Andrew Kevin Walker – The Fincher Analyst

First behind-the-scenes look at David Fincher’s “The Killer” with Michael Fassbender

Michael Fassbender: Road to Le Mans. Season 4, Episode 1

November2, 2022
Porsche (YouTube)

Follow the fourth season of Michael Fassbender’s journey to compete at the world’s ultimate motorsport event in this weekly YouTube series.

Starting at minute 2:14, there is a three-minute clip of Fassbender shooting car process scenes for The Killer with Fincher and his team on Sound Stage 2 at Triscenic Production Services. Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter of the film, is also visiting.

The actor discusses working on the film during the off-season of his other passion, car racing:

I had the great privilege and honor of working with David Fincher on The Killer. I have the lead role in his film. To have a small window of opportunity to go to work and then to be able to work with one of the best filmmakers out there was just a dream come true.

It felt really good to go back to work. The film that I’ve done before was just before lockdown. But that was 2019, so I was definitely ready to go back to work.

With somebody of David’s caliber, it was a very special opportunity for me: quite a few locations over a five-month period.

What was interesting for me was taking the experience from what we’re doing on track and bringing it on set, especially with somebody like David who films very precisely and everything is dealing in fractions in terms of how you deliver things and movement and exactly how the frame is occupied.

You have to step on and deliver in a period of time. And David is looking for perfection and to do that within a take, however long that take is. It might be 40 seconds. It might be six minutes long, but within that time frame, you’re looking to do everything exactly as it should be.

You’ve taken on board all the notes and there’s plenty of them to digest, but in the moment when you’re trying to deliver those notes, you’re not thinking at all.

It was a real honor. I felt like I learned a lot from him. It was a full-on shoot, very long hours sometimes six-day weeks. So there was literally not enough time for me to get into car and do any training whatsoever.

So we wrapped up the film in L.A., end of March, and I got directly on a flight the next day and then came straight to the track.

Step by Step, David Fincher’s ‘The Game’ Drags You Into a Living Nightmare

The most overlooked entry in David Fincher’s filmography is also one of his best.

Matthew Mosley
November 1, 2022
Collider

The Game had a lot to live up to. It was the film David Fincher chose as his follow-up to the wildly acclaimed Seven, a film that had thrust the young director into the limelight and prevented his career from reaching a premature end after the mixed reaction to his debut, Alien 3. Suddenly, he was no longer the man who’d killed the little girl we’d spent all of Aliens trying to save. Instead, he was a fully realized auteur ready to carve out his place in the annals of cinema, and all eyes were on him to see what he would do next. What he came back with was The Game, a Hitchcockian thriller for the modern age that toned down the controversial subject matter of its predecessor to focus on being a more straightforward genre pic – a decision that raised a few eyebrows.

The film centers on Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), a wealthy investment banker who has everything but the one thing money can’t buy – happiness. For his 48th birthday, his estranged brother Conrad (Sean Penn) gives him a voucher for a mysterious game operated by the equally mysterious Consumer Recreation Services. Nicholas initially rejects the gift, but curiosity gets the better of him and he agrees to participate. However, it doesn’t take long before reality and the game become one and the same, and Nicholas finds himself caught in a web of conspiracy that grows tighter the more he tries to escape. It’s classic thriller stuff and would make for perfect late-night viewing for someone looking to escape into the fantastical world of movies. It’s the sort of thing Alfred Hitchcock excelled at, and while it’s an oversimplification to say that that’s all the film has going for it – touches of psychological thriller era Brian De Palma are scattered throughout, alongside the occasional moment of surrealism that feels closer to what Charlie Kaufman would later popularize – it’s undeniably a more crowd-pleasing experience than Fincher’s previous work.

Read the full article

Interview with Andrew Kevin Walker, writer of Se7en

Daniel Fee (Twitter)
September 15, 2022
Daniel Fee33 (YouTube)

In this video, I’m lucky enough to sit down with Andrew Kevin Walker! Screenwriter behind projects such as SE7EN, the David Fincher directed crime thriller, starring Brad Pitt & Morgan Freeman! Andrew is also the screenwriter behind Brainscan, Nerdland, he co-wrote Windfall, and he also wrote an episode of hit TV Show, Love Death and Robots! It was such an honour to chat with Andy!

I would really appreciate it if anyone could donate to the National Deaf Children’s Society! (Twitter) Every cent helps! Thanks!

Andrew Kevin Walker: website, Twitter, Instagram

Mentioned podcast:

David Koepp in conversation with Andrew Kevin Walker

September 11, 2019
Live Talks Los Angeles (Apple Podcasts)

David Fincher Tells You Everything You’d Ever Want to Know About Making ‘Love, Death + Robots’ and Directing ‘Bad Travelling’

Fincher also talks about his love of director Alberto Mielgo’s ‘Jibaro’ and how he’s “never seen anything like it. I’ve never been that mesmerized.”

Steve Weintraub
May 20, 2022
Collider

If you’re a fan of David Fincher and Love, Death + Robots, you’re about to be very happy. Not only is Love, Death + Robots Volume 3 now streaming on Netflix, David Fincher directed one of the episodes, Bad Travelling, and it’s fantastic. Written by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, it’s about a giant crustacean and a shark-hunting sailing vessel. I’d love to tell you more…but the best thing about Love, Death + Robots is not knowing anything about what you’re going to watch and just letting it happen.

Shortly after watching the episode, I was able to get on the phone with Fincher for a deep dive conversation about directing Bad Travelling and the making of Love, Death + Robots. During the sprawling conversation, Fincher talked about his history with animation, how he decided on the style of animation for his episode, how they decided where something should end, how everyone involved in the series is doing it for the love of the genre, and if they’ve thought about making a Love, Death + Robots feature film or doing a live-action version. In addition, he talked about his love of director Alberto Mielgo’s Jibaro (another Love, Death + Robots Volume 3 episode) and how he’s “never seen anything like it. I’ve never been that mesmerized.”

Trust me, if you’re a fan of Fincher and this amazing series, you’ll learn a lot about how it’s made.

Check out what he had to say.

David Fincher Tries Animation in ‘Love, Death + Robots’

Fincher, left, directed the short under Covid protocols. “I didn’t quite realize how much I communicate through my face,” he said.

Noel Murray
May 19, 2022
The New York Times

The director made his first animated short for the new season of this Netflix anthology. “It was an incredibly freeing, eye-opening, mind-expanding way to interface with a story,” he said.

Before David Fincher became an A-list director and multiple Oscar and Emmy nominee — lauded for of-the-moment films like “Fight Club” and “The Social Network” and the TV series “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter” — he was one of the co-founders of the production company Propaganda Films. Propaganda was known for its visually dazzling TV commercials and music videos, and Fincher honed his craft in dozens of miniature movies made in myriad styles.

Yet until recently, he had never directed animation, even though he loves the medium so much that he signed on a few years ago to be an executive producer of the Netflix anthology animation series “Love, Death + Robots,” which returns for its third season on Friday.

“Love, Death + Robots” sprung from the ashes of a project Fincher had been developing with the “Deadpool” director Tim Miller since the late 2000s: a revival of “Heavy Metal,” the animated movie series inspired by the adults-only science-fiction and fantasy comics magazine. The first season of “Love, Death + Robots” debuted in 2019, featuring 18 episodes (ranging in length from 6 to 17 minutes) that adapted short stories by genre favorites like Peter F. Hamilton, John Scalzi and Joe Lansdale. An eight-episode second season followed in 2021.

Despite his involvement, Fincher never made a short of his own until Season 3, when he and the screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (who wrote Fincher’s crime thriller “Seven”) tackled a tale by the British science-fiction author Neal Asher called “Bad Travelling.” Set on the high seas on a distant planet, the story follows a merchant ship as it is tormented by a giant, intelligent crab that manipulates the crew members and then eliminates them one by one. Fincher described the short as “like a David Lean movie crossed with ‘Ten Little Indians.’”

Read the full interview

David Fincher’s Impossible Eye

David Fincher by Jack Davison

With ‘Mank,’ America’s most famously exacting director tackles the movie he’s been waiting his entire career to make.

Jonah Weiner
November 19, 2020
The New York Times

Six years ago, after I contacted David Fincher and told him I wanted to write an article about how he makes movies, he invited me to his office to present my case in person and, while I was there, watch him get some work done. On an April afternoon, I arrived at the Hollywood Art Deco building that has long served as Fincher’s base of operations, where he was about to look at footage from his 10th feature film, “Gone Girl,” then in postproduction. We headed upstairs and found the editor Kirk Baxter assembling a scene. Fincher watched it once through, then asked Baxter to replay a five-second stretch. It was a seemingly simple tracking shot, the camera traveling alongside Ben Affleck as he entered a living room in violent disarray: overturned ottoman, shattered glass. The camera moved at the same speed as Affleck, gliding with unvarying smoothness, which is exactly how Fincher likes his shots to behave. Except that three seconds in, something was off. “There’s a bump,” he said.

Jack Fincher photographed by David Fincher in 1976, when he was 14.
“That’s why it’s out of focus”.

No living director surpasses Fincher’s reputation for exactitude. Any account of his methods invariably mentions how many takes he likes to shoot, which can annoy him, not because this is inaccurate but because it abets a vision of him as a dictatorially fussy artiste. Fincher, who is 58, argues that this caricature misses the point: If you want to build worlds as engrossing as those he seeks to construct, then you need actors to push their performances into zones of fecund uncertainty, to shed all traces of what he calls “presentation.” And then you need them to give you options, all while hitting the exact same marks (which goes for the camera operators too) to ensure there will be no continuity errors when you cut the scene together. Getting all these stars to align before, say, Take No. 9 is possible but unlikely. “I get, He’s a perfectionist,” Fincher volunteered. “No. There’s just a difference between mediocre and acceptable.”

Read the full profile

The Hero’s Journey: Se7en

Jeff Garvin & Dan Zarzana
June 25, 2019
The Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey is a monthly podcast which examines classic and contemporary books and films through the lens of The Hero’s Journey. Pioneered by renowned mythologist and teacher Joseph Campbell, and refined for the context of modern storytelling by Disney veteran Christopher Vogler, The Hero’s Journey is a series of motifs and archetypes that pervade myths, folklore, and stories across all cultures and eras. Your hosts, author Jeff Garvin and book blogger Dan Zarzana, will discuss a new book or film each month. And probably, there will be some drinking.

Lose your heads with Dan and Jeff as they open the box on David Fincher’s serial killer masterpiece, Se7en.

Listen to the podcast

In Conversation with Andrew Kevin Walker

Andrew Kevin Walker (Brad Elterman)

On Story: 610 Andrew Kevin Walker – Se7en

Austin Film Festival (YouTube, vimeo)
June 18, 2016

Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker dissects his bleak thriller masterpiece, Se7en and working with director David Fincher to create the cult classic film.

Andrew Kevin Walker Interview

Movies and Stuff (YouTube)
Published on 22 Oct 2015

Dan and Abe interview the writer of Se7en Andrew Kevin Walker. Andrew touches on the history of Se7en, meeting Fincher, and his Silver Surfer script.

Episode 117: Ben from Fright-Rags, and Andrew Kevin Walker!

Shock Waves
October 12, 2018

Join your hosts Ryan Turek and Rob Galluzzo as they welcome to the show Ben Scrivens, the owner/creator of horror T-shirt company Fright-Rags! Reviewed! TALES FROM THE HOOD 2, AMERICAN HORROR STORY: APOCALYPSE. The gang is also joined by special guest Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter of David Fincher‘s SE7EN, SLEEPY HOLLOW, BRAINSCAN, 8MM, THE WOLFMAN, and much, much more. We get candid about the screenwriting process, the projects that never came to be, his working relationship with Fincher, and how he wrote SE7EN while working at Tower Records! All this and more!

Listen to the podcast

Andrew Kevin Walker .com

The Thrilling Parallels Between Detective Somerset and John Doe in ‘Se7en’

Emily Kubincanek
August 24, 2018
Film School Rejects

How can the good guy and bad guy be so similar?

At the core of any story is the relationship between protagonist and antagonist, especially in a story where the protagonist must understand his enemy in order to find him. The best battles between good and evil are convoluted with characteristics that could be categorized as either, or neither. When hero and villain are more alike than either would want to admit, that makes for a dynamite struggle between them. There are so many books out there that explain how to achieve that element in storytelling, but few movies ever do it as well as David Fincher’s serial killer masterpiece Se7en (1995).

Honestly, we’ve learned to expect nothing less than greatness with a Fincher + serial killer collaboration, and Se7en was his first. This almost neo-noir thriller follows the investigation of a serial killer using the seven deadly sins to justify brutal killings all over an unnamed city. Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is an aging homicide detective on his way out of the department when he’s assigned the worst last case. He’s paired with his replacement, an idealistic and determined young detective named Mills (Brad Pitt). They’re forced to work through their differences to solve the case, which is more horrifying and unpredictable than either could imagine.

There are viable arguments for who is the true protagonist in this movie, Somerset or Mills. For the sake of reading the rest of this article, just humor me if you disagree that Somerset is the protagonist in this story. He begins and ends this movie, most of the struggles are his own, and he’s in 90 percent of the scenes. While Mills has a major relationship with the killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) as well, what convinces me that he is not the protagonist is the connection and similarities between Somerset and Doe.

Read the full article

In conversation with… Lee Child on David Fincher’s Se7en

A video of Lee Child’s intro to last year’s BFI screening of “SE7EN“. I was there that night for the specially imported, ‘privately owned’ (QT?), original CCE 35mm print. I would have preferred a 4K DCP…

Joe Frady

November 30, 2017
BFI (YouTube)

Thriller author Lee Child talks to the BFI‘s Stuart Brown about David Fincher’s dark crime thriller, which follows a detective duo who find themselves pursuing a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins to theme his murders. With a great ensemble cast and Darius Khondji’s camerawork helping to bring out the bleak, urban landscape, Se7en was a worldwide success.