The Killer begins with an assassin (Michael Fassbender) in a half-completed WeWork office awaiting the arrival of his latest target. As he waits, he details his vocational mantras for the audience in voiceover: stick to the plan. Don’t improvise. Never yield an advantage. Forbid empathy. Fassbender proceeds to miss his shot and spends the rest of the film breaking each and every one of those tenets in the chaotic aftermath. Many of the pieces written about the film have pointed out perceived similarities between the film’s methodical, detail-oriented titular character and the perfectionist reputation of its director, David Fincher. However, […]

The first trailer has arrived for David Fincher’s The Killer ahead of its imminent Venice Film Festival premiere. Based on Alexis Nolent’s graphic novel series, the film stars Michael Fassbender as a professional assassin embarking on an international manhunt and also features Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard, Kerry O’Malley, Sophie Charlotte, Sala Baker, Emiliano Pernía and Gabriel Polanco. Fincher’s follow-up to Mank has the director reuniting with Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. Ahead of the film’s Venice debut, read Fincher’s director’s statement from the Biennale website: The Killer is my attempt to reconcile notions I’ve had for years about cinematic […]

According to their official credits, Being the Ricardos is the first time Aaron Sorkin has directed with Jeff Cronenweth behind the camera. Unofficially, that collaboration began a decade ago with a shot of an envelope. On the final day of production on 2010’s The Social Network—which earned Sorkin an Oscar for best screenplay and Cronenweth a cinematography nomination—director David Fincher dipped before the final shot to avoid the emotional wrap goodbyes, leaving Sorkin and Cronenweth in charge of the last insert.  “It was the shot where [Mark Zuckerberg’s] partner is accepted into the social club and there’s an envelope slid […]

In recreating in Mank the experiences from 1930 to 1940 that led screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, David Fincher has said his goal was to make a film that looked and felt of its era. But that fidelity only goes so far: On the visual side, Mank’s black-and-white look is captured in period-anomalous widescreen. Similarly, Mank uses a LCR (left-center-right) sound mix rather than pure mono. “We’re not trying to fool anybody by saying this is a mono mix,” says Fincher’s career-long sound designer Ren Klyce. “The goal was to make the film sound old-fashioned and from […]

In 1941, a 25-year-old Orson Welles made one of cinema’s most auspicious debuts by directing, co-writing, starring in and producing Citizen Kane. With Mank—David Fincher’s look at the evolution of Kane’s screenplay—cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt makes an impressive feature bow of his own.  After working his way up through the ranks of grip and electric and earning DP credits on the shows Legion, Mindhunter and Fargo, Messerschmidt’s very first fiction feature has landed him in the midst of Oscar conversation. With Mank now streaming on Netflix, Messerschmidt spoke with Filmmaker about deep focus, high ISOs and painting in lens flares; and how even […]

The last time I wrote about film color for this magazine was on the ways 35mm shooting and digital color combined in Uncut Gems and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to create contemporary looks strongly engaged with the past, resulting in what we might call a look “more filmic than film.” David Fincher’s Mank, along with a second season of the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian, gives us an opportunity to consider how digital and celluloid tendencies combine from the opposite direction—both were shot digitally, then graded to explicitly evoke celluloid. Once again, color grading and capture format […]

English actor Tuppence Middleton is on a steady, slow rise and that seems to suit her just fine. On this side of the pond she’s perhaps best known for playing Riley Blue on the Netflix sci-fi series Sense8 and Lucy Smith in the Downton Abbey movie, but you’d be foolish not to seek out her work in Trap For Cinderella and War and Peace. Now she’s part of the impressive ensemble in David Fincher’s latest film Mank. She plays “Poor Sara” Mankiewicz, wife of the alcoholic co-writer of Citizen Kane, played by Gary Oldman. I ask her about working with […]

Netflix has just dropped the first teaser for Mank, David Fincher’s first film since 2014’s Gone Girl. Working from a script by his late father, Jack, Mank re-examines the writing of Citizen Kane. Its title hints at the presumed agenda, which is to re-litigate the issue of whether screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz was the true force behind Orson Welles’s debut. It’s worth noting that Jack Fincher never had a screenplay credited to him in his life, although his IMDb page claims that “He once wrote a Howard Hughes biopic before it was decided to go with John Logan [sic] script for The Aviator (2004) instead.” Mank is […]

On October 1, The Social Network turns ten. The RED Mysterium X sensor (also turning ten) that rendered the film is now outmoded, but The Social Network thrives due to, not in spite of, the marks of its time. The limited latitude of the once cutting-edge camera sensor pushed David Fincher and DP Jeff Cronenweth—who also shot Fincher’s Fight Club, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl—into the darker bends of The Social Network’s imitation Harvard dorms. The camera struggled with highlights, so they avoided hot windows and sunny exteriors. It also strained to digest warm tones, so they chose […]

The greatest soccer player of his time, Diego Maradona was also the sport’s highest-paid athlete until he was forced out of competition due to his criminal connections and substance abuse problems. Director Asif Kapadia built the HBO Sports release Diego Maradona from over 500 hours of archival footage, much of it never seen by the public. After a theatrical run for Oscar consideration, Diego Maradona is now screening on HBO. The documentary focuses on Maradona’s years in Naples, where he led the Società Sportiva Calcio Napoli team to its first league championship. A native of Argentina, Maradona also played in […]