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.
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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.
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.’”
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.
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.
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“He constantly was empowering me, which I think really affected the rest of my choices thereafter,” Mara said of her collaborations with Fincher.
Christian Zilko
January 8, 2023
IndieWire
It’s been a good two years for Rooney Mara. The Oscar nominee has received strong reviews for her back-to-back appearances in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” and Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking,” but those films were preceded by a multi-year hiatus from acting. Fans of the actress have had to make peace with her sporadic work habits, given that she has become famously selective about the roles she’s willing to take.
In a new appearance on the LaunchLeft podcast, Mara explained that her selectivity is partially a result of an unpleasant on-set experience in the late 2000s that almost led her to quit acting.
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Director David Prior discusses Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, his love for “The Autopsy” short story, and The Empty Man‘s release.
Grant Hermanns
November 2, 2022
ScreenRant
Some bodies are more than meet the eye, as seen in the “The Autopsy” installment of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Based on Michael Shea‘s short story of the same name, the episode sees a coroner brought in to do the autopsies of several miners who died when one of them set off an explosion with a mysterious object, only to learn of the surprising truth behind him.
F. Murray Abraham and Luke Roberts lead the cast of “The Autopsy“, which hails from The Empty Man writer-director David Prior. Primarily set in an isolated location, the episode is a chilling game of mental chess as Abraham’s Dr. Carl Winters grapples with the revelation of why the miners died, and how he may be next.
In anticipation of its premiere, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with director David Prior to discuss Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, his installment “The Autopsy,” his and del Toro’s shared love of reading, The Empty Man‘s mishandled release, and more.
Watch Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix
Alanah Pearce, Troy Baker, Mike Bithell, and Austin Wintory
June 10, 2022
Play, Watch, Listen (Alanah Pearce)
Join Alanah Pearce (game writer), Troy Baker (voice actor), Mike Bithell (game director), and Austin Wintory (game composer) as they talk about all the games, movies, TV and ‘whatever else’ that took their interest that week, from four unique perspectives in the games industry.
Play, Watch, Listen is also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Follow it on Twitter and Instagram.
Alanah Pearce: Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, Facebook, Patreon
Troy Baker: Twitter, YouTube
Mike Bithell: Twitter, Steam
Austin Wintory: Twitter
The animators tell IndieWire what it was like collaborating with Fincher on the mo-cap character animation and giant, slimy crab.
Bill Desowitz
June 9, 2022
IndieWire
It’s easy to see why David Fincher chose “Bad Travelling” as his first foray into directing animation. He made his feature debut with the ill-fated “Alien 3,” after all, and the premise of this third-season episode of “Love, Death + Robots” is a bit like setting the plight of the Nostromo on the high seas: A giant, slimy crab devours the crew of a shark-hunting vessel, with only the cunning navigator surviving to battle the beast. (It also makes up for Fincher’s aborted take on “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” at Disney.)
Fincher also likens “Bad Travelling” to “Ten Little Indians” meets “Deadliest Catch,” with the ship’s navigator, Torrin (Troy Baker), contending with mutiny, betrayal, and a starving Thanapod crustacean that bizarrely communicates through ventriloquism.
“You don’t necessarily want to see them come to unnatural ends,” Fincher said about the crew in the production notes. “The idea was not to make them despicable, but self-serving. That’s the thing I always loved about Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto in ‘Alien’….”
Amanda Seyfried by Molly Matalon (The New York Times/Redux)
100 Most Influential People of 2022
David Fincher
May 23, 2022
TIME
When I lured Amanda Seyfried into Mank, her ability to be simultaneously knowing and warm opened that role to a (much) larger conversation than the script might have otherwise intimated. People may have thought of her as a rom-com-edienne, but she’s got a lot more going on under the hood. Including the rare ability to make one reassess one’s own imaginative shortcomings.
The Fincher Analyst 