The Revolutionary Vision of David Fincher
The boundary-pushing director reflects on his career, Hollywood’s golden past, and its perilous future
The boundary-pushing director reflects on his career, Hollywood’s golden past, and its perilous future.
When DaviD Fincher sat down with Netflix executives in the spring of 2019, he did not expect to be handed the equivalent of a blank check. Sure, the 58-year-old filmmaker — a former music-video wunderkind best known for pushing the envelope with baroque serial-killer thrillers ( Seven), toxic-masculinity satires ( Fight Club), and social media origin stories ( The Social Network) — had helped kick off the golden age of streaming with the outlet’s first original series, House of Cards. But he was used to resistance: You can’t have this budget. You can’t tell that story. ¶ So when his patrons said they’d help him make anything he wanted, Fincher thought of a long-dormant labor of love: a script his late father, Jack, had written about the making of Citizen Kane. Not the tale of its director, producer, star, and disputed co-writer, Orson Welles, who, at 26, took Hollywood by storm. This was the
story of Herman Mankiewicz, the alcoholic screenwriter who the famed film critic Pauline Kael insisted was the script’s true guiding force — and who inserted a personal grudge against the rich and powerful into the greatest movie of all time.
Fincher wanted to shoot it in black and white. He wanted visual nods to movies of the Forties, as if the film had been discovered in a vault after 80 years of gathering dust. Also, it would involve an obscure chapter in California’s political history concerning Upton Sinclair’s 1934 run for governor and a disinformation campaign allegedly run by studio execs. Fincher couldn’t believe it when Neflix said yes.
To see Mank, however, is to know why they did. An audacious, complicated, stylistically daring yarn, the movie is a hat tip to a bygone era that makes you feel like you’ve mainlined a day’s worth of TCM programming. But it’s also a challenging drama about complicity, the price of speaking truth to power, and the manipulation of media, which couldn’t make it feel more urgent.
Over a four-hour conversation from his home in Los Angeles, Fincher discussed bringing this tribute to his father (who died in 2003) to the screen, his reputation as a taskmaster on set, why he’s sorry Fight Club pissed off a fellow filmmaker, and more.
How did your father end up writing the Mank screenplay?
My dad wrote for a lot of magazines:
Psychology Today, Sports Illustrated,
Reader’s Digest. He’d written a novel in the 1950s or Sixties, I think, and burned it. He’d written a couple of screenplays in the 1970s. After he’d retired, he was looking for a challenge, and told me, “I’m thinking about writing a script. What is a story you would like to read about?”
When I was growing up, he always told me Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made. That was received wisdom, long before I ever had the chance to actually see it, when I was 12. We’d talked in the past about that Pauline Kael essay, “Raising Kane,” and the entire time he’d been telling me about the power and influence of that movie, Herman Mankiewicz’s name never came up. So I said, “Hmm. It’s always fascinated me, this friction between Mankiewicz and Welles in making Citizen Kane. No one’s told that story.” And he said, “Oh.” I mean, he wanted a challenge! [ Laughs.] I didn’t even think he’d finish it.
Why not?
Listen, when I was 12 or 13, someone showed my dad a magic trick, something with cards that was alphanumeric. He became obsessed with this thing, and literally stopped eating and sleeping for about six, seven days as he figured it out. He was prone to disappearing down rabbit holes.
Did you get that trait from him?
I would file that under the dime-store psychology of Rosebud [ laughs], but no. I got my work ethic from my mother: “Whatever you do, do with your might, things done by halves are never done right.” And Senior editor DaviD Fear profiled actor Cristin Milioti in July. my father had a kind of endless inquisitiveness. So I think I ended up with 22 chromosomes of each.
Do you that think your dad connected with Mankiewicz?
I feel like Mankiewicz felt like he was slumming — he’s this jaded New York writer who doesn’t have a lot of reverence for this newly minted art form in Hollywood — and that as a magazine writer, my dad could relate to him in that way. And y’know, as a musicvideo director, I could relate, too.
What do you mean?
I mean, I’ve made Michael Jackson videos, and people were going, “Oh, my God, they’re so great!” And you go, “Yeah, but I mean, it’s a Michael Jackson video. Let’s not blow this out of proportion here.”
There are a lot of people who would assume you’d see a kindred spirit in Welles as opposed to Mankiewicz, because...
I definitely do.
...you came to Hollywood with a proven track record in something besides feature filmmaking. You had success at a very early age and started your own company. And—
And I have a goatee, but . . . [ laughs] I want to be really clear, because it’s become such a fucking issue with the press on this film: I’m a huge Orson Welles fan. I stand on his shoulders every day. He was a genius, and this movie is not designed to take any of that away from him. Citizen Kane is an Orson Welles jam. But there were certain things underneath it that are definitely a Mankiewicz jam. Moviemaking is a collaborative effort. It just is.
But there are a few name-brand directors around today, and you’re one of them. Your name means something.
Look, I go to see Steven Soderbergh movies because I know it’s going to be a story that’s deftly told. I go to Sam Mendes movies because I know there’s going to be an attention to detail. But I’m talking about the fantasy of the auteur theory, which is that you can etch something in granite, wheel it into a preproduction meeting, say, “This is what the movie is. I’ll be in my trailer.” And that can be imparted to 85 people who can then execute your “vision.” It’s not how the process works. It’s not how I think. It’s more like, “How do I tell this story as well as I can tell it?” If you do that more than three times, you’re doing good.
Your dad was close to 60 when he first started working on this, right?
He was around that age, yeah, and there was no doubt that there’s a very . . . I mean, I feel it now. I didn’t feel it at the time. You know, I was 30 years old. So, to me, the midlife-crisis aspect of it was lost on me at the time. I was too young to appreciate it. Now, I can see he was going through things about the legacy of Mankiewicz, and his own legacy, that I may have been dismissive of. I’m not dismissive about those things now.
The movie climaxes with a long sequence of Gary Oldman’s Mank laying into a bunch of rich folks at one of William Randolph Hearst’s costumed dinner parties. Roughly how many takes did it require to get that scene right?
OK . . . [ sighs] so let us now get into the notion of “He does so many takes,” because this is a narrative that has lost its bridle. We shot that scene for three-anda-half to four days, just that one scene. I think we did 10 or 12 takes per setup, and we probably did 40 setups with two cameras to get all of it. Granted, it’s a lot of work for Gary. He’s got to gird himself, and he’s got to let loose. It’s exhausting. I think it gives the actors a different sense of beginning, middle, and end, however, and I think that’s an important thing. So, this whole thing of “Oh, the opening of The Social Network, it’s 99 takes!” Well, it’s 99 takes over two nights and 12 setups. I think that there’s an inherent lack of understanding over how this works. I’m not here to say that I make it as easy on everyone as I possibly can, but . . .
So your reputation as the filmmaker who does 70 takes of every scene...
But I don’t! I don’t do 70 takes of everything!
. . . is incredibly overinflated?
Yeah. Look, if you do 14 takes and on average you use take 12, that’s not bad. If you do 14 takes and you almost always use take two, your process is probably not working for you [ laughs].
I used to be much more sheepish about saying, “OK, let’s do another one,” because I had been led to believe, in the same way that an actor would think, “You want another one, what am I doing wrong?” You’re not doing anything wrong. And by the way, I’m not doing anything wrong by asking you for another one. What we’re trying to do right is make this whole thing seem effortless and like it just fell off the truck that way. And I feel like that’s my responsibility.
When you signed up to do House of Cards, did you have any sense that you’d be facilitating this massive paradigm shift in television?
First of all, I never got a call from Netflix saying, “Hey, how would you like to be involved in a paradigm shift?” That didn’t happen [ laughs]. But I was interested in longer-form storytelling, and it probably started with watching the cold embrace of a mass audience to Zodiac [Fincher’s 2007 slow burn about the hunt for the Zodiac Killer]. I’d thought, “Well, two hours and 45 minutes isn’t that long.” But apparently it was. Just getting people to come to the theaters for a movie that long proved to be a bridge too far. For the most part, people who are spending 15 bucks to see a movie, they want something that’s shaped like an arrow and traveling as quickly as possible to its intended destination. The notion of a narrative in which you’re three hours in and something happens that’s going to cause you to completely reassess what you thought of one of the lead characters? That’s interesting.
“THERE’S THIS NOTION MOVIES ARE DYING. THEY’RE NOT. THEY’RE JUST CHANGING. YOU CHANGE WITH THEM. PEOPLE WILL DO THINGS WE HAVEN’T YET IMAGINED.”
So you were already thinking about television when Netflix came calling?
I never saw a place for myself in network television. At one point, I had been offered a chance to direct the pilot for Deadwood. I met with David Milch, who I was enormously impressed with, and when I read the script, I thought, “It’s not television, it’s HBO!” [ Laughs.] I was even more intoxicated with the idea of doing something that sprawling. When House of Cards was picked up, one of the things we said was, “We want you to think of the remote as the paperback by your bed. There’s a Chapter One, a Chapter Two. . . . It’s a thing you check in and return to.”
It’s the beginning of Binge TV.
I remember hearing Netflix getting pushback for the idea of uploading all 12 or 13 episodes in one day. Folks at CAA were saying, “We want to be part of the watercooler conversation. We like the HBO model.” And I spoke up and said, “Guys, it’s just a different watercooler conversation. It’s what chapter you’re on.”
Early in your career, you were part of a wave of filmmakers who helped define a certain type of Nineties movie, which all culminates in 1999 — that’s arguably the best year for American filmmaking since 1974.
What came out in 1974?
The Godfather: Part II, Chinatown, The Parallax View, The Conversation, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore ...
The Godfather: Part II is a pretty good movie [ laughs]. OK, I’ll buy it.
In ’99, it was Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, Magnolia, Election, The Matrix, to name a few. Did you feel like you were part of something bigger happening at the time, or was it more like, “I’m not trying to start a revolution . . .”
“. . . I’m just trying to make my little movie before anyone realizes how homoerotic it is”? The second one [ laughs]. I remember seeing the trailers and saying, “Um, I’m not so sure the World Wrestling Federation market that you’re aiming this at is going to appreciate the homoerotic overtones of what it is that we’re selling.”
Yeah, there were a lot of interesting movies that had been in development for a long time, and then they all happened to come out at the same time and cross over. I certainly was not, you know, going to dinner with Spike Jonze going, “It’s such an exciting time to be alive, is it not?” [ Laughs.] He was like, “I’m acting in a David Russell movie . . . and everyone’s in a fistfight!” We had bigger problems. I see what you’re saying. But in 1999, I was in a bunker with my head down making Fight Club.
A movie so controversial that another filmmaker wished cancer on you. [In a 2000 Rolling Stone interview, Paul Thomas Anderson said that after seeing 30 minutes of Fight Club, he thought, “I wish David Fincher testicular fucking cancer.”]
[ Laughs.] Yeah. Look, I’ve been through cancer with somebody that I love, and I can understand if somebody thought . . . I didn’t think that we were making fun of cancer survivors or victims. I thought what Chuck [Palahniuk, on whose book the film was based] was doing was talking about a therapeutic environment that could be infiltrated or abused. We were talking about empathy vampirism. Cancer’s rough. It’s a fucking horrible thing. As far as Paul’s quote, I get it. If you’re in a rough emotional state and you’ve just been through something major. . . . My dad died, and it certainly made me feel different about death and suffering [ pauses]. And my dad probably liked Fight Club less than Paul did.
Have your feelings about social media changed since you made The Social Network?
I don’t really know anything about social media.
You may not be an active participant, but I’m sure you’ve been following the news: Facebook has not really been clamping down on misinformation — in fact, seems to be amplifying it. Do you feel like social media has something to answer for, regarding the moment we’re in?
Censorship is a slippery slope. I will definitely say if something’s factually inaccurate, it’s really great that people are pointing that out. How that is interpreted is always the crux. Listen, I’m close to 60 years old. So I have trusted news sources, and I don’t really . . . I don’t do the Facebook, and I never did. I’m not saying that I didn’t go to high school with really fascinating people [ laughs], I’ve just never particularly wanted to check in with them. I waste my time with other shit that’s probably just as infinitely stupid.
You’ve talked about movies now basically being either “spandex summer” vehicles or “affliction winter” prestige films, and how your work doesn’t fit into either category. Do you feel like you’re the last of a dying breed of a certain type of filmmaker?
No, I don’t think so. There will always be people who are poking and prodding and digging and searching for new ways to do the same thing, and new ways to do things that we haven’t even yet imagined.
Look, directing movies is a little like painting a watercolor from three blocks away through a telescope with a walkie-talkie and 90 people holding the brush. And as frustrating as that sounds, it’s also thrilling and invigorating when it comes off.
There’s this notion that the movies are dying. They’re not. They’re just changing. You change with them. I think anyone who, like me, is curious about how to impart their story, there’s going to be plenty more opportunities, at least in the short term. And depending on how long this pandemic goes on, there may be need for a lot more.