SHADOWS OF THE PAST
IT’S A BLACK-AND-WHITE CHARACTER STUDY OF THE WRITER BEHIND CITIZEN KANE. BUT MANK IS ALSO DAVID FINCHER’S MOST PERSONAL FILM YET. WE JOIN HIM FOR A WEEK ON SET TO DISCOVER THE ROSEBUD BENEATH THE SURFACE
DAVID FINCHER IS in a Los Angeles studio housing a recreation of the dining room of Hearst Castle, San Simeon. It is Friday, 31 January 2020, and he has a night shoot ahead, but has eked out rehearsal time this afternoon for a crucial scene due to film the following week. Gary Oldman, in ’30s suit trousers and half-buttoned shirt (dressed partially for comfort, partially for the part), has rounded the table and stopped less than a yard away from Empire as his character — Herman Mankiewicz: screenwriter, raconteur, genius, drunk — addresses a circus-themed dinner party. Arliss Howard is at the table, playing legendary MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, alongside Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, the real-life model for cinema’s great publishing playboy, Charles Foster Kane.
After a couple more run-throughs, Fincher suggests Oldman quicken a little, to take about ten seconds out of the epic, eight-minute scene. He then steps closer to his star to stress the importance of nailing a locked-in, consistent master shot because of all the various angles and close-ups to come. “The key here,” says Fincher, “and the reason I’m going to be a dick about this, is if you repeat a word — if you add a stutter or anything — it’s going to fuck up everything.”
Fincher is forthright, but not without purpose. Just as Orson Welles had overwhelming creative control on Citizen Kane, so he has ultimate authority here. It has taken 30 years to get to this point and he doesn’t want to screw it up. Mank is his 11th feature, but the first he ever imagined. It has screened infinite times at the cinema in his head.
The film finds Mankiewicz holed up in a remote bungalow writing ‘American’ (the first draft of Citizen Kane) and flashes back to his days as a jobbing studio screenwriter, taking the shine off the Golden Age of Hollywood. And while he’s very much a contemporary filmmaker, Fincher wanted to honour the period. He’s trying to capture the verbal dexterity of a ’30s picture and visuals that could live in the neighbourhood of Citizen Kane. “But, look, we’re not making a movie in 1939 or 1940, we’re making it in 2020.” Thus he’s capturing the audio with every tool available, but presenting it monaural. He’s shooting on digital, but degrading the image in post-production. It’s in black-and-white because, “If you’re in the transportation business and you’re trying to transport people back to a time and a place, black-and-white really fucking helps.”
But this is not a nostalgic postcard. It’s a more thorny, expansive and personal picture than that. It is about demythologising the filmmaking process, as well as showing someone discovering the value of their words — for good and ill. Fincher worries it might be too ‘inside Hollywood’. But maybe it’s for anyone who ever feared wasting their life. Perhaps that’s why it matters to him. Or perhaps it’s because it was written by his dad. Mank may well get to the heart of Mankiewicz, but it’s also revealing some things about the people making it.
MOST PEOPLE AREN’T familiar with Herman Mankiewicz. A former critic for The New Yorker and frustrated playwright, he became, essentially, a script doctor — an “idea hitman” says Fincher — whose attitude to Hollywood can be surmised from a telegram he sent his friend Ben Hecht, encouraging him to come west: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” (Hecht would go on to win two Oscars and, indeed, earn millions.) But Mankiewicz found there was no price on self-respect. He considered screenwriting slumming. He would have flashes of brilliance (like having the idea for Kansas to be depicted in black-and-white and Oz in colour in The Wizard Of Oz) that he’d then immediately undermine (he quit the screenplay, saying it couldn’t be filmed). He had contempt for the industry, but also for himself. It’s a relatable problem.
“Oh, self-loathing, yeah!” says Gary Oldman, chatting in his trailer after rehearsal. “Arliss, Charles Dance, myself in that room today, we could probably all three of us get together and do a really good job of selfloathing. We could have a self-loathing fest.”
Oldman smiles. A surprisingly ethereal figure in person, he drifts from thought to thought, quickening when there’s the chance to laugh — especially at himself. He mulls over Mankiewicz’s frustrations and fears, which the writer tried to drown in a sea of booze, a desire Oldman understands. “It’s no secret I’m in recovery. I’m nearly coming up to 23 years of sobriety,” he says. “When I read the script,
yeah, it’s alcoholism. But... it’s having that, despising it...” The sentence fractures. He recalls a quote of Mankiewicz’s from near the end of his life: “‘I don’t know how it is that you start working at something you don’t like, and before you know it, you’re an old man.’” Oldman says Mank wanted to be a playwright, or a novelist. “He wanted to be like [two-time Pulitzer prize-winner] George Kaufman. There’s an element of squandering his talent through booze, and never reaching your potential. Maybe it’s also the fear of failure and if you could keep having an excuse.”
Oldman doesn’t hide behind booze anymore, but does tend to disguise himself on screen — whether it’s the extreme hairstyle of The Fifth Element, or the transformative prosthetics of his Oscar-winning performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Fincher didn’t want any of that. No make-up. No distractions. “I thought, ‘Oh, fucking hell!’” says Oldman. “I can’t remember the last time I did that. I’ve always got something!”
It made him tentative. “I was thinking, ‘I don’t know about that.’ I don’t look anything like Mank. There’s a similarity with [Tom Burke as] Welles and Amanda [Seyfried]
kind of looks like [film star and Hearst’s lover] Marion Davies, and you’ve got this pale make-up on Charles Dance, so he resembles Hearst. But I didn’t have anything I could anchor to. Then, once we started, I thought, ‘Yeah, Dave was right.’ No tricks. No nothing. Just: here it is. I’ve embraced it.”
He seems content, if tired. He says he has never known a director to be so specific, to work him so hard. After the first couple of days, he says, “I felt like I’d been in the ring with Muhammad Ali or something.” This is not a criticism. None of the actors, even in unguarded moments during Empire’s week on set, show any frustration at, well, having to act. There’s an understanding that Fincher isn’t shooting so much coverage because he doesn’t know what he wants, but rather because he knows precisely what he wants. Still, Oldman isn’t sure he’ll give another performance as open as this, as unadorned. “I don’t know, to be honest with you. I might only do it for Fincher. He gets things done. He gets things out of you.”
Fincher asked for “Gary au naturel”, and got it. The director, meanwhile, has been stripping off some layers of his own.
FINCHER FIRST SAW Citizen Kane when he was 12 or 13. Expectations were high. “Because I had heard so much about it from my dad.” Still, he was stunned. “I was blown away by the pacing of it and how it moved from one idea to the next idea to the next idea. It was the first time I was aware of seeing the director imposed, because everything seemed like it was revolving around Welles.” A couple of years later he read ‘Raising Kane’, the New Yorker article (and subsequent book) by legendary film critic Pauline Kael, which argued Mankiewicz was the screenplay’s sole author and Welles unfairly took co-credit. The clash of interpretations, the idea of authorship, the drive and power of the film, all stayed with him.
There was also the connection with his father. Jack Fincher was, in a way, raised by movies. He grew up in ’30s Oklahoma, the only child of an alcoholic father and long-suffering mother who ran a hotdog stand and used the cinema as a babysitter. He escaped, via a stint in the air force, and became a magazine journalist and author (his book Human Intelligence was praised by Isaac Asimov as “complete, literate and intelligent”). Movies were the one constant. And the thing he and David bonded over.
Fincher’s film education came in cinema’s second Golden Age — the ’70s — but as much as All The President’s Men and The Godfathers were seminal, it was Kane to which they would often return. So much so that when his dad asked for a screenplay idea, having retired from journalism in the early ’90s, Fincher suggested writing about its writing. “It began in this realm of initially going, ‘I know there’s something here; I don’t know what it is,’” recalls Fincher, who at the time was one of world’s most in-demand music video directors, working with everyone from George Michael to Madonna. He hadn’t yet made a feature film, though. His debut was hotly anticipated, expensive, high-profile and... a disaster.
Okay, Alien3 is actually much better than Fincher thinks, but that isn’t hard. And he had a miserable time making it. Certainly, when he came to read his dad’s script, the experience had changed his perspective.
“I went into [the writing process] believing in Pauline [Kael], in her exhumation of Mankiewicz’s genius,” he says. “But then that was informed by going, as a 27-year-old, to make your first movie and have the world take a shit on your head. You realise: ‘It’s tough!’ What Welles was doing is hard. There’s an impudence to his genius. It’s on display every three to five seconds in that movie. He starts off juggling chainsaws.”
Fincher wasn’t interested in re-arbitrating a credit squabble, to the extent that Jack’s first draft did. Then, after a couple of years of back and forth between father and son, Jack inserted a subplot: the propaganda produced by (traditionally beloved) MGM studio exec
Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) to swing the 1934 California Governor’s race against socialist candidate Upton Sinclair. At first, Fincher dismissed the introduction of what we now call ‘fake news’, but then saw how it would help Mankiewicz realise the importance of his words. “That’s when the thing started to take shape.”
Finance was sought, in 1997, with Kevin Spacey likely to star, but no-one wanted to fund it in black-and-white. Cut to: more than 20 years later when, after the marathon production of Fincher’s FBI crime series Mindhunter, Netflix asked what he wanted to do next. With its themes of propaganda, liberal complacency, power and self-worth, Mank was suddenly timely. Twenty-eight years since his first feature, the world is ready for Fincher’s most personal film.
“WHAT WAS INTERESTING,” says Fincher, “was this notion of, well, there’s the shit that you do to put your kids through school. And then there’s the shit you do where you risk it. Where you say, ‘This is what I’m about.’” He is reflecting on Mankiewicz, a sell-out who sees a potential pathway to self-respect. It may be something the director relates to, having spent years servicing others’ creativity in music videos and commercials. Now, in features, Fincher has a reputation for being uncompromising. Really, he is just committed. As much as his films appear cynical and wry — Mank itself is very funny — they are, by and large, sincere. Fincher is all in. Because he knows we have limited time.
Jack Fincher died of pancreatic cancer in 2003. Fincher spent much of his final year with him, taking him to chemo, discussing Mank and all else. He made delicate, reverse-ageing fable The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008) partly in reaction to experiencing his father’s last days. That film’s screenwriter, Eric Roth, is on board Mank as a producer, his role largely to talk through the script with Fincher, imbuing it with the reality of people who’ve worked in Hollywood, rather than simply read about it. Jack Fincher’s love of movies is tempered by his son’s knowledge of making them. “I’m sure my dad would’ve, had he been able to, taken Herman Mankiewicz out to lunch and said, ‘I’m a fan. I love what you do.’” says Fincher. “And probably Herman Mankiewicz would’ve said, ‘Ah, you’re over-thinking it.’”
In Mank, Jack Fincher’s love of movies is tempered by his son’s knowledge of making them — practical problem-solving prioritised over theme and theory. He pushed the actors to be more immediate in their delivery than in modern movies. Say the line. Don’t knock over the furniture. “We’re not here to document, we’re here to support a text,” he says, explaining his specificity at the dinner rehearsal. “It’s not about putting a choke chain on a really, really talented human being, it’s simply saying...” He searches for a metaphor: “Look, a lot of shit happens at the Indy 500, but they’re always making a left turn.”
You can see here the influence of not just his film-fan father, but his more pragmatic mother — a nurse who worked in both substance abuse and mental health. “My mom was more about people and my dad was more about ideas.” Now 88, Claire can finally see her husband’s screenplay come to life. Fincher says she’s touched. But it’s bittersweet. “I think there’s definitely an aspect of her that’s like, ‘It’s a little late.’”
The Fight Club director isn’t — this might not shock you — overly sentimental. But
Mank clearly means a lot. Oldman speculates on the feeling. “It’s like, ‘I won’t let you down, Dad.’” Fincher isn’t about to phrase it like that. There will be no teary-eyed confession of making Pops proud. But he cares. “I always care what the writer thinks about a movie over everyone else,” he says. “Because I think that’s my responsibility. And this is the one case where I’ll never know, but it doesn’t change the fact that I thought — I still think — it’s a good script.”
As the days go by on set, now shooting the scene they rehearsed, Fincher’s drive is remarkable. They’ve cut the time — down to “7.48” — but press on. Oldman seems alternately exhausted — “I’ve lost my mojo, David” — and then, on our final day, exhilarated. This could be his most vulnerable, open-hearted performance. Fincher is more or less as he was, always striving to make it better. But, well, it has taken three decades to get to this point. At lunch he checks a new camera set-up. “Could be good,” he says. “If we don’t fuck it up.”