MINDHUNTER
MANSON, BTK, SON OF SAM... DAVID FINCHER’S MINDHUNTER IS BACK WITH A BLOODY PARADE OF SERIAL-KILLER ALL-STARS, AND BY DIALLING DOWN THE SENSATIONALISM IT’S MAKING THEM SCARIER THAN EVER
David Fincher and his cast spill their guts, literally and metaphorically, on Season 2 of the Netflix procedural to end all procedurals.
I WANT TO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON IN YOUR HEAD.”
David Fincher is issuing instructions to a moustachioed man, who is gazing into a mirror, adjusting the shoulder strap on the woman’s slip he’s wearing. The crew, similarly delicately, adjust the lighting for this moment of selffulfilment — one of a series of episodepuncturing vignettes of Dennis Rader (played by Sonny Valicenti), aka The BTK Killer. Bind. Torture. Kill. And do it quickly. Fincher is on a tight schedule for these late additions to the lengthy shoot. While the scene is set, he sits at the monitor with lead writer Courtenay Miles, adjusting dialogue, as the art department present him with crime-scene photographs and mementos of victims for sign-off. Multitasking can be murder.
Camera set, they shoot. Once. Twice. “That is fucking creepozoid,” says Fincher, after the third take. If you can manage to unsettle the director of Seven and Zodiac, then you’re probably doing your job. The next few days filming in this cavernous Pittsburgh studio will involve FBI office politics, masks (literal and figurative) and autoerotic asphyxiation. As one crew member puts it, “Some things you can’t unsee.”
Back for its second season, Mindhunter has lost none of its fearlessness. BTK returns, of course, but following impactful portrayals of lesser-known serial killers Edmund Kemper and Jerry Brudos, this year is taking on the iconic — including arguably the two most famous serial killers of all: Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) and David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam (Oliver Cooper). The latter we’ve previously seen on screen being commanded by a demonpossessed dog in Spike Lee’s Summer Of Sam. And — on the 50th anniversary of the murders his ‘disciples’ carried out — Manson is everywhere, including in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (portrayed by the same actor, Damon Herriman). But whereas most movies lean into the mythology of Manson, or embellish Berkowitz, Mindhunter is looking to re-examine reality. This isn’t hellhound hyperbole or gauze-softened myth. It’s the ugly truth.
“WE WANT TO BELIEVE THEY’RE MADMEN,”
says Courtenay Miles, “But when you read their history, their journals, letters, you see it is a human being in there. But it’s a human being gone wrong.” Miles was first assistant director on the debut series — the aide-de-camp to the director’s general — and made the unlikely but long-cherished transition to writer when Fincher gave her a shot. She immersed herself in the world of serial killers‚ and lost sleep as a result. “All of the characteristics that are in their mental structure and their compulsions are things that any other human being can identify with,” she says, reflecting on the long gestation of serial killers. “They’re made over 20 years. Nurturing these compulsions. That just got under my skin.”
Miles got the chance to be disturbed — and earn her first screenwriting credit — because Fincher cares considerably less about reputation than he does about his own lived experience. But while the first season saw him employ emerging directors (the most high-profile being Asif Kapadia, whose greatest achievements were in documentaries), here he’s joined behind the lens by two cinematic heavyweights. Carl Franklin is of late an in-demand director of TV, including House Of Cards, but was responsible for some astounding crime cinema in the 1990s: Devil In A Blue Dress and One False Move. In that grubby, merciless thriller, the wife of Bill Paxton’s seemingly guileless cop observes, “Dale doesn’t know any better. He watches TV. I read non-fiction.” Mindhunter bridges that divide. The other director is Andrew Dominik, whose three features all deal with the ruthless reality beneath criminal lore and legends (Chopper, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly). Dominik has wrapped his two episodes. Franklin is shooting four, Fincher three — but, as Dominik puts it, “his tentacles are everywhere”.
Today, while Fincher films BTK, Franklin is on the neighbouring stage with series leads Jonathan Groff and Holt Mccallany. As the FBI odd couple of ambitious idealist Holden Ford and reality-worn veteran Bill Tench, they’re wrestling with how to take what they’ve learned interviewing killers out into the field — specifically a live investigation of what became known as the Atlanta Child Murders (or ATKID). Between them is Albert Jones as Jim Barney, the African-american agent who was denied the
chance to join their Behavioural Science Unit in Season 1. He understands the implications of a case that doesn’t have the prominence it would if a string of white, middle-class children were being killed, rather than working-class African American ones. “That certainly was in the air,” says Jones. “These are black children that are going missing and being found dead. This notion that it wasn’t getting the immediacy and the attention it warranted lit a fire in Atlanta.”
As filming goes on, Fincher and Miles stand in the shadows between stages, whispering about pages they have just revised, trying to get the details just right. “Get it to Carl,” Fincher says. “Just go, ‘Look dude, this has been crunched together from 15 different versions — you need to make it so you buy it...’ You’ve got to let him know to make the vernacular work...”
Franklin will later say this process of continual revision isn’t that unusual on long-form storytelling, where a domino effect can be triggered by one adjustment. “They could be problems, they could be hidden gifts.” Still, in Franklin’s fourth month of his five-month stint, there’s definitely the sense that no other production is quite as rigorous as Fincher’s. Shooting one scene, a crew member suggests they gloss over a detail (“I’m inclined to say it doesn’t matter”), but Franklin interjects, “Yeah, we could do that, but ‘you-know-who’, that’s his whole thing.” The next day the two directors will have a chat about the need for additional shooting and, after Fincher leaves, another crew member turns to Franklin and smiles: “He came in like a phantom, crushed your dreams and went away!” Franklin nods, “That finish line just gets further and further away!”
There’s affection in the resignation, though. After the shoot, catching up on the phone, the 70-year-old director will marvel: “He sees the invisible. And we all do, but his version of the invisible sometimes means reconstructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing reality… Steven Soderbergh and I had a conversation about it. He was saying he feels like a graffiti artist compared to David.”
ANDREW DOMINIK, WHO GOT TO KNOW
Fincher through their mutual friend Brad Pitt, was specifically engaged to tackle Manson, who he’d been fascinated by growing up. “Somebody who can come up with their own mythology and then persuade other people of the reality of that. And also that they managed to convict a guy who wasn’t at either crime scene. It’s a really interesting thing.”
Fincher credits Dominik with really challenging what they were looking to do with Manson — how to make sure his presence was serving a purpose outside of his notoriety. “We don’t need to up the salacious mythology of Manson,” says Fincher. “He does just fine by himself. But what was interesting was Andrew began, months before we came to shoot, to really challenge, like, ‘What is it you want out of Manson, other than like a guest star? ’Cause that’s just silliness.’”
While as a director Franklin is something of a shepherd, Dominik is more of a provocateur. Mccallany mentions they often had different ideas on how to play a scene. In the Manson interview, in particular, it had combustible results. “Andrew got me so riled and kind of off-balance and unsettled that I found myself having these crazy reactions,” says the actor.
“Like, my face is twitching and I’m looking at Manson like I’m going to jump across the table and strangle him.”
Dominik describes his directing style as “creating collisions between people” and he definitely set out to get a reaction from Mccallany. “Holt is an actor who is superprepared, right? He knows his lines. He knows everybody else’s lines. And he plays the guy who always knows what’s going on. So when he comes to work, that very need — of wanting to feel prepared — is not what you need in the scene. You want a guy who’s being blindsided all the time. And so I think a lot of what I was doing was trying to get Holt to feel blindsided or uncomfortable.”
The infamous killers were physically recreated with the help of Kazu Hiro, who won an Oscar for transforming Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill on Darkest Hour. “He’d kind of retired and we just called and begged,” says Fincher, who initially had him agree to do just Manson. “And then we said, ‘Oh, what about Berkowitz?’” Empire has seen the ‘Son of Sam’ interview and the resemblance is uncanny — the scene electric.
“The thing that makes Son of Sam interesting to me was the crippling stranglehold that he had on one of the largest cities in the world [New York],” says Fincher. “And then you meet him and he’s so mundane. He’s not the guy next door, but he could be. And I think that’s in keeping with the tenor of what we set up with the first season, which is, ‘This is not gonna be the serial killer of the week.’”
Still, even as the Berkowitz interview prods and picks at the self-mythologising nature of these killers, there is undoubtedly a frisson from facing such famous psychopaths. “Part of the appeal of Mindhunter is that it is the all-stars. [The killers] are wildly entertaining when they’re on screen,” says Dominik. “Enjoying somebody in a television show isn’t the same as condoning their behaviour.”
Still, the Kiwi-born/australia-raised director would suggest that that isn’t really what the show is about. “I think David’s real idea is that he wants to make a show about the American disease, which is narcissism. This idea that we shape the world according to our desires and our needs. And I think he looks at profiling as being a great way to tell that story.” In that sense Mindhunter is as much about bureaucracy and personality as it is murder. “The subject of the show is really the profilers themselves,” he offers by way of explanation.
THERE’S AN ELEMENT TO MINDHUNTER
that explores the masks we all wear. “You get inside the psychology of the killers, but you also are inside of the psychology of the investigators,” says Franklin. “You actually begin to inadvertently start to profile these people.”
Pressure grows as the Behavioural Science Unit grows, powered by the funding of new FBI overseer Ted Gunn (Michael Cerveris). Fincher observes: “As David Geffen once said to me, ‘The devil is the one who shows up with the biggest cheque.’ You gotta watch out for the person who’s going to give you your heart’s desire.” Tench is pulled more between work and home, Holden between ambition and personal frailty, and in-house academic Dr Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) struggles with the Unit’s changed priorities. “You get to see a different dimension, so you see that persona, that mask, she has is her work face,” says Torv, whose character sees her theories co-opted into live investigations, rather than the psychological research she signed up for. “What is her function? If this is being applied to real-world cases and that’s not a place where she [functions], what is she doing there? She’s given up her life.”
It might be reductive to suggest Dr Carr is the most vulnerable person in the team, but she has the most to lose. “I mean, she’s a gay woman living in the late 1970s having to hide it from everybody around.” She also appears to be the person whom viewers treasure. Groff says one of the things he is asked most about Season 1 is Carr’s recurring interaction with a cat in her apartment building. It’s the same for Torv, who has her own theory as to what the ill-fated feline represents. “I’d always thought of the cat as
being like one of the faceless many, the people these serial killers practised on. But we never hear about the homeless and the abandoned and the people that go missing that nobody misses.”
It’s a bleak thought, but in tune with the spirit of the show, which is uniquely unsettling despite featuring no explicit brutality. “Hearing about these things can be way more effective than seeing them literally played out in front of you,” says Groff. “It forces the audience to lean in a little bit more and become a little bit more engaged, and therefore I think a little bit more scared.”
There’s an extended sequence in an early episode of the new season where someone who escaped a killer recounts their experiences — what happened to them, what happened to the person they were with. There is no blood, blade or bullet, but it will haunt you for a long, long time.
While the likes of Manson, Berkowitz and BTK still make the headlines, the show is more concerned with the consequences of violence. “David’s intention from the beginning was like, ‘These are sad, disgusting individuals. I don’t wanna celebrate them. I don’t want this to be the comic-book version of villains,’” recalls Groff, who contrasts that approach with a lot of the films and documentaries he has watched in relation to serial-killer material. “It’s like, ‘Ooh, creepy music and weird cutaways of knives and blood’, and they really lean into the melodrama of what happened. That is not what David wanted to do with this. He wanted to look at it in a very realistic way. Which is more unsettling and scary.”
Unsettling for the viewer. Unsettling for the cast. Through being matter-of-fact and eschewing the sensational, Mindhunter really gets inside your head. Jones recalls leaving his New York home to travel to the production.
“I do remember going down to work and telling my wife, ‘Make sure that that window is locked in the bedroom when I’m gone, please. Just for me. Just make sure that it’s locked.’”