David Fincher is the type of filmmaker that can make just about any type of film or TV project and we’ll watch it without question. Hell, he could make a cat food commercial, and film fans would probably analyze it for its style. But in the world of modern filmmaking, where theater multiplexes are dominated by superheroes and other genre fare, it would appear that to get the big budgets, directors have to include superpowers in their blockbusters. But according to David Fincher, he’d be perfectly fine making a superhero film, albeit with some major qualifications.
Speaking at SXSW, while promoting his upcoming Netflix animated anthology series “Love Death + Robots,” Fincher was asked whether or not he’d be interested in doing a superhero film.
“I don’t know, maybe. I was open to doing a zombie movie,” Fincher said (via the Observer).
He continued, “I think in terms of stories—I don’t want to have to go and they say, ‘Okay, you have to dream up something for Meteor Man or whatever.’ I don’t want to have to cobble together something around a pre-existing mask or uniform or cape or idea.”
“Love Death + Robots” colleague (and superhero filmmaker) Tim Miller responded that he, personally, doesn’t ever see Fincher taking on a caped crusader film. “I don’t think he’d ever do [a superhero film] because, honestly, the amount of shit I got from him and the amount of spandex jokes while I was doing ‘Deadpool,’” Miller joked.
Fincher and Miller met over a decade ago, and have been looking for ways to work together on a big project since. And the culmination of that partnership is the upcoming adult animated series coming to the streaming service this week.
“David said I’ll help you with something if you want to do it,” said Miller (via IndieWire). “And I laid out a bunch of projects, one of them was an animated anthology and he said, ‘That’s the one you should do, because we can try shit, we can get crazy, we can get a lot of other directors in the mix, and do some really wild visual stuff.’ He was drawn to it immediately.”
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And while Netflix immediately springs to mind as the perfect place to launch this series, the duo did pitch it the traditional way. However, the major studios didn’t know what to do with the anthology series, especially considering the “episodes” were various lengths and didn’t follow traditional TV rules.
“We have to get rid of the 22-minute [length of a half-hour show with commercials] and 48-minute [length of an hour-long show with commercials] because there’s this Pavlovian response to this segmentation that to me seems anathema to storytelling,” said Fincher. “You want the story to be as long as it needs to be to be at maximum impact or entertainment value proposition.”
And that’s exactly what Netflix allowed the filmmakers to do. With no restrictions on episode length, the duo hired some of the best animators in the world to create shorts. Plus, considering Miller and Fincher are steering the ship, the animators were given freedom to make whatever they wanted.
“We treat people the way we want to be treated. Which is tell us how it’s going to work and tell us why you made these decisions, and then you let people do what they do,” said Fincher.
“Love Death + Robots” hits Netflix March 15.