Earlier this week, at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Netflix held a special AMPAS Screening of “The Killer” followed by a Q&A with the film’s director David Fincher, the movie’s star Michael Fassbender, moderated by filmmaker Rian Johnson (“Looper”). And now, that whole conversation has made its way online.
In case you’re unaware, “The Killer” is Fincher’s latest film, an assassin thriller about the process. It was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Fincher’s “Seven” and has done a lot of work with him since, including a lot of uncredited rewrites on many of his movies, plus writing unproduced films like “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” sequel that never got made and “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,” which Disney didn’t have the stomach for.
The film is based on the graphic novel series “The Killer” written by Alexis Nolent (a.k.a Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, initially published in French by Editions Casterman. As Johnson points out (he’s a little nervous throughout the Q&A; it’s cute), “The Killer” had been announced years ago, as far back as 2008, in the trades, but Fincher said actual work on it didn’t actually commence until recently, so it’s not a project that he’d been trying to make for 15 years.
“We talked about it in 2008, but we didn’t really break it down into what it was going to be until 2019,” Fincher clarified. “So it’s not like everyone was holding their breath.”
Fincher said, yes, “Le Samourai” was an influence, but it was the comic itself and its unique subjectivity that really intrigued him.
“I read the comics, and it had this voiceover, and it was very cynical and nihilistic, and of course, very appealing,” Fincher said, pausing for comedic effect, which he got with a crowd laugh. “And I just honed in on this idea of how to transfer the notion of extreme subjectivity from a comic book to the screen, and that was really it. What are the ways… we can make it as subjective as possible.”
The film stars Michael Fassbender, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton and centers on a paid assassin who—after a fateful near-miss on a job— battles his employers and himself on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 neo-noir crime thriller film “Le Samouraï,” starring Jean-Pierre Melville, has come up in conversations and reviews many times. It’s also cited as a touchstone in this conversation, but so are the films of Don Siegel, known for “Dirty Harry” (1971) and the prison drama “Escape from Alcatraz” (1979), among other works that include four other collaborations with Clint Eastwood.
“The idea was to make a Don Siegel movie,” Fincher said. “Let’s hit the f*cking ground running, let’s know where we are headed, let’s get there as fast as we can, and there’s no doubling back and there’s no twists. People think the movie is about an assassin; it’s really about getting through that door.”
Asked if there was a more extended version of the movie in editing, Fincher said no, pretty much everything on screen was in the script. “I don’t think there are any scenes on the cutting room floor; I don’t think there are any scenes we [cut]. We went to make it as mean and lean as we could.”
Fassbender said the material was great, and he wanted to make something like “Le Samouraï” but that Fincher was the real draw and he would have done anything.
“Just working with David,” Fassbender stressed. “To have that opportunity, so, I would have taken anything, really. Fassbender did allow that his film company did want to “make something like ‘Point Blank’ or ‘Le Samourai,’ which I’d only just seen pretty recently. And I was like, ‘I love these kinds of films,’ and then… [gestures towards Fincher like it was fated].”
Fincher concurred but reiterated the draw of the source material. “Again, truly, I had read the graphic novel and thought, ‘How do you literally take the audience’s eyeball and put it into the character’s eye socket?’ That was really it.”
“The Killer” is streaming now on Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix.
