Clarence Moye
December 14, 2023
AwardsDaily
Netflix’s The Killer marks sound designer Ren Klyce’s 13th collaboration with David Fincher on a project spanning film and television. Their creative partnership resulted in Klyce receiving six Academy Award nominations, most recently for 2020’s Mank. (Klyce also received three other Oscar nominations for Disney-based work.) His work with Fincher excels creatively based on a shorthand gained from decades of idea sharing and artistic challenges that often redefine the relationship between sound design and the audience.
Fincher’s creativity and way of looking at a scene differently can still strike fear in the hearts of his filmmaking partners.
Take the climactic fight sequence in The Killer between Michael Fassbender’s Killer and Sala Baker’s Brute. Traditional filmmaking and sound design would have incorporated fight-based vocalizations (grunts, etc.) within the audio.
But Fincher had different ideas for the scene.
The Fincher Analyst 