Speck, Darrell Gene Devier, Edmund Kemper (the Co-Ed Killer), as well the murders of the Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer) subtly over-arch the season.
Mindhunter season 2 is setting itself up to be a doozy. Not only will we see interviews with more serial killers and the BTK Killer storyline continue to develop, but the show will also be taking on the Atlanta Child Murders; a string of 28 mostly child murders, that shook Atlanta from 1979-1981. These murders also spawned the “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your child is?” commercials.
Currently, the Mindhunters casting team is searching for actors to play the victims family members, Venus Taylor, Annie Rogers, D.A. Slaton, Mayor Maynard Jackson, Commissioner Lee Brown, and Deputy Police Chief Morris Redding.
Casting is also looking for Wayne Williams, a serial killer convicted of killing 2 men, but prosecutors believe he was responsible for murdered children because when Williams went to prison the child murders stopped.
Rumors and theories have been flying around the interwebs speculating which serial killers the show could possibly bring into season 2 for interviews or more. Well, we here at That Hashtag Show have that EXCLUSIVE information just for you!
Another comprehensive article by Spanish DP, Producer and cinematography scholar Ignacio Aguilar, this time on the cinematography of Zodiac. Time to practice your rusty Spanish or get help from a good web translator.
Excepcional adaptación cinematográfica del libro de Robert Graysmith, basado en su propia investigación sobre los asesinatos cometidos en la zona de San Francisco a finales de la década de los 60 y comienzos de los 70, por un asesino que además enviaba cartas a los períodicos, anunciando sus planes y próximas víctimas. El film está protagonizado, además de por el propio Graysmith (interpretado por Jake Gyllenhaal), por su compañero en el San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) y por el detective de homicidios Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), los cuales uno a uno, se van obsesionando por el caso que les ocupa a medida que profundizan en el mismo y creen encontrarse cerca de resolverlo. Se trata quizá del mejor y más sólido trabajo de David Fincher detrás de las cámaras, quien deja de lado su conocida solvencia técnica y se lanza a narrar minuciosamente todo lo concerniente al caso que inspiró películas como “Dirty Harry” (1971), tomando una estructura y formas muy parecidas a las de una de sus películas de referencia: “All The President’s Men” (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), escrita por William Goldman y protagonizada por Dustin Hoffman y Robert Redford. Anthony Edwards, Chloe Sevigny, Elias Koteas, John Carroll Lynch y Brian Cox, entre otros, completan el reparto de un film absolutamente modélico.
El director de fotografía fue Harris Savides [ASC], un hombre cuya carrera en cine, entre su tardía llegada y su prematuro fallecimiento por un cáncer cerebral a los 55 años de edad en el año 2012, desgraciadamente fue demasiado corta. Procedente de los videoclips y de los anuncios publicitarios, debutó en 1996 con “Heaven’s Prisoners” a las órdenes de Phil Joanou. Ya el año anterior había rodado metraje adicional para David Fincher en “Se7en” (1995), quien le contrató para su siguiente film, “The Game” (1997), la película que puso a Savides en el mapa. Posteriormente destacó mucho con “The Yards” (James Gray, 2000) y con varios trabajos para Gus Van Sant: “Finding Forrester”, “Gerry”, “Elephant”, “The Last Days” y “Milk”, además de por su trabajo para Jonathan Glazer en “Birth”. Además tuvo tiempo para colaborar con Ridley Scott en “American Gangster”, con Woody Allen en “Whatever Works” o con Sofia Coppola en “Somewhere”. Su estilo, muy sencillo y poco recargado, a menudo estaba dominado por la subexposición y la luz cenital, a veces asumiendo grandes riesgos, siguiendo en muchos aspectos la línea de Gordon Willis durante la década de los 70.
Savides por lo tanto era el director de fotografía ideal para Fincher en este proyecto, ya que el citado modelo “All The President’s Men” precisamente fue fotografiado por el autor de “The Godfather”. Ambientada desde finales de los años 60 hasta principios de los 80, “Zodiac” sorprendió mucho porque fue el primer proyecto de David Fincher rodado en formato digital y porque hasta aquél momento, dicha forma de adquisición se había empleado principalmente en películas como “Attack of the Clones” (2002) y “Revenge of the Sith” (2005), “Collateral” (2004) y “Miami Vice” (2006) o incluso “Apocalypto” y “Superman Returns” (2006), sin que ninguna de ellas (dejando de lado del film de Gibson) fueran películas de época. Savides (ante la insistencia de Fincher) recurrió a la cámara Thomson Viper Filmstream, la misma usada por Michael Mann en las dos películas citadas anteriormente, pero a diferencia del director de “The Last of the Mohicans”, en el caso de “Zodiac” los cineastas no lo hicieron para rodar con niveles de luz muy bajos o luz disponible, sino que rodaron en HD iluminándolo de forma muy parecida a como lo hubiesen hecho rodando en 35mm. Por ello, el efecto vídeo de las películas de Mann, tanto por la textura de la imagen como por emplear el obturador abierto, no está presente en absoluto en “Zodiac”, que en muchas ocasiones es mencionada como un hito precisamente porque su estética digital fue la primera que demostró que en este formato podían seguir obteniéndose imágenes de parecida calidad a las que se conseguían con el celuloide. Y aunque la Viper era una cámara limitada (con un sensor pequeño y no tanta latitud como las modernas) lo cierto es que prácticamente nunca se perciben dichas limitaciones.
The Fincher Analyst 