Category: 2023. The Killer

How Erik Messerschmidt Post-Produced His Cinematography for “The Killer”

Julian Mitchell, editor, media maker publishing
December 18, 2023
NAB Amplify

NAB Amplify caught up with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt just as he was about to fly to the Camerimage film festival in Poland, where Ferrari, his first film with director Michael Mann, was in competition. “An extraordinary experience, once in a lifetime,” was his on-the-spot reaction to the question, “How was it?”

But we wanted to talk to him about The Killer, a Netflix movie with an appearance in selected theaters at very selective times. Most people would wait for the stream and live with the Internet compression artifacts for the treat of a Fincher film, this time about a man who kills for a living. Cue Michael Fassbender, with sociopathic personality traits and an attention to detail that leaves nothing to chance; some reviews suggested that this man was a depiction of Fincher himself.

If you have seen previous films or television shows from the Fincher/Messerschmidt duo, especially 2018’s Mindhunter, you would be in a comfortable place from the get-go of The Killer: An avocado-colored LUT, exquisite scene management, and meticulous coverage. “Is this all you?” the DP was asked.

“It’s a thing that David and I do together. I enjoy the process of camera direction; I view it as sort of my principal job, really. It’s thinking about the structure of the film and of each scene. Every director’s interaction in terms of coverage and camera direction is different. It’s the first thing David and I discuss: structure and pacing. It’s almost an editorial conversation in terms of what we’re going to provide Kirk [Baxter, the editor] and how each scene breaks down in terms of the pace,” he said.

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‘The Killer’ filmmakers David Fincher, Andrew Kevin Walker on paring down the dialogue and being inspired by Don Siegel

David Fincher, Erik Messerschmidt, Michael Fassbender (Monaris / Netflix)

The Killer sees David Fincher deliver a lean, efficient and darkly funny hitman tale. Screen talks to the filmmaker and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker about bringing a French graphic novel to the screen.

Mark Salisbury (Ex-Twitter)
December 20,2023
ScreenDaily

“Obviously, I’m drawn to nihilism,” says a grinning David Fincher, director of Se7en, Fight Club and Gone Girl, when asked why he wanted to adapt French graphic novel series The Killer into a film. “But I wanted to make a fucking Don Siegel movie. I wanted to make a Michael Winner movie. I’m so tired of slogging through characters you create to deliver some idea of backstory. What’s the greatest backstory in the history of motion pictures? ‘What were you doing in China­town, Jake?’ ‘As little as possible.’ It explains everything in one line.

“I love it when you can distil motivation down to these incredibly brief and simple evocations,” he continues. “I’m tired of two-hour 45-minute movies, and two-hour 30-minute movies. I’m tired of making them. I’m joking, but does it warrant it? Then I started thinking about Get Carter, Charley Varrick. Movies where it just is what it is.”

This was back in 2007, when the graphic novel series — written by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, and first published in 1998 — was being developed into a film by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and Paramount. Fincher was intrigued, but was directing Pitt in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, so was not ready to commit. “It wasn’t like you were going, ‘This has to be seen.’ It was more of a way to explore some things I was interested in — the broadest brushstrokes of backstory and this idea of intercepted thought. Why is it we assume when we hear a character’s thoughts that it’s the truth? I don’t know people who aren’t lying to themselves.”

Fincher approached Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who had done uncredited rewrites on Fight Club and The Game as well as work on several unmade Fincher projects — among them The Girl Who Played With Fire, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, an adaptation of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama and a remake of The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud — to see if he was interested in adapting The Killer. But Walker was not, according to Fincher. “He didn’t want to touch it then.”

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Killer Instinct

With six unique locations, grading The Killer was never going to be simple. Colourist Eric Weidt shares how he captured David Fincher’s meticulous hitman.

Katie Kasperson
January 2024
Definition

The latest film from David Fincher, The Killer, sees Michael Fassbender play the titular assassin – a Smiths-loving cynic who embarks on an international chase after a high-profile job goes awry. The story takes our anti-hero from hazy Paris to humid Florida to wintry New York, with each location taking on its own challenge – both for the Killer and the film’s colourist Eric Weidt.

GOING INTERNATIONAL

Based on Alexis Matz Nolent’s graphic novel series and inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, The Killer combines a fast-paced plot with moody yet bold colours. “I think Fincher is a big comic book fan,” begins Weidt, “especially in the art of framing to impart the beats of a story. Working in film, he brings that to movement as well – he’s seeking a visual rhythm that makes you forget it is highly constructed.

“David likes to push and pull colours, but always strikes an unconscious balance,” he continues. Weidt began working on The Killer while it was still at the pre-production stage, developing lookup tables alongside cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt ASC, who had previously worked with Fincher on Mank, for which he won an Academy Award.

Read the profile and the full January 2024 issue of Definition magazine

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The Professionals: “The Killer” and “Ferrari”

Erik Messerschmidt, ASC shoots two stories about men whose business and private lives spin out of control.

Patricia Thomson
January 2024
American Cinematographer

A pair of films shot by Erik Messerschmidt, ASC premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last August, and both were collaborations with leading directors: David Fincher’s The Killer and Michael Mann’s Ferrari. Messerschmidt recently spoke with AC from Spain about his work on each production.

The Killer | A Devil of a Job

Fincher and Messerschmidt didn’t discuss the look of The Killer as much as its tempo and structure.

Adapted from a graphic-novel series, the film follows a methodical, nameless assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) whose life spirals out of control after a job goes horribly wrong in Paris. He tries to restore a sense of order by punishing those responsible.

Messerschmidt won an Academy Award for Fincher’s Mank (AC Feb.’21), and his collaborations with the director span the Netflix series Mindhunter and the feature Gone Girl — with Messerschmidt serving as gaffer for Jeff Cronenweth, ASC (AC Nov. ’14) on the latter.

“David is fastidious,” he says. “He is very prepared, but very collaborative and considerate of what it is everyone’s bringing to the project. He shares his goals for the film with you, and he shares the techniques that he wants to use in a really elegant way. So, you begin to understand quite quickly what he’s looking to achieve on a given shot, a given scene or even on a given film.

“On this film, David was particularly interested in exploring The Killer’s state of mind through the camera’s perspective,” recalls Messerschmidt. “The Killer in his natural state is very much in control of his environment — nothing surprises him, and we wanted the audience to immediately connect to his confidence.”

Read the full double feature in the January Issue of American Cinematographer

Savage VFX: The Killer VFX Breakdown

December 18, 2023
Savage VFX

Visual Effects By: Savage Visual Effects

Visual Effects Supervisor: James Pastorius
Visual Effects Producer: Brice Liesveld
2D Animation: Kevin Konitsch, Henry Borrasso, H Haden Hammond
3D Animation: Tim Turner, Rusty Ippolito, Andrew Romatz, Luke A. Ewing, Joseph Chiechi, Alvaro Segura, Mike Bettinardi, Mike DuPree

How Andrew Kevin Walker created a chatty ‘Killer’ who breaks his own rules

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.”

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‘Ferrari,’ ‘Society of the Snow’ and ‘The Killer’ Deliver the Sound of Trouble

TheWrap magazine: The sound teams on those three movies had to conjure up car wrecks, a plane crash and some assassinations.

Steve Pond
December 15, 2023
The Wrap

Over the last few years, the Oscar sound category has recognized war movies like “All Quiet on the Western Front,” science fiction movies like “Dune” and musicals like “West Side Story,” among others. There’s no formula for how to use sound effectively, but three of this year’s gems do share a sense that their sonic palette puts us in dangerous places: On the racetracks of 1950s Italy, in the frigid expanses of the Andes and inside the unsettling cranium of Michael Fassbender.

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The Killer: Wei Zheng (Artemple Hollywood), Yabin Morales (Ollin VFX) & James Pastorius (Savage VFX)

Vincent Frei
December 18, 2023
ART of VFX

Wei Zheng (VFX Supervisor) began his career in visual effects in 1998 at ILM. He then worked at Digital Domain and joined Artemple Hollywood in 2012. He has worked on various shows including Minority Report, Zodiac, Mindhunter, and Mank. Today he talks to us about his new collaboration with David Fincher.

Yabin Morales (VFX Supervisor) has been with Ollin VFX for over 15 years and has worked on projects such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, The Boys, and Outer Range.

With over twenty years of experience in visual effects, James Pastorius (VFX Supervisor) has worked on many films such as Gone Girl, Jumanji: The Next Level, Uncharted, and Ferrari. In 2007, he founded his own studio, Savage VFX.

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‘Killer’ Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt Collaborated With Director David Fincher To Create a Uniquely Visual Assassin’s Tale

Clarence Moye
December 18, 2023
AwardsDaily

Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt began his acclaimed collaboration with iconic director David Fincher as a gaffer on Fincher’s 2014 thriller Gone Girl. That initial introduction led to Messerschmidt lensing 16 episodes of the acclaimed Netflix crime drama Mindhunter for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. That close collaborative relationship with Fincher then morphed into Messerschmidt’s breakout moment as a celebrated cinematographer, his Oscar-winning lensing of Fincher’s 2020 Mank. His black-and-white cinematography not only echoed Gregg Toland’s Oscar-nominated work on Citizen Kane, but it also fully immersed viewers in 1940s cinema, a goal for the film that Messerschmidt shared with other Mank artisans.

Now, Messerschmidt again collaborates with Fincher on an entirely different project, Netflix’s The Killer. The film thrusts both artists into a modern day world of a hired assassin (Michael Fassbender) as he botches a hit job and travels across the world to seek retribution. Traditionally, when approaching a project of this caliber, Messerschmidt would prep a “lookbook,” a collection of photographs intended to outline visual references for multiple aspects of the filmmaking craft.

But with The Killer, Fincher and Messerschmidt approached things differently.

“In the past when I’ve worked with [Fincher], I have sent him lookbooks, we’ll have references, or we’ll start with paintings or photography or other movies. We didn’t do that on this movie. We talked about pacing and timing and scene structure and point of view,” Messerschmidt shared. “The aesthetics of the look of the movie ended up being born through the process of exploration and scouting and location selection. Even though the movie is stylistic, it all comes from a place of realism, and that was always the intent.”

To follow The Killer on his world-wide journey, Fincher segments the film into chapters. Not only does this structure echo the graphic novel roots of the story (the film is based on the French comic by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and Luc Jacamon), but it also sets the tone within the larger world of its edgy, pulp fiction ancestors. Given that structure, Messerschmidt faced unique lensing challenges as The Killer moves from chapter to chapter.

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Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt Delves Into Mind of “The Killer”

Reflective thriller continues DP’s collaborative relationship with director David Fincher.

Robert Goldrich
December 15, 2023
Shoot

The two latest feature films lensed by Erik Messerschmidt, ASC have him once again in the awards season conversation–director Michael Mann’s Ferrari (Neon) which will debut in U.S. theaters on Dec. 25, and David Fincher’s The Killer (Netflix), which has been already released theatrically and is now streaming on Netflix.

This installment of The Road To Oscar will focus on The Killer, which continues a longstanding collaborative relationship between the cinematographer and Fincher. Messerschmidt is no stranger to Academy Award banter, having won a Best Cinematography Oscar in 2021 for Fincher’s Mank. The film also garnered ASC and BSC Award wins for Messerschmidt.

Fincher has played a prominent role in Messerschmidt’s career. It all started back when Messerschmidt served as a gaffer for cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, most notably on the Fincher-directed Gone Girl. During the course of that movie, Fincher had Messerschmidt do some promotional still work for Gone Girl and the two struck up a rapport. This eventually led to Messerschmidt becoming the DP on Fincher’s Mindhunter, the thriller series centered on an FBI agent’s quest to track down serial killers in the late 1970s. Messerschmidt in 2020 wound up garnering his first career Emmy nomination for his lensing of Mindhunter. He shot the lion’s share of Mindhunter episodes; the series represented his first major TV gig as his DP endeavors prior to that were primarily in commercials and other short-form fare. Fincher then further expanded Messerschmidt’s reach–first into the feature realm with Mank and then The Killer. 

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