David Fincher’s new Netflix series asks what makes a serial killer
The ‘Fight Club’ director – who grew up under the shadow of the infamous Zodiac murders – tells Nev Pierce about his new Netflix series
‘Ilove Hannibal Lecter,” says director David Fincher, referring to fiction’s most infamous serial killer, from The Silence of the Lambs. “But he doesn’t exist when you really look into serial killing. He may actually be destructive to the understanding of who these people are.” Few filmmakers have “looked into” serial killing with the intense interest of this wry 55-year-old. His breakthrough picture Seven, which announced this one-time music video maestro as a major cinematic force with a flair for an indelible visual image, featured a serial killer (Kevin Spacey) who slaughtered people according to the seven deadly sins and a notoriously shocking ending that left police procedural clichés decapitated.
His best film is arguably Zodiac,a meticulous account of the frustrated attempts to catch the real life titular killer who terrorised California in the late Sixties. You could even argue – though this would likely bring a raised eyebrow from the director who also counts Gone Girl, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Fight Club on his CV – that the predatory Xenomorph from his illfated debut, Alien 3, is more dangerous even than Lecter, or that the reverseageing romance The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is really about the ultimate serial killer, Death himself.
His new Netflix series Mindhunter, however, is more grounded in reality than any of these projects. Yes, it deals with killers, but these aren’t gourmets or masterminds. Instead, inspired by the memoir of FBI agent John Douglas, it follows two agents (Holt Mccallany and Jonathan Groff) as they interview convicted killers for insights to help them capture active murderers. “I thought it was more interesting to see what makes a serial killer in real life, rather than turning him into a comicsays book supervillain,” says Fincher of the 10-part show, which is really about the birth of psychological profiling. “I thought a show based on conversations with the monster could be compelling, maybe in a new way. I was interested in the idea of not imbuing these creatures with a mythological power over us.”
Fincher was raised in California under the shadow of Zodiac, which may explain something of his enduring fascination with murderous bogeymen that stalk the imagination. The killer terrorised the state with letters to newspapers, including one that threatened to open fire on a school bus because “schoolchildren make nice targets”. Fincher took the bus and when his dad, a journalist, told him what was going on, he remembers thinking, “You work at home, you could drive us!”. “I honestly believe Zodiac got off much more on how people responded to the letters than he ever did by stabbing two innocents at a lake,” he says now.
His 2007 film is often hailed as one of the best of this century. Naturally, it was a disaster at the box office. Fincher that if the screenplay landed on his desk now, he’d probably opt to make a series out of it. “I think the line is really simple,” he says, of what divides movies from TV (or, as he calls it “long-form, chronological streaming entertainment”.) “Does understanding the characters in your drama take time? Is it going to take the audience a while to understand what’s interesting or compelling or contradictory about these characters? If the answer is ‘yes’, don’t make a movie out of it.”
That picture cost $65 million; his acclaimed 2010 film about Facebook, The Social Network – “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies”, he jokes – cost $50 million. In studio terms, these are mid-priced. “Mid-budget Hollywood movies is basically all I’ve ever made,” he says. But relatively modest bets don’t interest American studios much these days – the goal is billion-dollar hits from a galaxy far, far away or a comic book near you. “Modern movie studios now have their two seasons: Spandex Summer and Affliction Winter,” he says, referring to the split between superhero blockbusters and Oscarhungry dramas. “The audience knows what to expect. It’s like, ‘Pumpkins! It must be Hallowe’en!’ The mid-budget Hollywood film is gone.”
The Social Network won Fincher a directing Bafta and he was in talks to follow it with another Aaron Sorkinscripted drama, Steve Jobs, about the Apple founder (eventually filmed by Danny Boyle). Disagreements with the studio saw that project go sideways and emails related to it were leaked during the notorious Sony hack in 2014. In one, the then Sony chief Amy Pascal forwarded Fincher a newsletter that reported he was leaving the film, alongside news that Adam Driver had been cast in The Force Awakens, with the simple note: “WTF”. His response? “Adam Driver is a terrible idea, I’m with you…”
Does he really not rate the actor? “Oh, no, I like Adam Driver a lot,” says Fincher. “I was just being flippant. I’ve since asked Steven Soderbergh [who directed Driver in Logan Lucky] to apologise [on my behalf ], but I don’t think he thought it rose to the level of actually being addressed. I think he understood it was a joke. But if Adam Driver takes umbrage with it, I can’t apologise enough.”
Fincher is not the only filmmaker to reject the machinations of the studio system in favour of the relative freedom of Netflix. The streaming giant is, for sure, not afraid to take risks. When, in 2013, Netflix landed Fincher’s new America-set version of the BBC’S political classic House of Cards, it felt like a game-changer. If Netflix was good enough for Fincher, Netflix was good enough for anyone. Well, almost anyone. Dunkirk director Christopher Nolan, for one, has been outspoken in criticising the company for not supporting theatrical distribution of the movies they finance. Fincher takes a contrasting view. “I feel like stories are stories,” he says. “And the fact none of the executives at Netflix are under the Sword of Damocles to provide ‘x’-million eyeballs, from Friday till Sunday, is good. They’re ultimately a destination for content. They’re building the Library of Congress. They intend to cater to a lot of different tastes. And that’s way more interesting than Marvel to me.”
Fincher was once in talks to direct a Spider-man picture, except it fell apart when he wasn’t interested in telling the same old origin story. He held informal discussions about directing a Star Wars sequel when the franchise was revived (which would have taken him full circle, as VFX work on Return of the Jedi was one of his earliest jobs). But his black humour and need for precision and control (he is known for shooting scenes over and over, often repeating takes more than 10 times until satisfied) probably wouldn’t sit well with the Disney-controlled franchise.
Fincher isn’t abandoning the big screen, though. “I hope to make another feature before I’m put out to pasture,” he says. Perhaps surprisingly, it could yet be a studio sequel – to World War Z. The 2013 Brad Pitt picture, based on the apocalyptic horror novel by Max Brooks, overcame its own troubled production to become a hit, but there is arguably a better film to be made out of Brooks’s book, a detailed imagining of a world overrun by a zombie apocalypse. Dennis Kelly, writer of cult Channel 4 series Utopia, is working on the script.
In the meantime, he is preparing for season two of Mindhunter, which will shoot in the first half of 2018. “Hopefully it inspires people to think about this stuff in a different way,” he says. “I’m hoping there’s some more meat there than just the beheading of the week.”
Mindhunter begins on Netflix tomorrow