David Fincher: film studios 'don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars'
The director of Fight Club and Gone Girl on his 30-year struggle to bring his father's script for Mank to the screen
By Robbie Collin, Film Critic
14 November 2020 • 6:01am
An hour or so into the 1999 premiere of Fight Club, David Fincher slipped outside for some air. The director hadn’t known exactly what to expect when his brutally violent black comedy was selected for the Venice Film Festival, but whatever the dream scenario had been, this wasn’t it. The walkouts had started early, and become a steady stream. The only audience members laughing were his leading men, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton – though in fairness, the two had shared a joint beforehand. The first review off the presses had described Fincher’s film as “an inadmissible assault on personal decency” with a fascist bent, and the festival crowd weren’t noticeably any more enthused.
“The resounding thuds every scene landed with just became too much,” Fincher, now 58, tells me from home via Zoom. He recalls sitting on the steps outside and watching half a dozen disgusted older women file past: “all wearing at least one item of leopard print, like six Anne Bancrofts in The Graduate.” One evidently recognised the American enfant terrible and hissed something to her companions, who looked across and shook their heads in sync. “It was then I knew that what we’d done was wrong,” he says, beaming with pride.
Fincher’s tremendous latest film – his first since Gone Girl in 2014 – is unlikely to cause many viewers to storm home, not least because they’ll already be there when they watch it. Mank is a Netflix production, filmed just before the pandemic struck, but edited, polished and due to be released under lockdown conditions. Set in the Golden Age of Hollywood and shot in silvery monochrome, it follows the political chicanery and personal vendettas that led to the writing of Citizen Kane: a film released in 1941, and still widely considered the greatest ever made. Mank’s hero isn’t Orson Welles, Kane’s startlingly young director and star (he was 25 when it was released), but Gary Oldman’s Herman J Mankiewicz – a wildly talented screenwriter and incorrigible gambler and drunk, whom Welles enlisted to ghostwrite the script.
Mank’s own screenplay was written by Fincher’s late father, the journalist Jack Fincher, who died in 2003, and fed his son’s love of cinema from an early age. “It wasn’t that he set a curriculum as such, but he told me, ‘Look, if you’re gonna watch Westworld or Herbie the Love Bug, you have to temper that with the good stuff,’” he laughs. Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey were among the early set texts, but Kane was the pinnacle. “When I told him I was going to be watching it at school, he was like, ‘Get ready to talk about it with me afterwards, because this is the big one.’ ”
When Jack retired at 60, he decided he wanted to write a film of his own, and sought guidance from his son, who was then in his late 20s, and honing his craft as Madonna’s favoured purveyor of music videos. (Vogue and Express Yourself were two of his.) David suggested the tumultuous writing of Kane as a subject, and while his father got to work, he left for Pinewood Studios to make Alien 3 – a process which itself was not exactly silky-smooth.
“When I got back, the script he’d written was very much about this megalomaniacal young director trampling all over his collaborators, and I was like, ‘Hang on, it’s not as simple as that!’” he laughs. “Even when they give a 25-year-old the keys to the kingdom, they’ve still got to get all the troops facing the same direction.” Over the following years, Jack continued to revise the script, and in the late-1990s, David shopped it around the studios with a major star – one Kevin Spacey, with whom he’d worked on Seven and would later reunite for House of Cards – already attached. But his insistence on making the film in period-accurate black and white was always a deal-breaker, and when Jack was diagnosed with cancer in 2002, he had to come to terms with the fact that he wouldn’t live to see it made.
It was only last year, when Fincher was invited by Netflix to pitch a new project after polishing off the second series of his serial killer drama Mindhunter, that Mank slid into the realm of the possible. The streaming service OK’d every idiosyncratic detail, from having the cast perform in the clipped, precise style of the day – what Fincher calls “the ‘know your lines and don’t knock over the furniture’ school of acting” – to the fades-to-black between scenes, replicated by actually turning down the lights on set. The finished item is an astonishment – a personal tragedy, a Hollywood mystery, and an indictment of the unnerving American entente between power and entertainment. When I ask what Fincher thinks his father would have made of the film, he smiles. “He would have thought we went too easy on Welles.”
An astonishment: Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz in a scene from Mank Credit: Netflix
Having only ever worked with other people’s scripts, the writer-versus-director clash of perspectives is one Fincher knows all too well. “Did Welles or Mankiewicz deserve the lion’s share of the credit for Citizen Kane?” he asks. “I don’t even care. Did they get the best out of each other? Undoubtedly yes. It’s always with the best of intentions that you duel to the death.”
It makes sense that Netflix would be the ones to let Fincher make Mank. It was his 2013 political thriller for them, House of Cards, that all but single-handedly established streaming as the medium for the kind of mature, complex storytelling that Hollywood had forsaken in the franchise gold rush of the 2000s. Does he worry that his pivotal role in Netflix’s rise may have helped pave the way for old-fashioned cinema’s downfall?
“There’s still nothing better than seeing the curtains open and 700 to 1,200 people sharing a great film together,” he says. “But that hasn’t been my experience in a long time. You know, it’s now, ‘Would you please turn that off?’ or, ‘Can I ask you please to stop talking?’ ” As for the technical considerations: “I’ve been more impressed with the quality control at Netflix than at any other studio. Is every movie made to be seen 45ft across? To be honest, no. We put an awful lot of effort into the images in Gone Girl, but for most people to see that story on a 65-inch screen at home is fine by me.”
Besides, he goes on, it was the studios that ceded the ground in the first place. “The reality of our current situation is that the five families” – a sly Godfather gag, there – “don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars. None of them want to be in the medium-priced challenging content business. And that cleaves off exactly the kind of movies I make. What the streamers are doing is providing a platform for the kind of cinema that actually reflects our culture and wrestles with big ideas: where things are, what people are anxious and unsure about. Those are the kinds of movies that would have been dead on arrival five years ago.”
Six and a bit years ago, Gone Girl, adapted from Gillian Flynn’s popular page-turner, felt to him like the last stage out of Dodge. “It would have been impossible to get a movie with that discordant, evaporating ending made if we hadn’t been able to point to the book’s place on The New York Times bestseller list.”
Yet Fincher believes the studios still take their cues from ideas-driven films, even in our blockbuster-fixated age. “Nobody would have thought they had a shot at a giant hit with Joker had The Dark Knight not been as massive as it was,” he suggests. “I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, ‘Yeah, let’s take [Taxi Driver’s] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy’s] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars.’”
'The fact we got that film made is still, to my mind, a miracle': Brad Pitt in Fight Club (1999) Credit: Moviestore Collection / Rex Features
He contrasts Warner Bros’ Oscar-focused early confidence in Joker with the mood of blood-draining panic at an early screening of Fight Club at Fox, “where the general view afterwards among the studio types was, ‘Our careers are over.’ The fact we got that film made in 1999 is still, to my mind, a miracle.”
With House of Cards, on the other hand, Netflix’s deep wells of data always suggested the series would be devoured by subscribers, though the show was hardly held in universal high regard at first. “People were saying, ‘Washington doesn’t work like this! It’s all been shockingly dumbed down!’,” he remembers. Before production began, he and the series’ creator Beau Willimon “spent a summer in DC just going to restaurants, eavesdropping on conversations, and stealing from them. People were saying, ‘This has been reduced to the most flagrant and stupid and obvious…’ and I was like, ‘That was verbatim.’ ”
How about now, though? In 2017, Spacey was accused of sexual misconduct and although the charges have since been dropped, he was written out of the show’s final series. Does Fincher feel the saga has tarnished its legacy?
“I really don’t know,” he says. “I mean, I have a soft spot for Manhattan” – the 1979 Woody Allen film about a romance between a 42-year-old writer and a 17-year-old girl – “which is a movie that has become incredibly stained by time. But from a purely cinematic standpoint, you know, it’s hard for me to…” He breaks off, then explains he’s been swatting around ideas for a miniseries on the subject of cancel culture, that chronicles the fallout from a set of grisly celebrity revelations. “At its heart it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology,” he elaborates. “If you give a truly heartfelt apology and no one believes it, did you even apologise at all? It’s a troubling idea. But we live in troubling times.”
Fincher may be the ideal filmmaker to negotiate them. After all, it was he who, in 1995, pre-empted a darkening in the global mood with Seven – the baleful, despair-inducing neo-noir that somehow became that year’s seventh highest-grossing film. “The fact that Seven made the kind of money that it did was as big a shock to me as to the people who paid for it,” he says. “But the beauty of it was we stuck to our guns.” He happily recalls negotiating with both the production company and the Motion Picture Association – the US censorship board – over the film’s elaborately brutal murders, none of which we actually see taking place.
“Everything’s insinuated,” he says. “It’s always a great thing to be able to say to the MPA, ‘Well, we didn’t show it, we only talked about it. If you saw it, it was only in your dirty little mind.’ No other art form can give you that kind of access to someone’s entire brain for two-plus hours. And the space between what you show the audience and what they experience is the most interesting part of the whole transaction.”
Mank is on Netflix from Dec 4
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