David Fincher, Erik Messerschmidt, Michael Fassbender (Monaris / Netflix)
The Killer sees David Fincher deliver a lean, efficient and darkly funny hitman tale. Screen talks to the filmmaker and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker about bringing a French graphic novel to the screen.
Mark Salisbury (Ex-Twitter)
December 20,2023
ScreenDaily
“Obviously, I’m drawn to nihilism,” says a grinning David Fincher, director of Se7en, Fight Club and Gone Girl, when asked why he wanted to adapt French graphic novel series The Killer into a film. “But I wanted to make a fucking Don Siegel movie. I wanted to make a Michael Winner movie. I’m so tired of slogging through characters you create to deliver some idea of backstory. What’s the greatest backstory in the history of motion pictures? ‘What were you doing in Chinatown, Jake?’ ‘As little as possible.’ It explains everything in one line.
“I love it when you can distil motivation down to these incredibly brief and simple evocations,” he continues. “I’m tired of two-hour 45-minute movies, and two-hour 30-minute movies. I’m tired of making them. I’m joking, but does it warrant it? Then I started thinking about Get Carter, Charley Varrick. Movies where it just is what it is.”
This was back in 2007, when the graphic novel series — written by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, and first published in 1998 — was being developed into a film by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and Paramount. Fincher was intrigued, but was directing Pitt in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, so was not ready to commit. “It wasn’t like you were going, ‘This has to be seen.’ It was more of a way to explore some things I was interested in — the broadest brushstrokes of backstory and this idea of intercepted thought. Why is it we assume when we hear a character’s thoughts that it’s the truth? I don’t know people who aren’t lying to themselves.”
Fincher approached Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who had done uncredited rewrites on Fight Club and The Game as well as work on several unmade Fincher projects — among them The Girl Who Played With Fire, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, an adaptation of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama and a remake of The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud — to see if he was interested in adapting The Killer. But Walker was not, according to Fincher. “He didn’t want to touch it then.”
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