The David Fincher Shuffle

Started by mutinyco, September 07, 2003, 11:54:40 AM

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wilder

David Fincher, Gary Oldman Team On B&W 'Mank' At Netflix; Film On 'Citizen Kane' Writer Herman J. Mankiewicz Scripted By Fincher's Late Father Howard
via Deadline

After making the groundbreaking series House of Cards and Mindhunter at Netflix, David Fincher will direct his first feature film for the streaming service. He'll helm Mank, a long gestating dream project for the filmmaker about the man who shared the Best Original screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles. Gary Oldman is going to star as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz in a drama that was scripted by Fincher's late father, Howard Fincher.

The film is coming together for a November shoot in Los Angeles, and Fincher will shoot in black and white. Ceán Chaffin will produce the picture with Douglas J. Urbanski, Oldman's partner who was Oscar nominated for producing Darkest Hour, the film that won Oldman the Best Actor Oscar.

Mank was once going to be Fincher's follow his 1997 film The Game, and at one time it was going to star his future House of Cards star leading man Kevin Spacey as the storied screenwriter. It fell apart because of the filmmaker's insistence that he shoot in black and white, as Citizen Kane was shot. Fincher was particularly passionate about the script written by his own father, the former Life Magazine bureau chief who died in 2003.

Mankiewicz was one of the best known and best paid screenwriters in the early years of Hollywood and he clashed loudly with Orson Welles over the credit on the seminal drama Citizen Kane, and it took a great toll on him. A former Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the drama critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker, Mankiewicz wrote for the some of the most prominent movies of his period, and both he and Welles shared the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Citizen Kane in 1941. Other films he worked on during his career included The Wizard of Oz, Man of the World, Dinner at Eight, Pride of the Yankees and The Pride of St. Louis. While he was known for a satirical sense of humor he lent to his scripts, this story isn't a happy one.

Alethia


WorldForgot

What Happened Between Madonna and David Fincher? by Sydney Urbanek

Great write up on the intimate collaboration and relationship ~

Quote

“Are you looking for your Josef von Sternberg?” the interviewer asks.

“Um, yeah. I am,” Madonna responds, laughing.

“And what does—”

“I sort of have… I sort of feel like I have one, but he directs all my videos,” Madonna says, interrupting her. “His name is David Fincher, and we work on everything together, and we probably will do a movie someday. But I feel like the relationship I have with him is the one that she had with him, that Marlene had with von Sternberg.”

“What does it take to direct you?”

“It’s just almost like a silent language. It’s with eyes, you know, when you know someone so well. And it also has to do with love. I think the director kind of has to be in love with the actress, and only want the best for her.”

[...]

“I had kinda talked Madonna into releasing ‘Oh Father’ as a single,” Fincher told The Guardian in 2009. Presumably, he’d listened to all of Like a Prayer and been drawn to the song, but there was no reason to make a video for it unless it was released as a single. The video that he ended up making was loosely autobiographical, connecting Madonna’s fraught relationship with her father to the loss of her mother, Madonna Sr. Shot in October and released in November of 1989, it begins with a reference to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), a film that Fincher has obviously returned to for the forthcoming Mank (2020). An adult Madonna performs the song while her childhood self buries and mourns her mother, navigating her grieving and short-tempered father all the while. When real-life Madonna Sr. died in 1963, then five-year-old Madonna noticed at the funeral that her mother’s mouth “looked funny,” learning that her lips had been sewn shut.

Fincher directly recreated this memory in his video, obviously in collaboration with his client. The only party not on board was MTV, who reportedly found the shot disturbing and asked that it be removed. Madonna declined, and the network wouldn’t have been in a position to piss her off any further.

Madonna was an astute businesswoman, so the fact that she agreed to release “Oh Father” as a single on Fincher’s recommendation speaks to a level of trust between the two. “We were very happy with the video,” Fincher said. “But nobody ever saw it because the song wasn’t a hit.” It’s reasonable to conclude that their entanglement had begun by this point, since Fincher was now not only being made privy to Madonna’s childhood traumas—there are no references to Madonna’s mother in the song’s lyrics—but actually influencing her business moves. “You screwed me up,” she’d tell him in the new year. “You wanted to make this video for the song and no one liked the song and I went to bat for you and now I have to make a video by Tuesday.” As Fincher has explained, “And I said, ‘What’s the song called?’ And she said, ‘Vogue.’”