David Fincher’s “Mank” is a visual feast. Shot in black and white, Fincher takes audiences back to the glorious days of Hollywood, as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz pens the screenplay to Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”
Production designer Donald Graham Burt is receiving awards buzz for his work on the film. Burt worked closely with costume designer Trish Summerville to translate color into black and white.
Their secret? Using iPhone filters to see how the colors worked. Burt also relied on the camera monitor a lot.
And when it came to translating wealth and recreating the big sets such as the lavish Hearst Castle home of William Randolph Hearst, Burt says, “It was about emulating instead of replicating.”
When designing specific looks for Mank’s iconic characters, Summerville had ample research material available to her. For Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), she used Davies’ book and publicity stills of the era to design her outfits. She mostly avoided mimicking historic photos directly, using them as a jumping off point instead.
Mostly.
There were two Marion Davies’ looks in the film directly pulled from historic photos: her famous circus party costume and her “going away” look as she leaves MGM.
“One of the items that I did mimic, besides the circus party costume was a picture of her in a coat with a fur collar, standing on the side of a car like she’s departing. That was an inspiration for me for the scene where she departs MGM,” Summerville revealed. “Mayer gives her the bouquet of flowers and sends her on her way. So I wanted to have this really beautiful coat where we used faux fur for the collar and had a big diamond brooch on her. There were a few areas that I did pull from her real life, and that I got inspired by.”
In the annals of Hollywood, Herman Mankiewicz will forever be remembered as the screenwriter of Orson Welles’s towering classic Citizen Kane, but his impact on the history of cinema doesn’t stop there. Mankiewicz also served as an early, uncredited writer on The Wizard of Oz. His contribution? Suggesting that once Dorothy Gale travels over the rainbow, the film transitions from black and white to glorious Technicolor. “He walked away from that [project] saying, ‘This is all I can come up with,’” laughs director David Fincher. “It might be the greatest special effect in the history of the movies.”
For Mank, Fincher’s backstage drama about the screenwriter’s life and his work on Kane, the director and his creative team journeyed from a world of color to one rendered entirely in black and white, shooting eye-catching sets and costumes with the RED 8K Helium Monochrome camera. That created an interesting artistic puzzle for Fincher and his collaborators to solve. From cinematography and production design to costumes and hair and makeup, each department needed to determine the best way to manipulate color to achieve the proper register of lights and darks onscreen.
“We had to train our senses to see through a lens of black and white,” explains Oscar-winning production designer Donald Graham Burt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). “It mandated a palette based on tone and contrast.”
Fortunately, they proved more than up to the challenge.
Now presenting MANK, for the first time in Glorious Color!
Making a film in black & white means every choice must be meticulously examined in color first. In these behind-the-scenes color shots, you can see how Fincher’s department heads created striking moments for the screen. pic.twitter.com/oNqtbzUkXo
“Mank” set decorator Jan Pascale is no stranger to black-and-white films: She received an Oscar nomination for George Clooney‘s “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005). But those two monochrome films couldn’t be more different.
“When I first met with [‘Mank’ production designer Donald Graham Burt] about it, I said, ‘I’ve done black and white. I can do this.’ And Don said, ‘No, no, no, this is different.’ The way the images were captured was quite different,’” Pascale tells Gold Derby at our Meet the BTL Experts: Film Production Design panel. “On ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ we shot on film … and we had a really limited budget on that one — $7 million the whole movie — so I couldn’t paint anything or really paint anything, so everything was shot as is. But it sort of worked.”
“Mank,” however, was shot in black and white on a RED digital camera, completely changing the way images and details came off onscreen. But Pascale got some very modern assistance to help her do color-testing. “David [Fincher] and Don had done some testing with the camera that we were going to be using. And they discovered if we used our iPhones with the noir filter and photographed everything, that’s how it would appear in our movie,” she shares.
Mank director David Fincher, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt and costume designer Trish Summerville detail the approach to shooting the acclaimed slice of Hollywood history in black and white. How does the absence of color distill the visual storytelling? How do different colors in the costume and production design read when captured in black and white? Learn about all of that and more.
“Mank” is one of 2020’s most technically dazzling films. David Fincher‘s perfectionism transported us back to the Golden Age of Hollywood to tell us the story of Academy Award winning screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman) and the film has been hailed as one of the year’s best, most recently being rewarded as one of the Top 10 films of the year by the American Film Institute (AFI). Many members from the film’s production were kind enough to give us a behind-the-scenes look into the making of the film including Academy Award-nominated sound designer Ren Klyce, Costume Designer Trish Summerville & Co-Producer/VFX Producer, Peter Mavromates.
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David Fincher’s black and white epic, Mank, revisits the storied Hollywood era of the late 1930s when Orson Welles was writing what would go down in history as one of the best films of all time, Citizen Kane. But did he write it alone or with the help of Herman Mankiewicz, a once sought after screenwriter fallen prey to twin drinking and gambling problems? In Fincher’s version of events, based on a screenplay by his father, Jack Fincher, Mank the man (Gary Oldman) may have burned through the industry’s goodwill, but he was indubitably a co-writer on the film. However, the question isn’t central to Mank the movie.
Instead, the film’s focus is a gloves-off look at the gilded lives of Depression-era honchos Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), and the effect their political meddling and pay machinations have on the vast army of writers, grips, costume designers, and makeup artists who work beneath them. For Mank costume designer Trish Summerville (Red Sparrow, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), “one of the things I really enjoyed about the film was that we got to dress every walk of life of the 30s and 40s.” Though much of the film is set in an out-of-the-way house where Mank has been set up to heal from an injury and dry out, and spends most of his time in bed in a robe, Summerville’s work spans ample plebeian daywear to Marion Davies’s (Amanda Seyfried) furs (a high-end faux fur hand-painted to mimic silver mink) and gowns and the sharply tailored suits favored by Los Angeles power brokers of the day.
“I keep making this joke that it’s Fincher-vision because it’s not just black-and-white, it’s this really specific way that he’s going to light the film,” says costume designer Trish Summerville about the unique visual style of “Mank,” directed by David Fincher. The film tells the story of “Citizen Kane” writer Herman Mankiewicz, and it’s shot to resemble films of the 1930s and 1940s. That presented Summerville with equally unique challenges and opportunities. We spoke with her as part of our “Meet the Experts” costume designers panel. Watch our interview above.
“The black-and-white was the most challenging thing: figuring out how we wanted to make that work, doing different testing on clothing and fabrics … so we could see how it would read,” Summerville explains. “Even though you think you don’t need a color palette, you really do, because if not, when you’re looking at it with your naked eye on set, it becomes very jarring.” And understanding color was crucial for achieving the right effect in the finished product “so that when it read in black-and-white on the screen and on the monitors it didn’t just all come across as flat, it had dimension to it, sheens and tones.”
It helped that the film was portraying so many well-known figures with documented looks and styles — not just Mankiewicz, but Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, Louis B. Mayer, and more. “We could find things of [Mank] at work, on sound stages, and also at home,” Summerville says. “We even at one point found these images of him at one of his kids’ bar mitzvahs, so that was great, it was a whole family photo.”
But in a film with so many male characters, it was also important “to give each one of the men their own kind of characteristics and dress them towards who those characters really were … so that not everybody read as a navy suit in a room.” That research and detail, in collaboration with Fincher’s direction, Donald Graham Burt‘s production design and Erik Messerschmidt‘s cinematography, “all of it has these special touches that make you feel you’re transported to the 1930s.”
When director David Fincher called to tell costume designer Trish Summerville that his long talked-about film “Mank” — starring Gary Oldman as “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz — had gotten the green light, she knew it was destined to be “smart, funny, poignant, beautiful; it would tick all the boxes!”
“I definitely jumped at the chance,” says Summerville, who worked with Fincher on numerous other projects, though never before on a black and white feature film. “Besides a great story, with David I knew it was going to be incredible. I love working with him, and aside from this, he’s one of my favorite humans.”
The Fincher Analyst 