Rian Johnson
November 15, 2023
Netflix: Behind the Streams
Director David Fincher and actor Michael Fassbender discuss making The Killer with moderator Rian Johnson at The Academy Museum in Los Angeles.
Watch The Killer on Netflix
Tag: Direction of actors
In Conversation: David Fincher and The Crew of “The Killer” in New York
October 27, 2023
Netflix: Behind the Streams
David Fincher discusses the making of The Killer with Writer Andrew Kevin Walker, Editor Kirk Baxter, and Sound Designer Ren Klyce, after the “Tastemaker” screening for The Academy at the Whitby Hotel in New York.
Watch The Killer on Netflix
Holt McCallany Talks to David Fincher about “The Iron Claw” and the Role of a Lifetime
By David Fincher
December 29, 2023
Interview
After casting Holt McCallany in Alien 3 and later in Fight Club in the types of tough-guy roles that have largely defined his four-decade career, David Fincher finally let the 60-year-old actor showcase his softer side as FBI agent Bill Tench in Netflix’s psychological thriller Mindhunter. It was that performance, in which McCallany was able to balance steely professionalism and quiet melancholy, that earned him a meeting with director Sean Durkin, who was looking for the right person to play the patriarch of the Von Erich clan in The Iron Claw, his biopic of the legendary Texas wrestling dynasty. As Fritz Von Erich, a loving but severe father who pushed his four sons (played by Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, and Stanley Simons) beyond their limits—often with tragic results—McCallany is earning the best reviews of his career, and even, to his own shock, some Oscar buzz. As he told Fincher over Zoom a couple of weeks ago, he’s still letting it all sink in.
DAVID FINCHER: Hey Holtster! How have you been?
HOLT MCCALLANY: I’ve been great David, because there were a couple of articles, one in Variety, one in Vulture, that picked me as somebody who could get a possible Academy Award nomination for Supporting Actor, even though it’s going to be a very tough year.
Holt McCallany as Fritz Von Erich. By Devin Yalkin
Clayton Davis
December 14, 2023
Variety
Also on this episode, “The Iron Claw” actor Holt McCallany talks about playing the legendary wrestler Fritz Von Ehrich in Sean Durkin’s powerful new drama. He discusses coming to peace with many of his scenes that were cut from the film, and what we can expect from his upcoming directorial effort “The Star Maker” after getting script notes from David Fincher.
A quintessential “that guy” performer in the eyes of most audience members, this veteran character actor boasts over 80 credits in a three-decade career, including turns in “Nightmare Alley” and Netflix’s “Mindhunter.” As the hardened patriarch of a family of pro wrestlers in A24’s sports drama, McCallany exudes an intense and thorny power, expertly revealing the dangers of a particular form of pressurized ambition. It’s a performance that’s reminiscent of J.K. Simmons Oscar-winning turn as the abusive music teacher in “Whiplash.”
How Kerry O’Malley Delivered an Unforgettable Turn as a Secretary with Secrets in David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’
Matt Donnelly
December 14, 2023
Variety
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for David Fincher’s “The Killer,” now streaming on Netflix.
The next few months will be stacked with conversations about the year’s best film performances, but we’d be remiss to let 2023 go dark without mentioning one of its most exciting turns: Kerry O’Malley in David Fincher’s “The Killer.”
A veteran working actress who has appeared on “1923,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and in features like the “Annabelle” franchise, O’Malley more than held her own alongside Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton in the unexpectedly funny tale of a contract killer gone haywire.
O’Malley stars as Dolores, an average-seeming New Orleans woman who serves as dutiful assistant to a lawyer (Charles Parnell), who also happens to dole out high-paid hit orders on the rich and powerful. Fassbender, a protégé of Parnell’s, has been betrayed and seeks revenge — but must first tangle with Dolores, who confuses his own sense of vigilante justice with her pragmatism and air of innocence.
O’Malley’s sequence in the film makes for some of the most riveting character work we’ve seen from Fincher as of late. Dolores is a woman fully aware of how she earns her living, yet appeals to a broader sense of empathy in the viewer (and her own potential murderer). In a chat with Variety, O’Malley discusses auditioning virtually with Fincher, working with Fassbender and the “banality of evil.”
Actors on Actors: Michael Fassbender & Carey Mulligan
December 10, 2023
Variety (YouTube)
In their Actors on Actors conversation ‘Shame’ costars Carey Mulligan (‘Maestro‘) and Michael Fassbender (‘The Killer‘) reminisce on working with Steve McQueen and talk about the directors they worked with on their current projects, David Fincher and Bradley Cooper.
Variety Actors on Actors presented by AIR from Amazon Studios.
From ‘Shame’ to Netflix Films: Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan on Rejection and Being So in Character You Act Without Thinking
Kate Aurthur
Photographs by Alexi Lubomirski
December 10, 2023
Variety
In “Maestro” and “The Killer,” the characters played by Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender exist in different worlds. Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, an up-and-coming actress who becomes conductor Leonard Bernstein’s wife and soul mate, breathes rarefied air among East Coast artists from the 1950s through the ’70s. Fassbender’s tightly coiled, mostly silent assassin, meanwhile, travels the world seeking vengeance, while keeping his focus by doing push-ups on his fingertips.
Twelve years ago, though, Fassbender and Mulligan inhabited the same toxic universe, as dysfunctional siblings in 2011’s “Shame.” The film was writer-director Steve McQueen’s bleak, sexually explicit examination of sex addiction through the eyes of Fassbender’s character, Brandon, a New York City executive brought low by his self-destructive desires. Mulligan’s Sissy, a lounge singer, was sorrowful and also boundary-less.
Happy Sad Confused: Michael Fassbender talks “The Killer” & “Next Goal Wins”
Josh Horowitz
November 30, 2023
Happy Sad Confused
It’s been 4 years since Michael Fassbender was on the big screen but he’s making up for lost time with 2 new movies, Next Goal Wins and The Killer. Josh and Michael catch up on it all including his passion for race car driving and quoting movies.
Listen to the podcast:
To get early access to all of Josh’s interviews, go to 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.
Killer Instincts
David Fincher aims to unsettle with Michael Fassbender as a ruthless assassin in gripping thriller The Killer.
By Nev Pierce
Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino
November 1, 2023
Netflix Queue
The Killer is about an exacting professional whose meticulous methods and wry worldview are disrupted by unruly reality. This may be a clue as to why David Fincher wanted to make it. The Fight Club filmmaker is well-known for his tenacious approach to directing — always pushing for more. And in Michael Fassbender he has a leading man who is equally driven.
The Oscar-nominated star of 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs left screens for a few years to take up professional racing behind the wheel of a Porsche in the European Le Mans Series. This blend of danger and precision seems apt for playing the title character in The Killer, an unnamed assassin who aims to execute things — and people — perfectly.
We’ll get to how, or if, one can define “perfection” in cinema, but to an on-set observer, it might seem Fincher will settle for nothing less. While he would contest this, he knows his definitions can differ from others’. “My idea of professionalism is you work 24-7 to make good on your promises,” he says, before continuing with a self-aware smile. “Not a lot of people feel that way. Some people are like: ‘You do the best you can in 40 hours a week and let the chips fall where they may.’”
Venice Film Festival: “The Killer” World Premiere
September 3, 2023
Venice Film Festival (YouTube)
Press conference featuring Director of Photography Erik Messerschmidt ASC, Sound Designer Ren Klyce, Director David Fincher, and Editor Kirk Baxter ACE.
Red Carpet featuring Producer Peter Mavromates, Director of Photography Erik Messerschmidt ASC, Writer of the original “The Killer” (“Le tueur”) comic Alexis “Matz” Nolent, Editor Kirk Baxter ACE, Sound Designer Ren Klyce, Director David Fincher. The original stream has the ambient sound turned down to a minimum because it is too busy and noisy, and only barely intelligible in the close-ups.
Because We Love Making Movies: Actress and director Monika Gossmann
Eren Celeboglu (IMDb, Twitter, Instagram)
July 3, 2023
Because We Love Making Movies (Instagram, Facebook)
Because We Love Making Movies is an ongoing conversation with filmmakers who work behind the scenes to make the movies we love. These are the invisible warriors we don’t think of: Production & Costume Designers, Cinematographers, Editors, Producers, and the whole family of artists who make movies with their hands and hearts.
Today, I speak with Monika Gossmann (Instagram), an incredible actor, director, and acting teacher, who I first became of aware of after seeing her wonderful performance in David Fincher’s Mank. We discuss her collaboration with Fincher, Gary Oldman‘s inspiring professionalism and generosity, as well as the crucial role of Producer Ceán Chaffin in the creation of a nurturing working environment. We talk about how actors are storytellers and filmmakers, how she discovered her calling as an artist, and how she feeds her soul as an artist.
Listen to the podcast:
The Fincher Analyst 