One of the best parts about awards season is getting to see big directors go through the endless press tour cycle until they run out of things to talk about from their movie, and simply start throwing hot takes at every turn. Last year it was Martin Scorsese accidentally starting a war between filmmakers and Marvel after comparing the MCU to theme park rides. Now, David Fincher is throwing his name in the hat with some hot takes on “Joker” and cancel culture.
In a recent interview with The Telegraph to promote his throwback to the golden age of Hollywood “Mank,” Fincher talked about how difficult it was to get his latest film going when studios “don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars” because everyone is afraid of risks. Then he mentioned Todd Phillips‘s “Joker,” as a risk that paid off big time.
“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,” Fincher said, describing the film as a mash-up of two Scorsese classics that, according to Fincher, resulted in a poor portrayal of mental illness. “I don’t think anyone 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,” Fincher said, referring to the two characters played by Robert De Niro.
Not done throwing takes, Fincher then discussed Woody Allen‘s film “Manhattan,” and revealed he’s been thinking about a show centered on cancel culture. “At its heart, it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology,” the filmmaker said. “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.”