By David Fincher’s “The Killer” hits cinemas today and Netflix in two weeks, however the actor’s strike has prevented his film’s stars like Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton from doing publicity for the movie.
As a result, Fincher himself has had to take up the slack of talking about the movie to get the word out. Along with that comes some fascinating takes from the man himself on how he sees his own films and his legacy.
He tells The Guardian he “always liked B-movies” and promises he will “never be a more mature filmmaker” – meaning he’ll stay in the pulpy B-movie thriller wheelhouse he’s mostly resided in since his career began. He adds he’s someone who will “carry the twelve-year-old me with me wherever I go”.
Thus he doesn’t see enough consistency across his work to be considered an auteur:
“I’m so bad at that, because a) I don’t care. But b) At the point in time I was making Fight Club, people were saying: ‘How could you?’ And now you make something like The Killer and people go: ‘Why aren’t you doing it like your earlier, more important movies?’ I can’t win.”
His work has often been labelled as being about outsiders, many of whom are troubled white males with violent tendencies, yet Fincher doesn’t see them as outsiders – rather he says everyone sees themselves that way:
“I honestly believe that the high school quarterback who’s dating the homecoming queen cheerleader – even that guy thinks he’s an outsider. Who doesn’t think that they’re an outsider? That’s the fundamental difference between me and Tim Burton. Tim Burton believes that Edward Scissorhands is an anomaly. I just don’t know anybody who doesn’t think, in some kind of way, that they’re Edward Scissorhands.”
“Fight Club” in particular has become a key go-to film for certain anti-social groups and even political leanings. Of the impact it has had, Fincher says:
“I’m not responsible for how people interpret things, but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or [Picasso’s] Guernica…. It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence. People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them.”
That said, he separately tells GQ he hasn’t seen the film in twenty years and doesn’t want to as he compares the experience as being akin to “looking at your grade school pictures”.
Fincher’s “The Killer” is now out in select cinemas and hits Netflix on November 10th.
The post David Fincher On Auteurism & His Legacy appeared first on Dark Horizons.
