Riley Chow
February 11, 2021
Gold Derby
“This was supposed to be the sister movie to ‘Citizen Kane.’ It wasn’t supposed to be something that replicated it in any way,” explains “Mank” production designer Donald Graham Burt in his exclusive interview with Gold Derby. Burt recalls an early conversation that he had with his director David Fincher in which Fincher told him, “I want it to be like you’re in a film vault and there’s ‘Citizen Kane’ on the shelf and then you look next to it and you go: Oh, there’s ‘Mank’ — I don’t remember that film. And you pull it out and you watch it and it feels like a film that was made exactly at the same time.” Burt continues, “It was so important to try to keep it in the ’30s with everything and whenever we met challenges or so forth in the art department, I would always take a step back and say, ‘Okay, remember the research. Remember the references. Let’s keep it within the time period’.”
