David Fincher – he of the dark and twisted cinematic mien – is on a tear. The notoriously fussy and serial killer-prone director (“Zodiac,” Fight Club, “Seven”) usually takes years between projects quietly developing something he hopes will be up to snuff, but the filmmaker has recently become to a spate of projects – or at least for him.
First off there’s that “Fight Club” musical that will likely never happen (but the fact he’s even deigned to talk about it is something), than there’s the adaptation of three graphic novels; the perverse Charles Burns book “Black Hole,” and the “assassin suddenly plagued by his conscience,” tale “The Killer;” and the true crime chronicle, “Torso.”
Now comes word that he’s attached to yet another project; directing part of an animated version of sci-fi nerd fantasy porn magazine “Heavy Metal” according to Variety.
Fincher will direct one segment of the nine-part anthology, with other directors including Kevin Eastman (owner of Heavy Metal) and Tim Miller. All three will produce the film.
Of course there already was an animated “Heavy Metal” movie made in 1981 that became quite the cult-film brandishing a lot of the near-soft-core porn, erotica and violence that made the magazine so popular with adolescent boys of the ’70s and ’80s fond of science-fiction and masturbation (the hesher-heavy rock soundtrack that featured Dio-era Sabbath, Sammy Hagar, Nazareth, Blue Oyster Cult, Grand Funk Railroad and many other ‘stache-friendly dude-rockers was also pretty popular at the time).
But before all these prospective Fincher projects, we’ll see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” starring Brad Pitt as an old man who physically ages backwards which is due in the fall of 2008. Pitt’s character fall in love with a 30-year-old woman (Cate Blanchett) and then must come to terms with the relationship as they literally grow in opposite directions. The film has been wrapped for some time now and the special effects for Pitt to convincingly age backwards have been worked on furiously for months.
Trailer: “Heavy Metal” (’80s version)
Watch: “Heavy Metal” Scene set to Rush’s “Necromancer”