It’s All True: A Con­ver­sa­tion with David Fincher

From the pen of Jack Finch­er comes Mank, the sto­ry of how per­ma-soused Hol­ly­wood hack Her­man J Mankiewicz hap­pened to write one of the great­est screen­plays of all time. Sad­ly, Jack didn’t live long enough to see the words he had writ­ten trans­formed into sound and light, but it’s some­thing that his son David had want­ed to realise for close to three decades.

It’s been six years since Finch­er Jr’s last fea­ture film, 2014’s Gone Girl, and in the inter­im we’ve had two series of Rolls Royce TV dra­ma in the form of Mind­hunter. For some­one who has already made a tech bro riff on Cit­i­zen Kane (2010’s The Social Net­work), and a melan­cholic homage to his late father (2008’s The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton), Mank com­bines these two career poles, while also pos­ing such exis­ten­tial hypo­thet­i­cals as, what makes a man? And not only that, what makes a writer, and what makes a director?

LWLies: Let’s go on a quick flash­back to the ear­ly days and the cre­ation of this amaz­ing script by your father, Jack. He was a jour­nal­ist and author by trade. Did he piv­ot to screen­writ­ing lat­er in life?

Finch­er: I think he wrote a screen­play that was optioned and Rock Hud­son want­ed to do it – this was in the late ​’60s. That fiz­zled out. Then he wrote spec screen­plays in the ​’60s, ​’70s and ​’80s, and then when he retired in the ​’90s, he came to me and said, ​‘I’m going to have all this time on my hands, what do you want to read a script about?’ I said I had always been inter­est­ed in ​‘Rais­ing Kane’ which I was exposed to in mid­dle school. I had read Pauline Kael’s essay on micro­fiche in the school library, and then I noticed a copy of it in my father’s library, and we talked about it. Then, 12 years lat­er, I was about to go off to do Alien3, and he was retir­ing and want­ed a new challenge.

Did he have a cer­tain curios­i­ty about things?

Yes he did. At one point in his life, he want­ed to cre­ate a board game and he dis­ap­peared down a well for about a month try­ing to make this card game work. And then, at one point, some­one showed him a mag­ic trick that he became obsessed with, and he worked his way all around it, try­ing to fig­ure out how this thing was done. It was impos­si­ble that there wasn’t a force involved in some way, exert­ed by the per­son doing the trick. But it was a math­e­mat­i­cal trick that had some­thing to do with 52 inte­gers of play­ing cards. He would find these things and he would become inter­est­ed in them. So this was my invi­ta­tion to ter­mite art. And so he went and he wrote this screenplay.

What was your take on his first draft?

Well, ha ha, the first draft was very much a screed against the Direc­tors Guild of Amer­i­ca and the hubris of auto­crat­ic dic­ta­tors in cin­e­ma. I had just come back from Alien3 and I was read­ing this thing that was about how these all-pow­er­ful direc­tors were ruin­ing sto­ry­telling, and I was like, ​‘That’s… not some­thing I’ve expe­ri­enced with moviemak­ing.’ It illu­mi­nat­ed for me at that moment that my father had a pret­ty good under­stand­ing of how movies worked, but didn’t have any under­stand­ing at all about how they were made. Which is prob­a­bly 98 per cent true of Pauline. So he wrote this thing, and it didn’t real­ly jibe with what I had been through, where I was basi­cal­ly a migrant work­er who was there to clean up after every­one else’s sweep­ing pol­i­cy decisions.

Did you nudge him in a direc­tion that was clos­er to your experience?

We argued about it for a while. It was just flash­backs at that point – a fair­ly straight Kane remem­brance. Then it became clear to me that what I was inter­est­ed in was the notion of the enforced col­lab­o­ra­tion. That a movie is real­ly the by-prod­uct of a moth­er and a father and not just one enti­ty. Very dif­fer­ent care and feed­ing are required to go from the two dimen­sion­al inten­tion to the three dimen­sion­al real­i­ty. My new­found expe­ri­ence was that I had gone through five or six writ­ers on Alien3, and nobody was par­tic­u­lar­ly invest­ed. Every­one was pick­ing up their $125k a week, in some cas­es tak­ing dic­ta­tion, and in oth­ers say­ing, ​‘Well this is what I think it should be, but the kid wants to do some­thing else.’ My expe­ri­ence was very dif­fer­ent to the Welles expe­ri­ence at RKO.

Was it easy for Jack to empathise with your side of things?

I tried to explain that to Jack, and it wasn’t that he was resis­tant to it, more that he had no per­son­al insight into it. In any case, we set the thing down, I went off to do Se7en, and he came back with this notion of fold­ing in Upton Sinclair’s ​‘End Pover­ty in Cal­i­for­nia’ cam­paign dur­ing the 1934 guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion and how it had been sab­o­taged by Hearst and Louis B May­er and Irv­ing Thal­berg. At first I dis­missed it out of hand think­ing it was too com­pli­cat­ed. It seemed too tangential.

When did it click for you?

It start­ed to work in an inter­est­ing way because it became a sto­ry about a guy find­ing his voice, and a guy find­ing out that things that he said mat­tered. For some­body who was preter­nat­u­ral­ly wit­ty, ideas were a dime a dozen or, as he says in the film, they cost a whole lot more than that dur­ing the Depres­sion. For him, that stuff was easy, so how could he respect it? Here was this guy in Her­man Mankiewicz who, on his way to the frol­ic room, would toss off these notions of, ​‘All the stuff in Kansas should be in black and white, and all the stuff in Oz should be in Tech­ni­col­or,’ and then he gets fired off the movie, nev­er gets a screen cred­it on it, but it might be the great­est spe­cial effect in cinema.

It seemed like an inter­est­ing idea that the imag­i­na­tive pow­er of cre­ation that brings about black and white to Tech­ni­colour to black-and-white is also the instinct that saves a 10-dol­lar con­tri­bu­tion to a reelec­tion cam­paign and goes, ​‘You don’t need my 10 dol­lars, you’ve got every­thing you need right here to con­vince every­body.’ And in that moment, the movie as you see it kind of coalesced.

I love this ethe­re­al aspect of the film in which Mank is seen engag­ing with the land­scape, drink­ing it all in, stor­ing up material.

Self worth is a very ethe­re­al con­cept. It’s a very dif­fer­ent thing for dif­fer­ent peo­ple. The movie’s also about peo­ple tak­ing advan­tage of oth­er peo­ple. It’s also about absolute pow­er and enti­tle­ment. This was just one route that could extend from the trunk of this thing and hope­ful­ly find tap water.

The dia­logue in the film feels like it’s the prod­uct of those writ­ers’ room guys. Do you have any insight into how Jack was able to cre­ate that voice? Was he a fun­ny guy himself?

Oh yeah. But when he told me about Cit­i­zen Kane the first time, there was no men­tion of Mankiewicz. I don’t even think he thought about Mankiewicz, it was always about Welles. His idol was Win­ston Churchill. ​‘Yes, I am drunk. You are ugly, and tomor­row I shall be sober.’ He loved that kind of stuff. He ate it up. But this has been 29 years in the mak­ing. There were so many lines that were writ­ten based on idle con­ver­sa­tions between us. The moment where Rita says, ​‘You’re not writ­ing an opera,’ and he says, ​‘I am writ­ing an opera’ – that actu­al­ly hap­pened to me, and I told him the story.

I was on Alien3, and I was sum­moned back to Los Ange­les with a 24-hour cut of a trail­er for the film to show the exec­u­tives at Fox, and to hope­ful­ly get them to give me nine or 10 more days to fin­ish. And they said we need to see some­thing, and so I jumped on a plane with this trail­er which had been cut to Prokofiev’s ​‘Romeo and Juli­et’. I played it for them to see, and the exec­u­tives at Fox said to me, ​‘What is this?’ And I said it’s ​‘Romeo and Juli­et’, it’s just a piece of music, it’s not intend­ed for use, it’s just some­thing to cut with. And one of them said, ​‘You’re not mak­ing an opera.’ I sat there think­ing to myself, ​‘Actu­al­ly, I am mak­ing an opera.’ I told my dad that sto­ry and he said we need this in the movie.

How much was Jack’s script tin­kered with over the years?

Eric Roth came in and one of the first things we did was go back and check all the research. Scenes changed in terms of length – some are short­er and some are longer. Some of the pas­sages got moved around in order to make it clean­er in terms of the dra­ma. But every scene was the scene that was writ­ten. One of the things that’s indica­tive of what it is to under­stand cin­e­ma from the out­side – and film­mak­ing from the inside – is that I was going over the dra­ma of the first scene of Mank being brought to Vic­torville and pil­lows being fluffed, etc, etc.

He gets into the bed in his body caste and every­body is intro­duced. And then he gets a phone call from Orson Welles. I was try­ing to explain to Jack what this meant for a writer who is a pro, a hit­man, his job is to punch stuff up and make it bet­ter and ters­er and lop this and that off. That’s how films were made back then. There was none of this pre­cious The Voice. This guy has found him­self in a sit­u­a­tion where the only per­son he needs to answer to is him­self and Orson Welles. Jack ref­er­enced the fact that Welles had final cut, and when I talked about this to Eric Roth, he point­ed out that this is ter­ri­fy­ing for a screen­writer. You don’t have any­body to blame. So in terms of what we did to the script, we just combed through the spaghetti.

There’s a scene ear­ly on where we first vis­it San Sime­on and Mank stum­bles onto a movie set. It’s a point­ed­ly unro­man­tic depic­tion of film­mak­ing. It’s like a con­struc­tion site. How close is it to reality?

Entire­ly. It’s exact­ly that. The prob­lem with film – not cin­e­ma, and not film as a medi­um – but with the movie busi­ness, is this inces­sant mythol­o­gis­ing about how every­thing the audi­ence is see­ing has been wind-tun­nel test­ed and per­fect­ed to with­in an inch of its life by experts. If peo­ple real­ly under­stood how much grab-ass and chin-scratch­ing and effort it takes to make some­thing look effort­less, to look like it just hap­pened, how many times can you go, ​‘Can we just shave a lit­tle bit more time off that; when you break the glass can you sur­prise your­self a lit­tle bit more; no that’s too much!’ You’re con­stant­ly mod­u­lat­ing this thing that you can’t ever real­ly con­trol. Movies aren’t sci­ence. You can’t just adjust the slid­er and get a lit­tle bit more or a lit­tle bit less. It requires every­body to get it to work. And there’s mud and peo­ple ham­mer­ing things and peo­ple saw­ing stuff. It’s not NASA.

Do you feel that the biopic form inher­ent­ly invites sentimentality?

Sure, yeah, sure. I don’t know how a guy like Mank, who had as many peo­ple who adored him as he did, was allowed to drink him­self to death. He must’ve been very charm­ing when he was drunk. Oth­er­wise, it seems like they would’ve been some grand inter­ven­tion. There are Dud­ley Moore aspects to our pre­sen­ta­tion of Her­man, but we’re also not just talk­ing about… It’s meant to be a movie-movie. It’s not Lenny. It’s play­ing with Mankiewicz tropes. There’s the wit­ty ban­ter between a room full of the great­est Algo­nquin exo­dus types, and that was meant to be like that kind of Mankiewicz-esque movie. All the lit­tle flash­backs, where they’re ori­ent­ed in time, typed across the bot­tom, the sound­track includ­ing type­writ­ers and bells. All of that stuff is to make it a ​“movie”, and hope­ful­ly under the hood of that, there are some insights into what we’re imbu­ing the char­ac­ter of Mank with as it relates to his own… self-immolation?

‘Rais­ing Kane’ caused some con­tro­ver­sy when it came out, and there have been var­i­ous ripostes and decon­struc­tions of it, most notably from Peter Bog­danovich in his Esquire arti­cle ​‘The Kane Mutiny’.

Cit­i­zen Kane may or may not be one of the great­est Amer­i­can movies ever made. I tend to think it is. More impor­tant than that, it’s one of the first great Amer­i­can amal­gams of inter­est­ing, lit­er­ate, adult writ­ing that requires you to lis­ten to it and put it in its prop­er con­text and glean from it pro­found mean­ing. You have a piece of lit­er­a­ture as the frame­work under­neath this thing, and then you have this con­sum­mate show­man who is also a rau­cous and inspired sto­ry­teller. On his left is Mank. On his right is prob­a­bly one of the two great­est Amer­i­can cin­e­matog­ra­phers who ever lived [Gregg Toland]. And of those three guys, one guy dumped a phone book into anoth­er guy’s lap, that sec­ond guy cut the phone book in half, chose the pieces he want­ed, he then went over to the third guy, who hap­pens to be an unpar­al­leled cin­e­mat­ic genius, and planned the shit out of a movie with him.

Togeth­er, they made this thing. I would include Bernard Her­mann in this too. It was a time when real­ly, real­ly tal­ent­ed peo­ple – and I include every actor from the Mer­cury com­pa­ny – who had trust in one anoth­er and great skill sets and incred­i­ble curios­i­ty, were fuelled by the idea of show­ing these Hol­ly­wood sell-outs how it’s done. They got a great script out of a guy who, in my esti­ma­tion, had no plans for arbi­trat­ing the screen cred­it. He had signed away his rights and was per­fect­ly hap­py under cov­er of night, talk­ing these pot shots at William Ran­dolph Hearst. It’s only when peo­ple found out that he was off in the desert help­ing Welles and that he test­ed the waters by turn­ing the script over to Char­lie Led­er­er who then gave it to Hearst legal, and from that Mar­i­on found out about it.

Why do you think Mank changed his mind about the credit?

It was two things: people’s response to the mate­r­i­al, which was, ​‘Mank you should be very proud of this’; and also, ​‘you’re no longer the man behind the cur­tain. Every­one knows what your cul­pa­bil­i­ty is here.’ And it was at the moment where he said, ​‘Sor­ry guys, I want this one on my tomb­stone’. So that’s how we pre­sent­ed it. Now, the facts of it are very dif­fer­ent in terms of how the time­line worked, but the truth of it was that Her­man Mankiewicz was fine doing this secret­ly, need­ed the mon­ey and took the gig.

He was fine to help this young upstart sharp­en his stick for some­one else’s eye. And then when he dis­gorged it and saw what it was and that it had real artis­tic mer­it, he said, ​‘I’d like to rethink this’. Welles has a small role in the film, but it isn’t real­ly about him. Welles had a vision in his head. He was doing a Fran­cis Cop­po­la, the Amer­i­can Zoetrope – ​‘I want it to be all about us, and for it to be all about us, it needs to be pre­sent­ed by me because that’s how every­one under­stands it. I’m just gonna grab these peo­ple who I know and love, and they’re gonna come, and here’s this guy who has a check­ered employ­ment his­to­ry with the stu­dios, but I’m gonna give him a chance because I know he’s got a rapi­er wit and I know he knows the sub­ject mat­ter, and if he can come up with an idea, I’m prob­a­bly going to be able to fig­ure out a way to present it to an audience.’

But then you have the oth­er side of Welles, who said there’s noth­ing you can’t learn about cin­e­matog­ra­phy in an after­noon. That… um… can only real­is­ti­cal­ly come from some­one who’s stand­ing three feet to the left of Gregg Toland. It is more com­pli­cat­ed than that. But in his mind, he feels these are the work­ing ele­ments that he needs to tell his sto­ry, and he’s not wrong. So who wrote Cit­i­zen Kane? Her­man Mankiewicz wrote Cit­i­zen Kane. And every­body else pitched in to make it what it was. And nobody else pho­tographed it, nobody else direct­ed it, and I think prob­a­bly if Welles fought at all to be includ­ed on that title card it was out of a mis­placed sense of this is the way the mar­quee was meant to be.

Is writ­ing, or sculpt­ing dia­logue, not inher­ent to directing?

I don’t hap­pen to believe that if I come up with a line or word that bridges two scenes, or say, ​‘This works so much bet­ter if she doesn’t say this whole thing, she just looks at him and walks off,’ I don’t think that makes me a writer. A director’s job is to take the writ­ing and breathe behav­iour into it, and employ the bal­let of how the cam­era inter­acts with those faces, with those bod­ies, with that envi­ron­ment. It’s a con­duc­tor and a com­pos­er set-up.

In an inter­view you did with Play­boy, you said, ​‘I’d direct Se7en in a dif­fer­ent way now. It was only by the time I’d made Zodi­ac and Ben­jamin But­ton that I knew what I was doing.’ How have you changed as a direc­tor since those films?

Erm, I don’t enjoy the shoot­ing. I don’t think I ever will. To me it’s very chaot­ic. It feels to me like it’s just a string of com­pro­mised pearls. Hav­ing said that, I think that I have a greater under­stand­ing of how to help a sto­ry in the telling of it. Where­as, it was prob­a­bly after Pan­ic Room that I realised I want­ed to go in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. I had made two movies in a row that were kind of assaultive in terms of the way they pre­sent­ed the mate­r­i­al, and I just sort of felt like, I don’t know if I’m that inter­est­ed in engag­ing the eye in the same way. I liked the idea of pre­sent­ing things in a tableaux or a prosce­ni­um and watch­ing them. Maybe not cut­ting as quick­ly, or shoot­ing as many close-ups.

Your taste just evolves. The way you want to see peo­ple behave next to each oth­er changes. There’s noth­ing about the per­for­mance style in Mank that has any­thing to do with Gone Girl, you know? Gone Girl was very much ​‘this is real­i­ty tele­vi­sion’, and Mank is, ​‘this is con­tract play­ers who are good at say­ing their lines and not knock­ing over the fur­ni­ture’. That’s not to take any­thing away from any­one. What we’re try­ing to beat out of every­one is, take the emo­tion out of it and don’t wor­ry about being the con­tain­ment ves­sel for the deep­est, dark­est most inti­mate secrets of these char­ac­ters. They can exist here just to sup­port these ideas. It’s the style of those movies in the ​’30s and ​’40s – you nev­er think, ​‘What’s Gary Coop­er going through?’ You’re like, ​‘Let’s have Gary Coop­er turn around one more time in the doorway.’

Mank is avail­able on Net­flix from 4 Decem­ber. Read more in the lat­est print edi­tion of LWLies.