As his new film gets ready to hit Netflix, the legendary director talks to Nick Chen about The Smiths, Michael Fassbender, and the similarities between directors and hitmen.
Nick Chen
November 6, 2023
Dazed
To prove the catchiness of “Unhappy Birthday” by The Smiths, David Fincher sings to me the opening refrain with a huge grin. For our conversation, the 61-year-old director of feel-bad fare like Se7en, Zodiac, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in surprisingly good spirits. Or bad spirits, given the miserabilist nature of The Smiths.
In Fincher’s sleek, bleak thriller The Killer, his second feature for Netflix, there are 11 killer songs by The Smiths on the soundtrack. An unnamed hitman (Michael Fassbender) – simply The Killer, in the credits – calms his nerves when operating a sniper rifle by listening to “How Soon Is Now?”, the tremolo reverberating through his earphones. “That guitar shouldn’t be comforting, because it’s sinister,” says Fincher, speaking in Ham Yard Hotel during the London Film Festival. “But to me, it’s comforting. We originally had Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. [Trent] Reznor was like, ‘Every time we use The Smiths, it’s just funny.’”
After the black-and-white seriousness of Mank, Fincher has returned to the kind of big-screen, popcorn fun he delivered in Gone Girl – except it also mischievously isn’t. Adapted from a French graphic novel, The Killer is less of a John Wick-esque, gun-toting adventure and more observing an assassin do admin to bypass security measures. He shuffles through paperwork to identify home addresses, and fills in endless forms to join a victim’s gym. To remain faceless, he picks up Amazon purchases from a locker and eats at a McDonald’s that doesn’t involve entering a building. If it weren’t too meta, he’d wind down by using someone else’s password to stream Fincher’s House of Cards on Netflix.
The Fincher Analyst 