Tag: Andrew Kevin Walker

David Fincher at The Cinémathèque Française: “The Killer” Screening and Q&A

Frédéric Bonnaud, Director of the Cinémathèque française
Anaïs Duchet, Interpreter
October 13, 2023
Cinémathèque Française

The Cinémathèque Française (French Cinematheque) hosted a David Fincher Retrospective from October 13 to 22, 2023, in Paris (France).

Supported by Netflix, Patron of the Cinémathèque, it opened with a preview screening of The Killer followed by a Q&A with Director David Fincher, and Director of Photography Erik Messerschmidt, ASC.

The next day, a screening of Zodiac was followed by a discussion with the director about the film and his career.

‘The Killer’ Writer Andrew Kevin Walker on Fincher, That Tilda Scene and Minimizing Dialogue

The “Seven” screenwriter also details the process of getting Michael Fassbender’s character down to 13 lines.

Adam Chitwood
December 31, 2023
The Wrap

Andrew Kevin Walker and David Fincher have one of the most creatively fulfilling relationships in Hollywood, and their latest collaboration “The Killer” is certainly one of their best.

Walker burst onto the scene as the screenwriter behind 1995’s twisted serial killer thriller “Seven,” whose shocking ending immediately caught the eye of Fincher and became the director’s second feature film. Walker would go on to perform uncredited work on scripts for “The Game” and “Fight Club” and wrote a few other Fincher projects that never came to pass (including a “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” reboot for Disney), and recently co-wrote and produced the 2022 thriller “Windfall” for Netflix and filmmaker Charlie McDowell. But “The Killer” brings Walker and Fincher back into familiar territory with a fresh twist.

When Fincher first pitched “The Killer” – which follows an assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) following a botched hit – to Walker back in 2008, they talked about minimizing the character’s dialogue. When the project gained new life at Netflix a decade later, Walker was tasked with a very specific job: try and write the film with only 10 lines of dialogue for Fassbender’s character.

Walker nearly succeeded, getting the total number of lines down to 13, but after the first assembly cut of the film was put together, Fincher and Walker agreed the film needed more voiceover. Much more.

Walker unpacked this process and his relationship with Fincher in an interview with The Wrap, also touching on how he went about crafting the Tilda Swinton scene in the film and the somewhat ambiguous ending.

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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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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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“The Killer” sound designer, editor, mixer Ren Klyce: “I’m finally figuring out how to do my job”

Ray Richmond
December 5, 2023
Gold Derby

You wouldn’t think that Ren Klyce would have a whole lot more to learn about his job as a sound professional on movies. He’s been at it for nearly 30 years, going back to “Se7en” in 1995 and presiding as director David Fincher‘s designated sound guy ever since. He’s earned nine Academy Award nominations for his sonic work, including on Fincher’s “Fight Club,” “The Social Network,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Mank.” And yet while discussing his latest collaboration with his favorite director, Netflix‘s “The Killer,” he asserts, “I learned a lot on this film. I think I learn every time. I always think, ‘Oh, I’m finally figuring out how to do my job.’ You get a new project and you realize that you’re learning a whole new set of skills. I like the idea that there’s still sort of a beginner mentality to the approach, and I think that’s actually a healthy way to do any type of work, honestly.”

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The Screenplay for “The Killer” by Andrew Kevin Walker

Andrew Kevin Walker
December 9, 2023
andrewkevinwalker.com

How lucky am I to have been involved in this amazing project, with so many talented people?

It’s a production draft – shooting script, basically – imperfect + rough around the edges, with some incongruous prose, for example, + sluglines doing utilitarian work, but… thanks to the kind permission of Netflix, for those interested, here’s the link to the script for The Killer.

The Killer is now playing on Netflix

Follow Andrew Kevin Walker on Instagram

Here’s Every Sitcom Code Name Michael Fassbender Uses in ‘The Killer’

The titular assassin of the new David Fincher thriller travels the world under a few familiar pseudonyms.

John Dilillo
November 10, 2023
Tudum by Netflix

What’s a hit man without a code name? James Bond is 007; The Gray Man’s Court Gentry is Sierra Six; even Get Smart’s Maxwell Smart goes by Agent 86 when he’s on the clock. In David Fincher’s new assassin thriller The Killer, the titular professional has more than a few pseudonyms, and they all have a shared origin. Played by Michael Fassbender, this killer has a taste for television — every one of his aliases is borrowed from a classic sitcom. “He may have been raised on [television],” says The Killer screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (who previously teamed with Fincher on their shared breakout Se7en). “It may have been more of a parent to him than any parent.”

The running gag originated with an earlier Fincher/Walker collaboration. “I was doing a polish on Fight Club,” Walker tells Tudum. “Fincher and I realized that Edward Norton’s character had to have little name badges on, or sign up sheets for his support groups he would go to. And Fincher was like, ‘Well, let’s just use names from Planet of the Apes, like Dr. Zaius or Cornelius, etcetera.’ ”

When Walker began working on The Killer, he decided to similarly sneak casual sitcom name-drops into scenes where the main character introduces himself, as a subtle Easter egg for particularly discerning viewers. Fincher persuaded him to blow the idea up further. “I started even more obscure than they are now, with characters like Mr. Mooney,” foil to Lucille Ball on her ’60s vehicle The Lucy Show, Walker says. “It’s the genius of Fincher that he was like, ‘OK, here’s your kind of silly little hidden joke. Let’s bring it forward.’ ”

Under Fincher’s watchful eye, the production made sure to spotlight each and every alias. “When he was shooting a lot of the car interiors and doing a few tiny reshoots and inserts,” Walker says of Fincher, “he shot close-ups of plane tickets, close-ups of the driver’s license, he made sure to show every single name first and last.” You can see each of those names — as well as a handy guide to which sitcoms they spring from — below. 

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The Killer and Seven collaborators David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker dissect their lethal partnership

The director and screenwriter talk about their long-awaited reteaming for Netflix’s hitman thriller starring Michael Fassbender.

Clark Collis
November 11, 2023
Entertainment Weekly

“I never say never.”

Generally good words to live by. In the case of director David Fincher, they’re also good words to work by, at least as it pertains to entertaining the notion of making a sequel to his new film, The Killer, available now on Netflix. “It doesn’t pay to have rules with that stuff. I’m the guy who, before Zodiac, said, ‘No more serial killers.'”

The joke is typical Fincher: dry, winking, and only humorous to those who possess the proper context. The filmmaker who brought us Kevin Spacey‘s serial killer John Doe in 1995’s Seven would, of course, continue to explore similarly murderous terrain, not just with 2007’s Zodiac, but in 2011’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and on two seasons of his Netflix show Mindhunter. While The Killer is not a serial killer film, it certainly has a series of killings. The movie stars Michael Fassbender as a nameless hit man who, after a job goes wrong, sets about visiting with routinely lethal consequences a succession of folks — including two fellow assassins, one played by Tilda Swinton — who might pose a threat to his future.

The film reunites Fincher with Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker in the pair’s first credited big-screen collaboration since the Brad Pitt-starring hit and pop culture sensation. The director tasked Walker to come up with a script that kept the dialog of Fassbender’s central character to the bare minimum. Walker recalls that Fincher told him to, “try and write it so this guy has literally ten lines of dialog spoken in the entire movie. As a point of pride, I did hand in a first draft that had literally 13 lines of dialog. It was the most I could get it down to and still have it function and be semi-natural.”

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Script Apart: “The Killer” with Andrew Kevin Walker

Al Horner
November 17, 2023
Script Apart

Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight… and if you can do all that while listening to The Smiths, even better. That’s the mantra of the eponymous assassin at the heart of The Killer, directed by David Fincher and written by our guest today – the fantastic Andrew Kevin Walker.

The Killer is a movie that deconstructs the hitman movie genre like Michael Fassbender’s glassy-eyed gun-for-hire deconstructing a McDonald’s sandwich on a park bench in Paris. It opens with a blaze of images that tease the explosive action typical of these films then swerves in a different direction. The result is defiantly meditative two hours in which the violence of the movie’s revenge plot following a botched assassination is almost incidental to the character’s meticulous ways and detached observations about the world.

It’s an absolutely riveting watch but then again, what did we expect? Unlike The Killer, who misses his target early on in the film, sparking the film’s descent into chaos, Andrew and Fincher rarely miss their mark whenever they work together. The pair first teamed up on 1995’s Se7en, which began life as a spec script that Andrew wrote after moving to New York from suburban Pennsylvania. Since then, Andrew’s taken passes at Fight Club and The Game for Fincher, on top of his solo adventures in Hollywood, penning films like Sleepy Hollow and 2022’s excellent Windfall.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Andy answers our questions about the subtle commentary on materialist culture woven into the film. We get into the influence of the novelist Somerset Maugham on Andy’s work and break some of the film’s most intriguing moments, including its enigmatic ending – in which a life is spared but existential questions are left looming.

Listen to the podcast:

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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.

How David Fincher Turned ‘The Killer’ Into a Mean, Lean Punch to the Gut

Fassbender, Fincher, and Swinton on the set of ‘The Killer.’
MILES CRIST/NETFLIX

The filmmaker on working with Michael Fassbender, that Smiths soundtrack, and how his adaptation of a French comic about an assassin became a Seventies B movie.

David Fear
November 8, 2023
Rolling Stone

THE MAN IS a consummate professional. In the outside world, he could be anyone — just another ridiculous looking dude somewhere between the ages of 32 and 48, the everyguy in line behind you at an Ace Hardware store or in front of you at McDonald’s. But sitting here, in an unfinished WeWork office space, is this slender, limber apex predator in his natural habitat, and an extremely patient one. He’s perched here for days, just staring out the window at a ritzy apartment in Paris. Watching. Waiting. Whiling away the hours, doing nothing. It’s a key part of the job. “If you can’t stand the boredom,” he says, via voiceover narration, “the work is not for you.”

Should you suggest to David Fincher — world-class filmmaker, notorious perfectionist, and a gentleman who genuinely appreciates a good joke — that the line spoken by the title character of his new film The Killer is also a warning to audiences hiding in plain sight, he will laugh. The director will go into detailed explanations about why the unnamed hero (or rather, its “hero”: “Massive air quotes at work here”), played by Michael Fassbender, is not just a hit man but a very, very unreliable narrator. He’ll mention that the script, written by Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, borrows the idea of long interior monologues in lieu of nonstop action directly from the source material. And he’ll admit that they knew that any movie “probably being sold with an image of a guy with piano wire in his hand or putting someone into cold storage,” yet “starts out with 25 minutes of someone sleeping on sheetrock in an empty office, musing as to what it’s all about,” might potentially have viewers wondering what they’ve stumbled into. But Fincher will not say you’re wrong.

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