David Fincher is out promoting his revisionist tale of old Hollywood, Mank, which just hit theaters and will debut on Netflix on December 4. In an interview with The Telegraph, the director of Zodiac and The Social Network made some asides that went a little off-script from the usual “it was so wonderful to work with soandso.”
He took some swipes at the major studios and their hesitance to make original films. After reflecting on his time making Fight Club with Warner Bros., he said they only rolled the dice on Joker because they’d already scored such a huge hit with The Dark Knight. “Yeah, let’s take Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin” — Robert De Niro‘s characters from the Martin Scorsese films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy — “and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars,” Fincher said sarcastically.
While the brunt of his bile was aimed at the studio system (he also remarked that something “medium-priced” with “big ideas” like his own recent film Gone Girl only got greenlit because the book was such a bestseller), his suggestion that Joker was a “betrayal of the mentally ill” may find Fincher off Todd Phillips‘s Christmas card list.
In an interview with French Premiere, as caught by The Playlist, Fincher advanced the theories of Mank that the authorship of Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane was more collaborative than some people realize. “[A]t 25, you don’t know what you don’t know,” he said of the theater and radio wunderkind who stormed Hollywood. He paraphrased Welles saying “it only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography” then called b.s. on that, saying “this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have Gregg Toland around him to prepare the next shot.”
Classic cinema buffs the likes of which book passage on the TCM Cruise immediately reached for their smelling salts.
Elsewhere in the Telegraph article he touched upon Woody Allen‘s film Manhattan (he called it “stained by time”) and added that he is developing a series on “cancel culture.”
“At its heart it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology,” he said. “If you give a truly heartfelt apology and no one believes it, did you even apologize at all? It’s a troubling idea. But we live in troubling times.”
Fincher’s series House of Cards was among the first substantial projects in Hollywood that underwent major changes during the #MeToo movement, when allegations were made against its star Kevin Spacey.
Earlier in the week, streamer Netflix and Fincher inked a four-year exclusive deal. “I’m here to deliver them ‘content’ — whatever that means,” he said.
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