Andrew Kevin Walker looks to make the process of writing fun, and to add a dash of that fun to his scripts, as with “The Killer.” (Brandon Michael Young / For The Times)
Bob Strauss
December 18, 2023
Los Angeles Times
Andrew Kevin Walker feels right at home on the patio of a Los Feliz restaurant. As he should; the Pennsylvania native has lived in the L.A. neighborhood since moving here from New York with his screenplay for “Se7en,” the disturbing thriller that became director David Fincher’s 1995 breakout feature.
Gregarious as the protagonist of “The Killer,” his new feature with Fincher, is taciturn — the screenwriter’s proud that, in his first script draft, Michael Fassbender’s unnamed, professional assassin had only 13 lines of dialogue. He sweated to get every line and action in the brutal, existential “Killer” just so, yet constantly refers to a search for fun in both his painstaking writing process and throughout the lean, mean movie he concocted with Fincher.
“Writing is no fun, but the challenge is how do you make it interesting to invent, semi-realistically at least, this guy’s existence in the first 20 minutes or so,” says Walker, who’s wearing a vintage Rolling Stones tour T-shirt, shoulder-length gray/blond hair and a friendship bracelet that says “jackass” made at one of the numerous WGA picket lines he marched this summer. “Sleep on a rubber mat that you roll up every night, spray the sink and use bleach in the toilet so you’re getting the DNA out of the pipes the best you can, have thermal gloves so you can twist off your rifle barrel without blistering your hand. … The problem-solving became what defined the process-intensive storytelling. Which hopefully didn’t tip over into tedium but embraced what I like to call an exquisite mundanity.”
The Fincher Analyst 