Nerding Out With David Fincher

The Hollywood history behind the director’s passion project

David fincher’s 11th feature film, Mank, is a passion project like no other on the director’s résumé—a drama, shot in black and white, about the formative years of Hollywood’s sound era, the agony and the ecstasy of what he calls “enforced collaboration” between directors and writers, and the political ruthlessness of Golden Age studios, told through the journey of an unlikely hero: Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), the newspaperman turned screenwriter who co-wrote (or wrote, depending on your POV) the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Every frame of the movie brims with the director’s loving but unsentimental view of film history and of filmmaking—and also carries an unexpected wallop of political resonance with media manipulation and the creation of “fake news,” disinformation that couldn’t pos

sibly have been anticipated 30 years ago, when his late father, Jack, first wrote the script. Mank is an unusually personal film for Fincher, not only because it memorializes his work with his father (who died in 2003) but because, in a way, it continues a passionate conversation about movies that began between the two of them when Fincher was a boy. Its history also spans Fincher’s entire feature career—the original draft was written just before he went off to direct his first film. In two interviews over a long weekend, the director talked about bringing it to the screen.

You and I are about the same age, and I grew up as a movie buff like you. And even before I saw Citizen Kane, I knew the received wisdom was that it was the greatest American movie of all time.

Exactly. My dad, because he was a journalist, lived by the axiom that the greatest entertainment was written by people who understood the real world, and his love of The Front Page and Citizen Kane certainly supported the idea that the best movies were grounded in reality by their creators, who often came with fairly extensive journalism backgrounds. When we talked about stupid things like “Are the Beatles the best band in the world?” he would say, “Well, here are certain perspectives on that.” But when it got down to “What’s the greatest movie ever made?” it was without pause

Citizen Kane. I remember at age 12 telling him that we were going to be watching a 16-mm. version of Citizen Kane in filmappreciation class. I was a tad reticent because … a 33-year-old movie? It seemed like a cave painting. But when I saw it, I was amazed. Without understanding the virtuosity of the direction, I understood it as something that had this sure-footedness— not something I was used to with That Darn Cat! and The Love Bug. I was smitten. I felt like I had seen something that was important in ways I didn’t understand yet.

It sounds like it hit you at an age when you were mostly watching kids’ movies.

In our house, my father believed it was quality over quantity. My dad was raised in a movie theater. His father was an abusive alcoholic, and his mother worked all the time, so he spent a lot of weekends unmonitored watching the same Tom Mix Western three times, and that was a calming and safe place for him. He was okay if I went to see Westworld or The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, but he would also say, “That’s junk.” He forgave me my trespasses, but he also took me to see Dr. Strangelove when I was 9 and

2001: A Space Odyssey when I was 7. We would probably see a movie a week together up until I was in my mid-teens.

Did your father talk to you about Herman Mankiewicz?

I don’t think my father was even really aware of Mankiewicz. It wasn’t until he retired from writing magazine stories that he said, “I’m thinking about writing a screenplay.” He was 60 or 61, and the first thing he said was, “What should I tackle as a subject?” I said, “Why don’t you write about Herman Mankiewicz?” He was tickled with that idea, and he went off and gave it his best shot, but it ended up being limited in its scope. It was [about] a great writer obliterated from memory by this showboating megalomaniac.

When was this in terms of your own career?

I hadn’t directed a movie yet. I was just going off to do that. Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate [1992’s Alien 3], I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work. I kind of resented his anti-auteurist take. I felt that what the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration: You may not like the fact that you’re going to be beholden to so many different disciplines and skill sets in the making of a movie, but if you’re not acknowledging it, you’re missing the side of the barn. A script is the egg, and it needs a donor to create the cellular split that moves it into the realm of something playable in three dimensions and recordable in two dimensions and presentable to other people. So it was interesting for the two of us, because obviously I was rooting for him, but when I read his first draft, I thought, This is kind of a takedown of Welles. When I was 12, he told me about how Welles had played every role—writer, producer, director, star. So I knew that part of him held Welles in awe. Then the script came in and I thought, Whoa, who’s this?

One thing I loved about Mank is that it has a great deal of empathy for Mankiewicz, but it’s not anti-director.

The first draft just felt like revenge. I said to him, “You’re talking about two people staking out their 40 acres, and never the twain shall meet. And that can’t happen if you’re making a movie. You don’t get to just do your thing.” For all his magazine stories about filmmakers, he knew the vernacular, but he didn’t understand where the blueprint ends and the geological survey begins. That was difficult. We worked on it for a while, and then I threw up my hands and went off to make Se7en. And he discovered the Upton Sinclair epic campaign [the massive antipoverty public-works initiative that formed the basis for Sinclair’s 1934 California gubernatorial run]; he learned how [studio heads Irving] Thalberg and [Louis B.] Mayer, in cahoots with Hearst, had sort of pioneered fake news [by cutting phony anti-Sinclair newsreels].

After what Meyer and Thalberg did to Sinclair’s campaign, the film suggests that Mankiewicz felt he’d sacrificed his own integrity.

At first, when [Jack] presented it to me, I said, “I don’t see how this is part of Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz’s problematic relationship.” Jack, to his credit, said, “I think there’s something in here about somebody who discovers that their words are important.” At the time, it didn’t strike me as a middleaged man taking stock of his life’s contributions. I wasn’t sensitive to that because I was 30, and I probably didn’t realize what this opportunity was to him. But as I started thinking about it, I realized it was amazing marrow out of which to grow the red blood cells needed for this story, which is about a man finding his voice. How could you come from intellectual parents who wanted so much for their kids and end up in Hollywood? [Herman and his brother Joseph] had come out to help save the spoken word in cinema. I was always pretty sure that Herman thought he was slumming, and I know Jack did. So this was a place where the three of us could relate. I remember making music videos where people would say, “Oh my God, you did that George Michael video? That’s amazing.” I’d think, Contain yourself. It’s just a music video with a bunch of supermodels.

I could relate to that.

When the first draft of Kane is ready for Welles, Mankiewicz says, “I built him a watertight narrative and a suggested destination. Where he takes it, that’s his job.” Is that how you think writers see directors,

“There are people in this movie who weren’t born when the script was written.”

or is it how you see a director’s job?

I feel the line is the greatest hope that a writer can have for his script: “This is the end of my work. My stay here is done.” Then, like Superman, they take off. I think the reason the [Citizen Kane] script is so good is that Herman went into it going,

Whew, thank God my name’s not on it. I’ll work again. He took the gloves off, and he did his best work. And there’s absolutely no argument—Welles was a fucking genius. The fact that this is his first movie is beyond shocking. Anybody standing on his shoulders is in awe of him, but having said that, I’ve seen movies he made from scripts that he wrote. They’re not in the same league.

To what extent do you see Mankiewicz’s story as a cautionary tale?

I never wanted it to be cautionary. I think it’s about alcoholism—both sides of alcoholism. A guy self-immolating, and also the other side, which is that people go, “Oh my God, he was so much funnier before he got off blow.” It’s a little pathetic to watch somebody whose wife has to help him out of his clothes. But that’s also who he was. Sometimes those people are ten times more brilliant inebriated than they are straight. It’s definitely a conflicted view, but it felt more realistic to me.

How easy was it to get your cast into the film’s period speaking style?

Gary can do anything. If you said to some of the other members of the cast, “You need to do this like George Sanders,” they would be like, “What? Who’s that?” But Gary and Charles Dance, their eyebrows would shoot up and they would nod and smile, and they would know what you were asking for.

Did the pandemic impede you at all?

We originally planned on looping the entire movie. There are so many exteriors, and you can’t go a block in Los Angeles without hearing a leaf blower. We didn’t do as much of it as we had planned on doing, but we did a lot. Because

[laughs], and I don’t know if you know this … I shoot a few takes. So we were able to steal audio from different places, and we didn’t end up having to loop very much—which was good because looping turned out to be one of the most bizarre and Andromeda Strain–like processes.

In what way?

We would go into a studio, and everyone would wear masks. Then they would come in with these foggers and antiviralspray the room, and we would leave for half an hour, and then come back and do six or seven lines, and then leave, and they would fumigate. It was insanity. Amanda [Seyfried] did all of her looping from her home in upstate New York. They sent a whole rig for her, and she did all her looping by Zoom.

The film looks and sounds like something created in the studio era.

Ren Klyce, who is the sound designer, and I started talking years ago about how we wanted to make this feel like it was found in the UCLA archives—or in Martin Scorsese’s basement on its way to restoration. Everything has been compressed and made to sound like the 1940s. The music has been recorded with older microphones so it has a sort of sizzle and wheeze around the edges—you get it from strings, but you mostly get it from brass. What you’re hearing is a revival house—an old theater playing a movie. Visually, our notion was we’re going to shoot super-high resolution and then we’re going to degrade it. So we took most everything and softened it to an absurd extent to try to match the look of the era. We probably lost two-thirds of the resolution in order to make it have the same feel, and then we put in little scratches and digs and cigarette burns.

I noticed you put in reel-change circles.

Yes, and we made the soundtrack pop like it does when you do a reel changeover. It’s one of the most comforting sounds in my life.

You are in the top tier of directors who work with screenwriters instead of writing their own scripts, and that’s fairly unusual in our current era of the directorscreenwriter. And you don’t take credit for the contributions that I’m sure you make to those scripts.

I’m not a writer. I don’t take credit for things that I don’t do. Listen, I’m the offspring of a writer. I can’t. I’ve watched somebody put a blank piece of paper in a 1928 Underwood and sit there for 45 minutes. I know how lonely that is.

And, to state the obvious, it was your father, so that brings a whole—

Yeah, there’s no doubt. I don’t want to get mawkish about that, but I mean … it’s the love of a film that was given to me by someone whom I could talk over these things with and really excavate—and then he was gone. I did have conversations with Ceán [Chaffin, Fincher’s wife and producer] in which she said, “How much of this are you doing for yourself ?” She said to me, “You’ve been thinking about this movie too fucking long. It’s not doing you any favors.” There are people in this movie who weren’t born when the script was written. Two years is enough pre-visualization. Twenty years is too much. I have nine drafts on my shelf. I’m cleaning off that shelf. It’s time to take a deep breath. ■