David Fincher, the Unhappiest Auteur
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
One thing Tarantino said about Fincher though is there's a difference between directors like him and Fincher. I agree but it's not negative how he portrayed it. It's one thing to write your own film and then direct it and the other for someone else to write it and you interpret it. Take what you will from it, I don't take it as negative but different.
Alien 3 was my first thought when I saw David Fincher in this headline. As flawed as that movie was, I still really enjoyed it. I can tell he legitimately tried to make it a legitimate "art" piece in his mind.
Your commentary about him being young+big money... is absolutely correct. Alien 3 could have had 3x the box market pop if there was a more collaborative process in my view.
Oh well, you live and you learn. Personal bias: I have enjoyed pretty much every one of David Fincher's movies.
Where are you getting this? The story about Alien 3's production has been told from a few different points of view and I've never heard it said that Fincher took too much advice.
While I immensely enjoy his films, it seems that he has great distain for the fact that filmmaking is a community effort, and simultaneously doesn't have it in himself to fight for his choices, so he just eliminates choice where he can.
Watching his progression over the years, I feel like the penultimate David Fincher film would be sans-actors and camera movement, followed by a film of raw script text pages with his red marker notes scribbled on them.
It seems like a valid approach for a highly budget-constrained indie director, but for someone in his position that is completely nuts. I wonder if he was being hyperbolic.
Thanks, that's super interesting.
On the bonus material for the Alien box set, which Fincher didn't participate in, a number of people who commented (studio people, producers on set, etc., IIRC) said they felt they were marginalized during the filming and that their advice was not heeded. All things considered, the documentary was very supportive of Fincher's point of view, that he was a victim of an overly controlling studio that didn't give him the funding he needed. So I guess there's a difference in point of view there regarding precisely when he stopped heeding others' advice. :)
Fincher's technical acumen and understanding of screen performance is exceptional. While his work can be hit or miss (just my opinion), he is almost inarguably one of the finest directors to practice in this medium of all time.
What a director does is more akin to structuring the day-to-day focus. A director who has taken to relaxing intent on some broad aspects of the production is going to have a smoother production, be more agreeable, be easy to hire again. But a director who is more stringent may deliver a product that coheres better. It's a kind of balancing act on the part of the producer to not end up with a staff full of prima donnas fighting for control and wasting money through indecision and résumé-driven development.
HBO will get new signups, the movie will get a marketing bill that keeps it in the red forever, and directors + actors with backend deals will get nothing.
It’s not really surprising, though. Think of the HBO ident; noise just does not compress well. I’ve encountered (supposedly well-encoded) 40+GB BRs of old b/w movies with obvious, distracting artifacts.
But then, most people can’t tell the difference.
As for the source of the problem, I’m sure it looked a lot like real film grain on the reference monitor, but on my screen it looks a bit embarrassing.
I ran into this dealing with marketing folks at [bigtechco] where bitrate restrictions were more severe: certain visuals got them very excited, but we had to tell them they just weren't achievable.
I don't know much about the video production process, but in the audio world it's standard practice to preview media on a range of devices. Creators would need something similar for video bitrate to avoid the situation Fincher is in here.
Externally, there are companies like Nielsen that attempt to derive ratings for steaming media (via surveys, paying people to install plugins, using audio fingerprinting etc), but it’s not clear how accurate they actually are.
I suppose I could be reluctantly convinced to part with $5 or $10 for the latest predictable comic book CGI-fest. I'll pay much more for Fincher, or anyone else I actually respect. Trying to charge the same for mass-market lowest-common-denominator marvel or transformers nonsense as something aimed for the sniff art crowd sniff just sounds unsustainable. There needs to be a free-floating price, just like any other product with different markets.
Firstly, I'm not certain of how the economics would play out: the "marvel or transformers nonsense" (and boy is it nonsense) tends to cost a lot of money to make, because they feature famous actors and they're end-to-end expensive CGI; arthouse films tend to be a lot cheaper because they feature less CGI, and sometimes the actors involved will work for less money because the films are more "worthy", or they like the director. More people watch the superhero drivel than the arthouse films, for sure, so perhaps it would all balance out, but it's unclear.
Secondly, while I broadly love Terrence Malick, if I'd paid £20 for "Knight of Cups" (which was dire), I would have to think very, very hard about parting with another £20 for his next film unless the notices were very good. I think you'd end up with a minuscule audience if you started marking up arthouse films in this way.
Unrelatedly, I have to admit that "Mank" sounds really boring and I'm not eager to watch it, even though I have a Netflix subscription and I've enjoyed many of Fincher's previous films (hell, I even liked "Alien 3").
Fincher is certainly no art house director. He makes big-budget movies with stars like Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck. He is kind of like Steven Spielberg - a director so talented in the craft he elevates rater middlebrow material to be uniquely enjoyable. Fincher just gets a bit more respect because he is "dark". But dark does not mean deep. For example Seven is really quite silly and contrived, but his excellence at directing makes us forget that.
So he's a great director like Spielberg - but he's in a different genre and willing to tackle less family friendly subjects. Sorry was this meant to be a criticism?
They're both great. Get off your high horse. Great cinema is great cinema. If you can't appreciate them both, there's something wrong with your taste in movies. Sounds like you don't like them just because they're popular, which is lame.
Of course Fincher isn't "art house" - although Mank is moving in that direction. But he's certainly not a multiplex pleaser. There's a lot of different genres and a fan base for all of them. The challenge is finding a model that makes this work.
> dark does not mean deep
Well I thought The Social Network and Zodiac were thoughtful and at least somewhat deep. I guess this can just turn into a "deepness" competition but eh, I liked them.
I don't know about "multiplex pleaser" - Gone Girl, Finchers previous movie, "topped the box office for two consecutive weekends" according to Wikipedia.
> there's something wrong with your taste in movies
Ironically, your comment is the only condescending one in this thread. Thanks for throwing a minor fit over one person's shared opinion.
That might kill "serious" movies even faster. The people that like to watch them don't necessarily have more income.
If I've decided to "make a night of" a movie, the ticket price is almost irrelevant. I guess I'm applying a very narrow stereotype but most of the "serious movie lovers" I know are fairly well paid. I'll pay for quality. Transformers - I wouldn't go even if it was free.
I just feel like there's something being squeezed out of the equation here.
>I just feel like there's something being squeezed out of the equation here.
As a European I'd add "state funding for the arts".
It's in no way more of a no-no than state funding for space is (which is how everything major has ever been achieved there, from NASA to Space-X, a state outsourcing/subsidy business if there ever was one).
I'm not even sure what point I'm making here. I think it would be a good thing if the Opera cost $10.
Here's a quote I've found - it appears it was popular with US folky types too:
Significantly, the opera house was the “first musical institution to open its doors to the general public” (Zelochow, 1993: 261).The first opera house opened in Venice in 1637: it presented “commercial opera run for profit . . . offering the new, up-to-date entertainment to anyone who could afford a ticket” (Raynor, 1972: 169). By the end of the century Venice had sixteen opera houses open to the general public. Interestingly, as Henry Raynor observes, “The Venetian audience consisted of all social classes” (ibid: 171). Bernard Zelochow argues that this remained the case throughout the next two centuries.
By the late eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century the opera played a preeminent role in the cultural life of Europe. The opera was enjoyed and understood by a broad cross-section of urban Europeans and Americans.The opera house became the meeting place of all social classes in society. . . . The absence of the concept of a classical repertoire is an index of the popularity and vigor of opera as a mode of communication and entertainment. (Zelochow, 1993: 262)
By the nineteenth century, then, opera was established as a widely available form of popular entertainment consumed by people of all social classes. As Lawrence W. Levine explains, referring specifically to the US (but also the case in most of Europe), opera was an integral part of a shared public culture, “performed in a variety of settings, [it] enjoyed great popularity, and [was] shared by a broad segment of the population” (Levine, 1988: 85).
For example, on returning to the United States in the late 1860s from England, where he had been American Consul, George Makepeace Towle noted how “Lucretia Borgia and Faust,The Barber of Seville and Don Giovanni are everywhere popular; you may hear their airs in the drawing room and concert halls, as well as whistled by the street boys and ground out on the hand organs” (quoted in Levine, 1988: 99–100).
Imagine Tarantino working as a video-store clerk, but still having a huge thing for movie history ("serious" and camp).
Or poor creatives, writers, etc. that love such works, but make shit.
(In Europe the "peniless artist" stereotype/reality is a very real thing, in music/theater/writing/painting/and so on, and those people do like such movies).
You'd probably never get that chance if prices floated; those films go out to a market that bases their social life on consuming genre fiction and for whom seeing them is not optional. Prices would shoot up to $40 a ticket, and marketing would just be laser-targeted towards that audience, who would pay like putting money into the collection tray at church. Kickstarter has proved that 5-10% of that audience would be willing to pay multiples of that (2x to probably 50x) extra without anything in return but exclusive tokens that are evidence that they paid.
IMO, mostly middle-of-the-road, highly-competent directors like Fincher would be in trouble in that world, since they are both going for a general audience and relying on a general media narrative of genius and award potential to market their films. Genre movies withdrawing from general reviewers and general marketing (like awards shows) reduces the impact of those awards, and leaves them as a de facto genre themselves - like mainstream literary fiction. Maybe able to crank out one or two films that crack the top 10 every year and barely self-supporting on average; highly dependent on government and institutional support.
Talent graduates from mainstream non-genre awards-show films to comic book films, not vice-versa, which is why awards shows are desperately trying to get those films into every category, as a means to market those traditional blockbusters to genre fans.
> mass-market lowest-common-denominator marvel or transformers nonsense
So, tl;dr, IMO Fincher is the mass-market lowest-common-denominator choice, and bombastic genre trash targets a small inelastic market that would still be sustainable at a far higher price point. The number who would pay a premium for Fincher wouldn't be enough to support his budgets and marketing. Mainstream Fincher films would only survive given away for a token (or in order to market something else.) 20M people would pay $60 for The Avengers 8, but 400M might be willing to pay $3 for Mank or watch it for free if you put it on all of some brand's devices as a promotion (like a U2 album, or Netflix.)
Of course Fincher would be (and probably is) highly desired in genre films, so in that world he'd probably be charging $100 per to 40M fans for The Incredulous Spider-Man: Sapphire Empire's Revenge Chapter II or The New Fast More Furious 19.
The movies were just ludicrous but I don't regret it. snap
Ticket prices for cinema likely pale in comparison to the changes as a result of technology improvements and COVID.
In the past two decades we've gone from the biggest home screens being a huge heavy CRT or mediocre projection screen, to large 1080p or 4k LCD and OLED displays. The average TV size was 25" in 2000, now approaching 50". [1] Audio has similar improvements, with not only built-in TV audio being better, but now with soundbars, subwoofers, wireless options, Atmos, etc it's much more common to have decent or excellent sound.
What does post-COVID theatre look like? I can't imagine it has zero effect.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/961283/united-states-ave...
They’re both “fun entertainment” but while one is a cynical money grab the other has a commitment to quality. Quality fun may seem paradoxical to some snobs but it is definitely possible.