Tag: Interview

‘Mank’ VFX: How David Fincher Directed the Scene-Stealing Stars of the Hearst Castle Zoo

Fincher provided meticulous notes to Industrial Light & Magic on how the monkeys, giraffes, and elephants should look and perform.

Bill Desowitz
February 3, 2021
IndieWire

While the “Mank” visual effects team meticulously recreated ’30s-era LA in black-and-white (utilizing the matte paintings of Artemple, Territory’s LED rear screen projection, and Savage’s sky replacement with the Unreal engine), David Fincher took a special interest in directing the photo-real CG animals from Industrial Light & Magic that inhabit the Hearst Castle private zoo.

In a brief but memorable series of exchanges with the animals during their chatty moonlight stroll, Mank (Gary Oldman) and Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), are definitely upstaged by the scene-stealing Capuchin monkeys, elephants, and giraffes. “David wanted specific performances from all the animals,” said ILM VFX supervisor Pablo Helman (“The Irishman”). “He wanted the [four] monkeys to be agitated, the giraffes to spring in a certain way, and the elephants to have a response.”

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The Audio Design Hacks That Made Mank Sound Like Citizen Kane

Ren Klyce had to experiment with a lot of new ideas to make David Fincher’s movie sound old.

Angela Watercutter
February 2, 2021
Wired

During the COVID-19 pandemic, very few cinephiles have seen the inside of a theater, let alone a grand old one like the Castro Theater in San Francisco or the Paramount in Austin, Texas. Yet those who have recently watched Mank, David Fincher’s biopic about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, might’ve noticed—or, more specifically, heard—something that felt old, something that sounded like it was coming from a 1930s theater, even if they were streaming the movie on Netflix. It’s eerie—and completely intentional.

With Mank, Fincher wanted a movie that not only looked but also sounded like the films produced in Hollywood during Mankiewicz’s era in the 1930s and ’40s. To do that, he shot the film in black and white (of course), and also enlisted the help of sound designer Ren Klyce, who came up with a method to create an aural “patina” that made all the dialog, all the ambient noises, and the score sound as though they were created using the methods of Golden Age pictures. “We came up with the technique by analyzing the sound spectrum of old-fashioned movies,” Klyce says, “and of course Citizen Kane was one that we modeled, and we kind of realized that that film sounded the way it did because of the limitations of the technology.”

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Gigi Williams On Fighting Her Inner Makeup Minimalist for ‘Mank’

Photo by Nikolai Loveikis

She prefers a lighter touch in makeup, but the black and white style of David Fincher’s Mank demanded much, much more.

Clarence Moye
February 2, 2021
Awards Daily

By now, the crafts behind Mank are approaching legendary status. Each department needed to retrain their eye, rethink their typical approaches, to create the gorgeous designs for David Fincher’s black and white period film. Makeup department head Gigi Williams was certainly no exception.

Williams, who last worked with Fincher on Gone Girl, calls herself a subtle makeup artist. Her designs typically eschew loud, broad strokes in favor of a more subtle approach.

But a subtle approach would not work with the film’s black and white palate.

“For me, I had a lot of dark gel in men’s eyebrows. I used black mascara on every single man, and I piled it on because that’s how they looked in their photographs for the period. Even though they weren’t wearing mascara, but was the only way I could recreate that look,” Williams shared. “I found myself really having to push myself to a place that I wasn’t comfortable with which was a lot of makeup, oddly enough.”

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Homage to the Golden Age

Mank wears its luminous black & white cinematography like a costume, blending in with the themes, but never distracting from the story

Chelsea Fearnley
February, 2021
Definition Magazine

There was never any doubt that David Fincher’s brilliant Mank would be shot in black & white. The film follows a Hollywood screenwriter, Herman J Mankiewicz aka Mank (played by Gary Oldman), as he wrestles with the screenplay for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. It’s a sumptuous ode to the Golden Age of cinema – one that transports audiences to a place where they can understand and appreciate the homage – and yet, it is littered with modern filmmaking techniques that aren’t fooling anyone about its release date.

Fincher and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt agreed that they didn’t want to be confined to shooting on film or within the aspect ratio of 1.37:1 that would have been accurate for the period – not with Fincher’s digital prowess and proclivity for a widescreen format. And, just in case there was any confusion about the technological resourcefulness of this film, Messerschmidt is even credited as being responsible for ‘Photography in Hi-Dynamic Range’ in the title sequence.

“Filmmaking has always been a medium where we selectively employ the techniques that are available on the day,” says Messerschmidt. Nonetheless, shooting in black & white demands huge amounts of creative courage and the cinematographer was conscious about being too seduced by the opportunity.

He explains: “Before I had even read the script, I sent Fincher some images referencing the film noir genre of that era. I soon realised that, thematically, Mank is not a noir film. There are certainly elements that call for hard lighting effects, such as the flashback sequences in the writers’ room or with Shelly Metcalf [a fictional test shot director friend of Herman’s] moments before his suicide, but I tried to ground much of it in realism. I didn’t want to draw audiences away from the storyline by being too dramatic, so I chose to light through windows and illuminate interiors with practicals.”

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David Fincher’s ‘Mank’ Production Designer on Recreating Hollywood’s Golden Era

Jazz Tangcay
February 1, 2021
Variety

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.”

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Designing Eye-popping Costumes for the Black & White ‘Mank’

Costume designer Trish Summerville’s extraordinary designs bring classic Hollywood to vivid life in gorgeous black and white.

Clarence Moye
February 1, 2021
Awards Daily

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.”

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Right On Hue

Photo by Nikolai Loveikis

David Fincher’s black-and-white tribute to Old Hollywood took a radically different approach to the role of color in design.

January 29, 2021
Netflix Queue

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.

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The Hollywood Reporter: Producers Roundtable

Tatiana Siegel
January 22, 2021
The Hollywood Reporter

Andy Samberg, Dede Gardner, Charles D. King, Ashley Levinson, Marc Platt and Eric Roth on the Streaming Rise Amid COVID and Their Awards Contenders. They also discuss adapting to a year of seismic changes in the film industry: “We started rethinking everything.”

Shepherding a film from a nebulous idea to a locked print is fraught with interruptions and surprises. As such, no profession in Hollywood requires greater dexterity than that of a producer. And unlike any other time in cinematic history, 2020 was a year of overnight transformation amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, leaving producers with no choice but to adapt fast.

Two producers from this year’s roundtable — Judas and the Black Messiah‘s Charles D. King and The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Marc Platt — saw their theater-bound films take a detour to a streaming platform (HBO Max and Netflix, respectively). Although Eric Roth, who produced David Fincher‘s Mank, was always poised for a streamer release via Netflix for that film, he also experienced the great sweep to HBO Max with the upcoming tentpole Dune, which he wrote. Ashley Levinson, whose Pieces of a Woman and Malcolm & Marie are both in the awards season conversation, oversaw the writing and production of the latter during the COVID-19 lockdown. Minari‘s Dede Gardner, the only female producer with two best picture Oscar wins (for 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight), and Palm Springs‘ Andy Samberg were the lone two of the group lucky enough to see their films premiere in a packed, mask-less theater (both films made their debuts at Sundance in January 2020).

On Jan. 8, at The Hollywood Reporter‘s invitation, Gardner, King, Levinson, Platt, Roth and Samberg converged via Zoom to discuss the great cinematic reset, this year’s awards season controversies and what they’d fix about Hollywood.

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Mank, The Unmaking

January 28, 2021
Netflix

manktheunmaking.com [Old Domain]

mank.aristidebenoist.com

Text by:

Nev Pierce

Photography by:

Erik Messerschmidt
Miles Crist
Gisele Schmidt-Oldman
Gary Oldman
Ceán Chaffin
Nikolai Loveikis

Design and development by:

Watson Design Group, Inc.
Aristide Benoist

Art Of The Cut Podcast: “Mank” Editor Kirk Baxter, ACE

Steve Hullfish (Twitter)
January 27, 2021
Art Of The Cut Podcast (ProVideo Coalition)

The Art of the Cut podcast brings the fantastic conversations that Steve Hullfish has with world renowned editors into your car, living room, editing suite and beyond. In each episode, Steve talks with editors ranging from emerging stars to Oscar and Emmy winners. Hear from the top editors of today about their careers, editing workflows and about their work on some of the biggest films and TV shows of the year.

On this episode of the Art of the Cut Podcast, Steve talks with multi-award winning editor Kirk Baxter, ACE about editing the Netflix film “Mank.” You likely know Kirk from his Oscar winning work on “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Social Network” as well as his Oscar nominated work on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” In addition to his feature film work, Kirk was nominated for Prime Time Emmy’s for “House of Cards” and “Big Love.” All of this just scratches the surface of Kirks filmography, check out his IMDb page for a full breakdown!

This episode of the Art of the Cut Podcast is brought to you by Filmtools.com, Hollywood’s trusted one-stop shop for all things production and post.

Want to read/ listen to more interviews from Steve Hullfish? Check out The Art of the Cut Archive for more than 200 interviews with some of the top film and TV editors of today!

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Read the transcription of this interview:

ART OF THE CUT with Kirk Baxter, ACE on editing Fincher’s “Mank”

Steve Hullfish
February 2, 2021
ProVideo Coalition