David Fincher seems to be the first person to admit that he’s not the easiest filmmaker to work with. That doesn’t mean he’s a terrible person or an awful director. From most accounts, it seems to be the exact opposite. But he is, and will seemingly admit to it, a detail-oriented person. Camera angles, lenses, lighting, actor placement, movement, everything is dictated by Fincher in precise detail. And this seems to have various effects on his colleagues, including Jake Gyllenhaal during the making of “Zodiac.”
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In a new New York Times profile of the “Mank” filmmaker, the topic of his relationship with actors and his perfectionism once again comes up.
“OK, let’s get to what he’s an [expletive] about,” said Eric Roth, a writer who has worked with Fincher on multiple projects. “He’s a taskmaster to a fault, and he’ll argue to the death with you. He’s a prosecutor — he makes me so uncomfortable. ‘Why would you write that? Why would you think that makes sense?’ Finally, I say, ‘Asked and answered!’”
The screenwriter added, “but he’s as loyal as the day is long, he’ll support you and he knows what he wants — in Hollywood, that’s an incredible thing.”
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One of the more public examples of an actor clashing with Fincher seems to be with Jake Gyllenhaal during the making of the 2007 film, “Zodiac.” In a previous NYT interview, Gyllenhaal opened up about his issues with Fincher’s directing style. But speaking to NYT now, the filmmaker goes into what he thinks is the root of the issue with Gyllenhaal.
“Jake was in the unenviable position of being very young and having a lot of people vie for his attention, while working for someone who does not allow you to take a day off,” he explained. “I believe you have to have everything out of your peripheral vision.”
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He continued, “I think Jake’s philosophy was informed by — look, he’d made a bunch of movies, even as a child, but I don’t think he’d ever been asked to concentrate on minutiae, and I think he was very distracted. He had a lot of people whispering that ‘Jarhead’ was going to be this massive movie and put him in this other league, and every weekend he was being pulled to go to the Santa Barbara film festival and the Palm Springs film festival and the [expletive] Catalina film festival. And when he’d show up for work, he was very scattered.” He had “his managers and his silly agents who were all coming to his trailer at lunch to talk to him about the cover of GQ and this and that. He was being nibbled to death by ducks, and not particularly smart ducks. They got in his vision, and it was hard for him to hit the fastball.”
The filmmaker went into further detail and said Gyllenhaal did apologize, but Fincher added, “Not that I needed an apology.”
“I don’t want to make excuses for my behavior,” he continued. “There are definitely times when I can be confrontational if I see someone slacking. People go through rough patches all the time. I do. So I try to be compassionate about it. But. It’s: Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day. And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again.”
And while it’s hard to compare filmmakers and their style of dealing with actors, there seems to be a spectrum for how abrasive a director can be. On one end, you have someone like Ron Howard, who has absolutely zero people coming out and saying he’s a terrible filmmaker to work with. Then on the other hand, you have horror stories about other filmmakers like Fincher and David O. Russell. But even then, with those latter two, they both have plenty of actors that continue to work with them time after time. So, really, it’s just difficult to blame anyone.
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That said, it’s clear that Fincher believes there’s more to the friction with Gyllenhaal than just his directing style. And regardless, the results speak for themselves, as the actor’s performance in “Zodiac” is easily one of the best of his career.
