Out promoting his new film “Mank,” filmmaker David Fincher has been out doing interviews and offering enjoyable frank responses to questions about both his work on screen and that of other filmmakers.
However this weekend Fincher’s comments to The Telegraph have seen him start a social media conversation about film merits not really seen since Martin Scorsese’s infamous “MCU movies are theme park rides” talk a year ago.
This time though it’s about numerous topics with “Joker,’ and to a lesser extent both Orson Welles and cancel culture, coming into play and all fuelled by sensationalistic headlines which misframe said comments.
As part of the interview, Fincher spoke about how difficult it was to get “Mank” made when studios are now so risk-averse and “don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars”. Then he cites Todd Phillips’ “Joker” as an example of a risk that paid off big for the studio:
“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. I don’t think Âanyone 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.
I’m sure that Warner Bros thought at a certain price, and with the right cast, and with De Niro coming along for the ride, it would be a possible double or triple. But I cannot imagine that movie would have been released had it been 1999.”
That 1999 mention is very specific as it refers to Fincher’s own “Fight Club” which was a highly controversial studio film for its time. He goes on to say:
“The general view afterwards among the studio types was, ‘Our careers are over.’ The fact we got that film [Fight Club] made in 1999 is still, to my mind, a miracle. The reality of our current situation is that the five families 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. It would have been impossible to get a movie [like ‘Gone Girl’] 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.”
The comment seems to have generated controversy on Film Twitter with numerous misinterpretations of the original quotes. Not done throwing hot takes though, Fincher discussed Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan” and says he’s doing a show centered on cancel culture: “At its heart, it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology. 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.”
Then he hopped over to Premiere France where, having done “Mank” now, was asked about his honest thoughts on “Citizen Kane” filmmaker Orson Welles. Fincher had plenty to say, namely about Welles’ failure to acknowledge the genius around him that helped him:
“I think Orson Welles’ tragedy lies in the mix between monumental talent and filthy immaturity. Sure, there is genius in ‘Citizen Kane,’ who could argue? But when Welles says, ‘It only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography,’ pfff… Let’s say that this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have Gregg Toland around him to prepare the next shot… Gregg Toland, damn it, an insane genius!
I say that without wanting to be disrespectful to Welles, I know what I owe him, like I know what I owe Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, or Hal Ashby. But at 25, you don’t know what you don’t know. Period. Neither Welles, nor anyone. It doesn’t take anything away from him, and especially not his place in the pantheon of those who have influenced entire generations of filmmakers. But to claim that Orson Welles came out of nowhere to make ‘Citizen Kane’ and that the rest of his filmography was ruined by the interventions of ill-intentioned people, it’s not serious, and it is underestimating the disastrous impact of his own delusional hubris.”
We’ll get a better idea of Fincher’s opinion of Welles with “Mank” which has just hit select theaters and will arrive on Netflix on December 4th.
