Tag: Eric Weidt

David Fincher and Erik Messerschmidt, ASC Target V-Raptor to Shoot “The Killer”

April 10, 2024
RED Digital Cinema

In David Fincher’s Netflix darkly comic thriller The Killer, Michael Fassbender is the nameless assassin who goes on an international hunt for revenge while insisting to himself that it isn’t personal. 

The film marks the second Fincher-directed feature shot by Erik Messerschmidt ASC, following the Citizen Kane drama Mank, for which he won the 2020 Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

It is also the latest in a long line of Fincher movies since The Social Network to be shot on RED.

“There was not a conversation about using another camera system – there never is with David,” Messerschmidt says. “RED as a partner have been enormously collaborative with us in terms of helping us develop new ideas and solve problems. RED is absolutely creative partners to David’s process and certainly to me.”

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Not a Long Tail, Not by a Long Shot, for “The Killer”

Trevor Hogg
February 20, 2024
VFX Voice (VES)

Producer and long-time David Fincher collaborator Peter Mavromates extend their partnership in The Killer where an assassin seeks revenge after a botched assignment. The Netflix feature consists of 900 digitally-augmented shots that range from shortening the tail of a dog to CG airplanes, tasked to a vendor list that includes Ollin VFX, Artemple-Hollywood, Savage VFX, and Wylie Co. as well as an in-house team. “Visual Effects Compositor Christopher Doulgeris and I will go into the color bay with [Colorist] Eric Weidt and talk about some issue that we had,” Mavromates explains. “Even sometimes if it’s an outside vendor, we’ll focus to help problem-solve. It’s this wonderful and fluid atmosphere, and it works for David Fincher because he’s always got ideas flowing. He doesn’t want to be on a clock at a facility where you’ve got from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. and then it’s overtime. There’s none of that. David will walk the halls and stop in on people to check on stuff.”

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Killer Instinct

With six unique locations, grading The Killer was never going to be simple. Colourist Eric Weidt shares how he captured David Fincher’s meticulous hitman.

Katie Kasperson
January 2024
Definition

The latest film from David Fincher, The Killer, sees Michael Fassbender play the titular assassin – a Smiths-loving cynic who embarks on an international chase after a high-profile job goes awry. The story takes our anti-hero from hazy Paris to humid Florida to wintry New York, with each location taking on its own challenge – both for the Killer and the film’s colourist Eric Weidt.

GOING INTERNATIONAL

Based on Alexis Matz Nolent’s graphic novel series and inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, The Killer combines a fast-paced plot with moody yet bold colours. “I think Fincher is a big comic book fan,” begins Weidt, “especially in the art of framing to impart the beats of a story. Working in film, he brings that to movement as well – he’s seeking a visual rhythm that makes you forget it is highly constructed.

“David likes to push and pull colours, but always strikes an unconscious balance,” he continues. Weidt began working on The Killer while it was still at the pre-production stage, developing lookup tables alongside cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt ASC, who had previously worked with Fincher on Mank, for which he won an Academy Award.

Read the profile and the full January 2024 issue of Definition magazine

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The Professionals: “The Killer” and “Ferrari”

Erik Messerschmidt, ASC shoots two stories about men whose business and private lives spin out of control.

Patricia Thomson
January 2024
American Cinematographer

A pair of films shot by Erik Messerschmidt, ASC premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last August, and both were collaborations with leading directors: David Fincher’s The Killer and Michael Mann’s Ferrari. Messerschmidt recently spoke with AC from Spain about his work on each production.

The Killer | A Devil of a Job

Fincher and Messerschmidt didn’t discuss the look of The Killer as much as its tempo and structure.

Adapted from a graphic-novel series, the film follows a methodical, nameless assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) whose life spirals out of control after a job goes horribly wrong in Paris. He tries to restore a sense of order by punishing those responsible.

Messerschmidt won an Academy Award for Fincher’s Mank (AC Feb.’21), and his collaborations with the director span the Netflix series Mindhunter and the feature Gone Girl — with Messerschmidt serving as gaffer for Jeff Cronenweth, ASC (AC Nov. ’14) on the latter.

“David is fastidious,” he says. “He is very prepared, but very collaborative and considerate of what it is everyone’s bringing to the project. He shares his goals for the film with you, and he shares the techniques that he wants to use in a really elegant way. So, you begin to understand quite quickly what he’s looking to achieve on a given shot, a given scene or even on a given film.

“On this film, David was particularly interested in exploring The Killer’s state of mind through the camera’s perspective,” recalls Messerschmidt. “The Killer in his natural state is very much in control of his environment — nothing surprises him, and we wanted the audience to immediately connect to his confidence.”

Read the full double feature in the January Issue of American Cinematographer

Behind the Scenes of Netflix’s ‘The Killer’ with Adobe Premiere Pro

November 27, 2023
Adobe

See how award-winning editor Kirk Baxter and his team, First Assistant Editor Ben Insler, and Colorist Eric Weidt, used Adobe Premiere Pro to break the rules of traditional editing in The Killer, a neo-noir thriller directed by David Fincher.

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Execution Is Everything

The film reflects the muted yellow and green colour palette of its graphic novel inspiration.

Oscar-winning DP Erik Messerschmidt ASC reteams with David Fincher for a live-action comic book adaptation that required a meticulous approach to its cinematography.

James Mottram
November 2023
British Cinematographer

When Erik Messerschmidt ASC got the call from David Fincher to work on his new film The Killer, it was an offer that arrived almost as stealthily as its lethal protagonist. “He only ever [asks] once he knows he’s going to make the film,” says the American-born cinematographer, who previously collaborated with Fincher across two seasons of the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017-2019) and the acclaimed Hollywood-set period tale Mank (2020), which won Messerschmidt an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The Killer, an adaptation of the French graphic novel, written by Alexis “Matz” Nolent, offered a whole different set of challenges, however.

This tense, taut thriller follows a nameless assassin, played by Michael Fassbender, who is fighting for his life after a job he undertakes in Paris goes disastrously wrong. “When I first read it, I was so excited about how little dialogue is in the film. It’s all voiceover,” explains Messerschmidt. “Normally, when you shoot a scene in a narrative film, you’re shooting actors predominantly talking to each other. And this film… on the set it was quite a quiet place. Which is really, really interesting. And it changes the dynamic enormously.”

To borrow the film’s cunning tagline, “Execution is everything”, and making The Killer became a meticulous experience for Messerschmidt and his team. Choreographing the camera to reflect the perspective of Fassbender’s killer, as he watches from the shadows, required absolute perfection. “It became very much about precision,” he says. “It’s an enormous amount of pressure on the camera operator [Brian S. Osmond] on this film.” Every step of the background artists was accounted for, like an elaborate dance. “So, it’s all sort of in concert…[that] is the intention most of the time.”

If you are a subscriber, read the full profile in issue 120 of British Cinematographer

Or you can read it on the website

Bringing life to ‘The Killer’

October 30, 2023
FilmLight / British Cinematographer

The Killer is David Fincher’s latest action/thriller movie based on the French graphic novel series of the same name, by Alexis “Matz” Nolent. Starring Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton, the film follows an assassin who gets embroiled in an international manhunt after a hit goes wrong.

The movie, which made its premiere at the 80th annual Venice Film Festival and will be available on Netflix from 10 November, saw another successful collaboration between cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt ASC, director David Fincher and colourist Eric Weidt. Weidt has been working with David Fincher since 2014 and the trio previously joined forces on Mank (2020) and the Mindhunter series (2017-2019).

A US and French citizen, Weidt is a renowned freelance colourist who spent 15 years in Paris working with fashion photographers and filmmakers (Vogue, Bazaar, Pop).

“I began with Fincher doing beauty work in Nuke in 2014,” explains Weidt. “I showed him a reel of colour work I’d done working in fashion in Paris, and I think he figured that squared perfectly with the kind of precision he wanted to get into by grading his own projects in-house.”

Read the full case study on FilmLight and British Cinematographer

Dead Reckoning

Oscar-winner Erik Messerschmidt, ASC, draws a bead on the mind of an assassin in David Fincher’s The Killer.

Kevin Martin
October 26, 2023
ICG Magazine

Consider this promotional material for the 1969 assassin-at-a-crossroads film Hard Contract: “Everything they do is 97 percent control and 3 percent emotion.” Compare that with the mantra from the nameless lead character in The Killer, director David Fincher’s newest feature for Netflix, shot by Oscar-winner Erik Messerschmidt, ASC. “Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”

It sounds pretty much the same, right? Both help illustrate the heart of a broad subgenre of films that includes Anton Corbijn’s The American (shot by Martin Ruhe, ASC), the aforementioned Hard Contract (shot by Jack Hildyard, BSC), The Eiger Sanction (shot by Frank Stanley, ASC, former IATSE Local 659 president) and Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal (shot by Jean Tournier.) The common locus revolves around the assassin as a high-functioning sociopath, able to operate effortlessly in various circles without being found out. Given the inherent complexity of such a character type, it is easy to see how Fincher was able to attract Michael Fassbender to take the lead role.

Derived from a long-running graphic novel series by author Alexis “Matz” Nolent, The Killer had been in gestation by Fincher for close to fifteen years. Depicting a murder-for-hire gone awry and its aftermath, the film is viewed through the eye of a seasoned assassin (Fassbender), who now finds himself a target and must seek out not only his erstwhile employers but also those they have deployed against him.

Messerschmidt’s history with Fincher began as Chief Lighting Technician on Gone Girl [ICG Magazine October 2014] before going on to shoot his Mindhunter series and then, in 2021, winning the Oscar for Mank. Messerschmidt had also shot episodes of Fargo, Legion and Raised by Wolves, and, more recently, the WWII aerial epic Devotion [ICG Magazine December 2022]. “What I initially found interesting about the script was how it is almost wholly absent of dialog,” Messerschmidt describes. “There is a significant amount of voice-over, a lot of which was present in the first script, but very little is spoken on screen – so in a sense, it’s like a silent film. This meant the way we told the story with the camera was that much more important. It’s an adaptation of a graphic novel, which are told in a similar way. I was fascinated by that kind of challenge.”

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Color Timer Podcast: 15 Minutes with Colorist Eric Weidt

Desert island movies, David Fincher, and the poetry of color.

Vincent Taylor, Senior Colorist
May 19, 2023
MixingLight.com

Eric Weidt has worked as a Colorist on impressive projects such as Mindhunter and Mank. He spent 15 years in Paris working with fashion photographers and filmmakers (developing look-up tables) and has a BA in theatre arts.

Eric has worked exclusively with director David Fincher since 2015. We delve into his relationship with the famous director and explore his process for his incredible Black & White work in the motion picture ‘Mank’. We even talk about the one film he would watch if he only had one choice (stuck on a desert island with electricity).

Eric Weidt: “I’m remastering some of his old classics right now. Like, I remastered The Social Network [in 4K], I’m in the process of remastering Panic Room, and I’m also just starting on Seven“.

Listen to the podcast:

MixingLight.com
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Amazon Music

Producer: Kayla Uribe
Executive Producer: MixingLight.com
Supporting Sponsor: FilmLight

FilmLight Colour Awards: Eric Weidt with ‘Mank’

An interview with the winner for best colour grading in Theatrical Feature 2021

February 3, 2022
FilmLight

Presenting the winners of the FilmLight Colour Awards 2021.

Winner, Theatrical Feature: Eric Weidt, for ‘Mank’

The award for the grading of a theatrical feature went to Eric Weidt, who worked with DoP Erik Messerschmidt on ‘Mank’. Shot on an 8K RED camera, the movie is striking for its 30s Hollywood look combined with the crystal-sharp resolution.

Weidt also talks about his projects with Fincher for 2022.

Watch the video on YouTube