The Fincher Analyst

Magnificent Obsession: David Fincher on His Three-Decade Quest to Bring ‘Mank’ to Life

Brent Lang
November 18, 2020
Variety

“Mank” is the gripping story of the brilliant but troubled artist behind “Citizen Kane,” often considered to be the greatest movie ever made.

No, it’s not about director Orson Welles. Instead, it pushes Herman J. Mankiewicz, the alcoholic writer for hire who is responsible for bringing the film’s revolutionary, non-linear narrative structure and corrosive portrait of wealth and power, to the center of the frame.

“He was one of those voices that charted the way,” says David Fincher, the director who labored for nearly 30 years to bring “Mank” to life. “My hope is that people will be entertained watching a generational wit, who is in some ways forgotten and never got his due.”

Gatefold print cover designed by Dan Benesch

“Mank,” which Netflix will debut Dec. 4, is also likely to reignite a fierce debate around the concept of auteurism. If film is truly a director’s medium, then who gets the credit for a masterpiece? It’s an argument about authorship that has swirled around “Citizen Kane” almost from the time it hit theaters in 1941. That’s largely due to the fact that Welles not only starred in the movie: He also directed, produced and co-wrote it while still just a 24-year-old wunderkind.

Others disagree about the extent of Welles’ contributions. As Pauline Kael’s controversial 1971 essay “Raising Kane” and now “Mank” make clear, “Citizen Kane” was greatly informed by Mankiewicz’s friendship with William Randolph Hearst (the newspaper baron who inspired Kane), as well his personal experience with media and politics.

You might think that Fincher, a revered visual stylist, whose perfectionism can drive film crews and actors to the breaking point, would be a subscriber to the Great Man theory at the heart of auteurism — the idea that some talents are so outsize they seep into every shot or beat of a movie. You’d be wrong though.

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Cover illustration by Greg Ruth; Fincher image reference by Frank Ockenfels

David Fincher on ‘Mindhunter’: ‘I Don’t Know if It Makes Sense to Continue’

Brent Lang
November 18, 2020
Variety

How Variety Covered the Era of ‘Citizen Kane’ and Herman J. Mankiewicz

Tim Gray
November 18, 2020
Variety

Script Apart: “Zodiac” with James Vanderbilt

Al Horner
November 18, 2020
Script Apart

This week we’re joined by the excellent James Vanderbilt, screenwriter of the 2007 David Fincher thriller, Zodiac. James has had an impressively eclectic Hollywood career: on top of writing action adventures like White House Down, detective comedies like Murder Mystery, sci-fi sequels like Independence Day 2 and the odd Spider-Man blockbuster or two, he’s also produced horror hits (Slender Man, Ready Or Not) and stepped behind the camera to direct his own gripping historical drama (2015’s Truth). Before all that, though, came this cult smash: a slow-burn dramatisation of the hunt for the most notorious serial killer in American history.

Zodiac was a labour of love. Vanderbilt obsessed over the mysterious murderer’s identity for decades before writing the film, based on the 1986 non-fiction book of the same name by Robert Graysmith. Graysmith was a cartoonist working at the San Francisco Chronicle when a string of gruesome killings across the Bay Area, by one unknown assailant, left the region in a state of panic and paranoia. The killer, known as the Zodiac, wrote cryptic letters to Graysmith’s paper that perplexed police, and sent Graysmith on a personal mission to uncover the killer’s identity. The Zodiac was never caught. Vanderbilt’s film tells the story of Graysmith’s ultimately unsuccessful search for the truth.

If you’re wondering how you write a satisfying thriller in which the killer gets away, don’t worry: James did too. I chatted to James from his home in LA to hear about the conventions he had to break to make this incredible movie, the dizzying amount of research that he and Fincher undertook to make sure they were telling the victims’ stories responsibly, and whether or not he’d ever consider making of sequel of sorts, about the notorious 1970s killer the Son of Sam.

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Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.

Follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft and WeScreenplay. To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

David Fincher: film studios ‘don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars’

Robbie Collin, Film Critic
November 14, 2020
The Telegraph

An hour or so into the 1999 premiere of Fight Club, David Fincher slipped outside for some air. The director hadn’t known exactly what to expect when his brutally violent black comedy was selected for the Venice Film Festival, but whatever the dream scenario had been, this wasn’t it. The walkouts had started early, and become a steady stream. The only audience members laughing were his leading men, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton – though in fairness, the two had shared a joint beforehand. The first review off the presses had described Fincher’s film as “an inadmissible assault on personal decency” with a fascist bent, and the festival crowd weren’t noticeably any more enthused.

“The resounding thuds every scene landed with just became too much,” Fincher, now 58, tells me from home via Zoom. He recalls sitting on the steps outside and watching half a dozen disgusted older women file past: “all wearing at least one item of leopard print, like six Anne Bancrofts in The Graduate.” One evidently recognised the American enfant terrible and hissed something to her companions, who looked across and shook their heads in sync. “It was then I knew that what we’d done was wrong,” he says, beaming with pride.

Fincher’s tremendous latest film – his first since Gone Girl in 2014 – is unlikely to cause many viewers to storm home, not least because they’ll already be there when they watch it. Mank is a Netflix production, filmed just before the pandemic struck, but edited, polished and due to be released under lockdown conditions. Set in the Golden Age of Hollywood and shot in silvery monochrome, it follows the political chicanery and personal vendettas that led to the writing of Citizen Kane: a film released in 1941, and still widely considered the greatest ever made. Mank’s hero isn’t Orson Welles, Kane’s startlingly young director and star (he was 25 when it was released), but Gary Oldman’s Herman J Mankiewicz – a wildly talented screenwriter and incorrigible gambler and drunk, whom Welles enlisted to ghostwrite the script.

Read the full interview [Only for subscribers – 1-month free trial]

Mank: Interviews. Charles Dance

Charles Dance plays newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst in Mank.

Dance appeared as prison doctor Clemens in Fincher’s first film Alien3 (1992):

“First of all, I’m a huge fan of his. And I don’t say that about all directors that I’ve worked with. But when I first worked with David, the minute he walked onto the set and started to talk, I thought ‘right, this guy is clever'”.

“Mank”: Charles Dance im Interview

CINEMA-Magazin (YouTube)
November 13, 2020

Pop Culture Confidential: Arliss Howard (“Mank”)

Christina Jeurling Birro
November 13, 2020
Pop Culture Confidential

Don’t miss this exclusive and compelling conversation with actor, writer, and director Arliss Howard (Full Metal Jacket, Natural Born Killers, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Amistad, Moneyball, Manhunt)

A journey into his process, his brilliant performance as MGM’s Louis B Mayer in David Fincher’s new epic feature ‘Mank’, working with Fincher, Kubrick, Spielberg and Stone and so much more!

‘Mank’ premieres theatrically in some territories on Nov 13th. On Netflix Dec 4.

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Arliss Howard (2001, Evan Agostini)

Lensing Creativity Goes Remote

The pandemic has accelerated many technical trends that were already underway

David Heuring
November 11, 2020
Variety

Necessity is the mother of invention, and nothing proves this proverb more true than the evolution of film and television production technology in the age of COVID-19. While the field has always changed rapidly even in normal times, the pace of change and adaptation has accelerated over the past six months.

This adjustment has posed many questions. Beyond personal protective equipment, mandatory testing, on-set safety monitors, walking lunches and corona contingency fees, will the pandemic have enduring effects in the creative, collaborative endeavor that is filmmaking? The technology to work remotely has essentially been in place for some time, but will the pandemic finally push us over into a new normal?

Numerous existing technology trends are being suddenly supercharged by the necessities imposed by the coronavirus. Shooting close to home has never been more appealing, and that impulse aligns neatly with ongoing advancements in LED backings and virtual production. In the world of image processing, connectivity solutions such as those offered by Moxion, Frame.io and Sohonet were already bringing immediacy and super-high resolution to a wide variety of devices without regard to location — and now those virtues are suddenly in much higher demand. And remote collaboration solutions including PIX are looking positively prescient.

Director David Fincher’s team found that the PIX production backbone, a tool they’ve helped develop over the years, facilitated safe group creativity but also enhanced efficiency on the forthcoming Mank.

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Total Film: Mank cast on working with David Fincher

“It does feel like Groundhog Day”

Matt Maytum, Jack Shepherd
November 11, 2020
Total Film (GamesRadar+)

There are few directors as infamously meticulous as David Fincher. Amanda Seyfried – who appears in Fincher’s upcoming movie Mank, about the writing of Citizen Kane – previously revealed that one scene took around 200 takes to capture properly. For the latest issue of the magazine, Total Film asked the team behind Mank about working with Fincher, with the director himself being the first to admit that he can be quite demanding.

“It was exhausting in the beginning, I think, for him,” Fincher says of leading actor Gary Oldman. “Because I’m fairly didactic about, ‘These are the things that the scene needs to accomplish for me, and we will continue to play, to look for ways to underline these ideas that are as subtle as we can make them.’

Read the full preview and pick up a copy of the new issue of Total Film

Newsstand and subscriber editions covers.

Total Film: David Fincher discusses the state of play in Hollywood

“There’s really only two seasons for movies: ‘spandex summer’ and ‘affliction winter'”

Matt Maytum, Jack Shepherd
November 10, 2020
Total Film (GamesRadar+)

David Fincher’s Mank was a long time coming. The director has been drumming up interest in the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter behind Citizen Kane, since 1997 – as soon as his writer father Jack Fincher (a journalist and author) had finished the script.

“Unless you’re making a tentpole movie that has a Happy Meal component to it, no one’s interested,” Fincher tells Total Film for the latest issue of the magazine, headlined by Mank. However, after many years fighting for Mank to get made, the perfect opportunity presented itself when Netflix asked what Fincher would like to make next (the filmmaker had worked with the streamer on House Of Cards, Love, Death & Robots, and Mindhunter).

Read the full preview and pick up a copy of the new issue of Total Film

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Total Film: Gary Oldman goes back to Hollywood’s Golden Age in this exclusive look at David Fincher’s Mank

A new look at the Netflix awards contender.

Matt Maytum
November 10, 2020
Total Film (GamesRadar+)

On paper, David Fincher’s Mank is a movie about the making of Orson Welles’ 1941 classic, Citizen Kane. But, in reality, it’s much more than that – as our five-star review indicates.

It tells the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz: the ‘Mank’ of the title. A self-sabotaging screenwriter, he’s a genius wit and knows the industry inside out, but his heavy drinking and reckless gambling scupper his chances to get ahead. An opportunity comes calling when Welles offers him the opportunity to collaborate on a screenplay with the working title, American…

The movie – which is a 30-years-in-the-making passion project for Fight Club and The Social Network director Fincher – stars Oscar-winner Gary Oldman as Mank. You can take an exclusive look at Oldman in the film below, courtesy of our sister publication Total Film magazine. Plus, a new look at Oldman behind the scenes shooting an old-school driving scene, and hanging about between takes with Fincher.

Read the full preview and pick up a copy of the new issue of Total Film