Tag: Interview

Kirk Baxter on Editing David Fincher’s The Killer

Kirk Baxter and David Fincher enjoying some downtime at Miraval Studios.

Iain Blair
December 6, 2023
postPerspective

David Fincher’s The Killer is a violent thriller starring Michael Fassbender as an unnamed hitman whose carefully constructed life begins to fall apart after a botched hit. Despite his mantra to always remain detached and methodical in his work, he lets it become personal after assassins brutally attack his girlfriend, and soon he finds himself hunting those who now threaten him.

The Netflix film reunites Fincher with Kirk Baxter, the Australian editor who has worked on all of Fincher’s films since The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and who won Oscars for his work on The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I spoke with Baxter about the challenges and workflow

How did you collaborate with Fincher on this one?

I try not to weigh David down with too many background questions. I keep myself very reactionary to what is being sent, and David, I think by design, isolates me a bit that way. I’ll read the script and have an idea of what’s coming, and then I simply react to what he’s shot and see if it deviates from the script due to the physicality of capturing things.

The general plan was that the film would be a study of process. When The Killer is in control, everything’s going to be deliberate, steady, exacting and quiet. We live in Ren Klyce’s sound design, and when things deviate from The Killer’s plan, the camera starts to shake. I start to jump-cut, the music from composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross comes into the picture, and then all of our senses start to get rocked. It was an almost Zenlike stretching of time in the setup of each story then a race through each kill. That was the overarching approach to editing the film. Then there were a thousand intricate decisions that we made along the way each day.

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‘The Killer’ Costume Designer on Dressing Michael Fassbender’s Assassin Like a German Tourist

David Fincher “did not want him to look cool at all, like a typical assassin,” explains Cate Adams.

Esther Zuckerman
November 30, 2023
The Hollywood Reporter

At the opening of David Fincher’s The Killer, Michael Fassbender’s unnamed assassin describes his look as based on a German tourist he saw in London. It’s a convenient disguise for blending in on the streets of Paris because, as he explains, no one wants to interact with a German tourist. But what does that look like off the page? That task fell to costume designer Cate Adams, working with the exacting director. “David had a lot of ideas about how he wanted him to look,” she says. “He did not want him to look cool at all, like a typical assassin.” The solution? Bucket hats, Skechers and “lazy people clothing.” 

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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.

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Here’s Every Sitcom Code Name Michael Fassbender Uses in ‘The Killer’

The titular assassin of the new David Fincher thriller travels the world under a few familiar pseudonyms.

John Dilillo
November 10, 2023
Tudum by Netflix

What’s a hit man without a code name? James Bond is 007; The Gray Man’s Court Gentry is Sierra Six; even Get Smart’s Maxwell Smart goes by Agent 86 when he’s on the clock. In David Fincher’s new assassin thriller The Killer, the titular professional has more than a few pseudonyms, and they all have a shared origin. Played by Michael Fassbender, this killer has a taste for television — every one of his aliases is borrowed from a classic sitcom. “He may have been raised on [television],” says The Killer screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (who previously teamed with Fincher on their shared breakout Se7en). “It may have been more of a parent to him than any parent.”

The running gag originated with an earlier Fincher/Walker collaboration. “I was doing a polish on Fight Club,” Walker tells Tudum. “Fincher and I realized that Edward Norton’s character had to have little name badges on, or sign up sheets for his support groups he would go to. And Fincher was like, ‘Well, let’s just use names from Planet of the Apes, like Dr. Zaius or Cornelius, etcetera.’ ”

When Walker began working on The Killer, he decided to similarly sneak casual sitcom name-drops into scenes where the main character introduces himself, as a subtle Easter egg for particularly discerning viewers. Fincher persuaded him to blow the idea up further. “I started even more obscure than they are now, with characters like Mr. Mooney,” foil to Lucille Ball on her ’60s vehicle The Lucy Show, Walker says. “It’s the genius of Fincher that he was like, ‘OK, here’s your kind of silly little hidden joke. Let’s bring it forward.’ ”

Under Fincher’s watchful eye, the production made sure to spotlight each and every alias. “When he was shooting a lot of the car interiors and doing a few tiny reshoots and inserts,” Walker says of Fincher, “he shot close-ups of plane tickets, close-ups of the driver’s license, he made sure to show every single name first and last.” You can see each of those names — as well as a handy guide to which sitcoms they spring from — below. 

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The Killer and Seven collaborators David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker dissect their lethal partnership

The director and screenwriter talk about their long-awaited reteaming for Netflix’s hitman thriller starring Michael Fassbender.

Clark Collis
November 11, 2023
Entertainment Weekly

“I never say never.”

Generally good words to live by. In the case of director David Fincher, they’re also good words to work by, at least as it pertains to entertaining the notion of making a sequel to his new film, The Killer, available now on Netflix. “It doesn’t pay to have rules with that stuff. I’m the guy who, before Zodiac, said, ‘No more serial killers.'”

The joke is typical Fincher: dry, winking, and only humorous to those who possess the proper context. The filmmaker who brought us Kevin Spacey‘s serial killer John Doe in 1995’s Seven would, of course, continue to explore similarly murderous terrain, not just with 2007’s Zodiac, but in 2011’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and on two seasons of his Netflix show Mindhunter. While The Killer is not a serial killer film, it certainly has a series of killings. The movie stars Michael Fassbender as a nameless hit man who, after a job goes wrong, sets about visiting with routinely lethal consequences a succession of folks — including two fellow assassins, one played by Tilda Swinton — who might pose a threat to his future.

The film reunites Fincher with Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker in the pair’s first credited big-screen collaboration since the Brad Pitt-starring hit and pop culture sensation. The director tasked Walker to come up with a script that kept the dialog of Fassbender’s central character to the bare minimum. Walker recalls that Fincher told him to, “try and write it so this guy has literally ten lines of dialog spoken in the entire movie. As a point of pride, I did hand in a first draft that had literally 13 lines of dialog. It was the most I could get it down to and still have it function and be semi-natural.”

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Script Apart: “The Killer” with Andrew Kevin Walker

Al Horner
November 17, 2023
Script Apart

Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight… and if you can do all that while listening to The Smiths, even better. That’s the mantra of the eponymous assassin at the heart of The Killer, directed by David Fincher and written by our guest today – the fantastic Andrew Kevin Walker.

The Killer is a movie that deconstructs the hitman movie genre like Michael Fassbender’s glassy-eyed gun-for-hire deconstructing a McDonald’s sandwich on a park bench in Paris. It opens with a blaze of images that tease the explosive action typical of these films then swerves in a different direction. The result is defiantly meditative two hours in which the violence of the movie’s revenge plot following a botched assassination is almost incidental to the character’s meticulous ways and detached observations about the world.

It’s an absolutely riveting watch but then again, what did we expect? Unlike The Killer, who misses his target early on in the film, sparking the film’s descent into chaos, Andrew and Fincher rarely miss their mark whenever they work together. The pair first teamed up on 1995’s Se7en, which began life as a spec script that Andrew wrote after moving to New York from suburban Pennsylvania. Since then, Andrew’s taken passes at Fight Club and The Game for Fincher, on top of his solo adventures in Hollywood, penning films like Sleepy Hollow and 2022’s excellent Windfall.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Andy answers our questions about the subtle commentary on materialist culture woven into the film. We get into the influence of the novelist Somerset Maugham on Andy’s work and break some of the film’s most intriguing moments, including its enigmatic ending – in which a life is spared but existential questions are left looming.

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Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.

Follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft and WeScreenplay. To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

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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Art of the Cut: “The Killer” with Kirk Baxter, ACE

Kirk Baxter and David Fincher enjoying some downtime at Miraval Studios.

Steve Hullfish, ACE
November 23, 2023
Art of the Cut (Boris FX)

Today on Art of the Cut, we’re talking with Kirk Baxter, ACE, about editing David Fincher’s latest: The Killer, which is now on Netflix.

Kirk’s been on Art of the Cut before – for Gone Girl and for Mank. He was nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He won an Oscar, a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for The Social Network. He was nominated for an ACE Eddie and won an Oscar for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Was nominated for an Emmy for House of Cards. Was nominated for an ACE Eddie for Gone Girl. Was nominated for an ACE Eddie for Mindhunter. Was nominated for an ACE Eddie for Mank and won an ACE Eddie for Love, Death and Robots.

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Follow Steve Hullfish, ACE, and the “Art of the Cut” podcast on Ex-Twitter. Buy his book “Art of the Cut. Conversations with Film and TV Editors” (‎Routledge, 2017).

Read the transcription of this interview:

The Killer

Kirk Baxter, ACE, director David Fincher’s long-time editor, talks about the power of believing in the process, pacing, and voiceover changes on the action-packed thriller.

Steve Hullfish, ACE
November 23, 2023
Art of the Cut (Boris FX)

The Editing Podcast: David Fincher’s Editor Reveals The Key To Make ANY Edit Work

Jordan Orme and Hayden Hillier-Smith
November 22, 2023
The Editing Podcast

Welcome to The Editing Podcast, where storytelling meets the art of post-production. In this riveting episode, hosts Hayden Hillier-Smith and Jordan Orme sit down with none other than the master editor behind the brilliance of David Fincher‘s cinematic wonders—Kirk Baxter.

We delve deep into Kirk’s illustrious career, spanning iconic films that have left an indelible mark on the world of cinema. From “The Social Network” to “Gone Girl” to his most recent thriller, “The Killer”, Kirk Baxter’s editorial prowess has shaped some of the most memorable moments in film history and has influenced the editing landscape forever.

In this episode, we dissect the mesmerizing opening sniper scene, a sequence that hooks audiences from the first frame. Kirk takes us behind the scenes, sharing the secrets of crafting tension and suspense that keep viewers on the edge of their seats. We also explore the intricacies of “The Killer‘s” visceral fight scene, a jaw-dropping display of editing finesse that elevates the film to a new level of intensity. Kirk Baxter’s insights into the creative decisions behind each cut and the rhythmic flow of the sequence offer a rare glimpse into the mind of a true editing maestro.

00:00: David Fincher’s Editor Kirk Baxter
01:00: Use Riverside
02:18: Why Hiding Blinks Creates Intention
05:05: The David Fincher Editing Style
09:50: Choreographing The Vicious Fight Scene in The Killer
12:29: Letting Sound & Music Guide Your Edit
13:57: Comment “Storyblocks is cool”
15:00: Hooking Your Audience In The First 5 Minutes
16:23: How To Cut With Intention
18:14: Breaking Down The Sniper Scene in The Killer
25:15: The Magic Of Vertical Sound Cutting
27:53: Breaking Down The “Cool Girl” Sequence in Gone Girl

Editor: ​⁠ Tyson Pellegrini and Hayden Hillier-Smith
Executive Producer: Vishnu Vallabhaneni
Thumbnail: David Altizer

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