David Finch­er: ​‘Moviemak­ing is a rat f*ck, every day is a skirmish’

Net­flix has come a long way since the launch of its flag­ship in-house pro­duc­tion, House of Cards back in 2013. The first two episodes of that land­mark series saw one of Amer­i­can cinema’s most fas­tid­i­ous crafts­men make his first for­ay into tele­vi­sion. Now David Finch­er is back and dou­bling down, helm­ing four episodes of 2017’s most antic­i­pat­ed binge-fest, an adap­ta­tion of the mem­oir by FBI agent John Dou­glas, the crim­i­nal pro­fil­er who served as inspi­ra­tion for Jack Craw­ford in Thomas Har­ris’ best­seller, ​‘The Silence of the Lambs’. Finch­er gave us a call for an epic con­ver­sa­tion about all things MINDHUNTER.

LWLies: Was MIND­HUNTER a project you devel­oped yourself?

Finch­er: Yeah. Let’s see, Char­l­ize Theron called me around 2009 – 2010. It was def­i­nite­ly before House of Cards. She owned the book and had the idea to devel­op it as a TV show, so we start­ed talk­ing about what it could be. I’d nev­er done TV. I was like, ​‘I don’t know enough about it.’ We devel­oped it togeth­er with a writer that she had sort of already hired. I was only kind of tan­gen­tial­ly involved, I wasn’t in the driver’s seat and more of the mind that if some­thing can come of this I’ll cer­tain­ly direct the pilot.

We went down a road where I met with the writer Joe Pen­hall and laid out the things that I’m not inter­est­ed in, the most impor­tant one being the notion that a fine line sep­a­rates the FBI agent from the ser­i­al killer. I felt that it was well trawled, I felt that it was a lit­er­ary con­ceit and real­ly had noth­ing to do with why I think peo­ple are inter­est­ed in ser­i­al killers. I don’t think peo­ple are inter­est­ed in ser­i­al killers because they’re so much like them, I think they’re inter­est­ed in the aber­rant because it’s so hard to under­stand. I real­ly felt that this was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reclaim, not the genre, because I hate the idea that ser­i­al killer films are a genre, but more the idea that the ser­i­al killer is some kind of Wile E Coy­ote super genius.

What else were you keen to avoid?

I laid out that I wasn’t inter­est­ed in the minute dif­fer­ences between the hunter and the hunt­ed, and I’m not inter­est­ed in an A‑B sto­ry­line. I’m not inter­est­ed in ​‘Here’s what Batman’s up to and here’s what the Joker’s up to.’ I want­ed to talk about the late 1970s, post-Civ­il Rights, post-sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, post-Water­gate and post-Son of Sam, where the FBI has to brace its boots and try to rein­vig­o­rate itself in order to become rel­e­vant again. They were at a par­tic­u­lar lull where they’d been respon­si­ble for the house of the SLA burn­ing down, they were in a val­ley in terms of their pub­lic rela­tions. I felt that that was a real­ly inter­est­ing time.

At what point did you decide to make it about this fic­tion­al char­ac­ter, Hold­en Ford, remov­ing John Dou­glas from the narrative?

That was Joe Pen­hall. Once we’d decid­ed that we weren’t going to use the first script writ­ten by the first writer, Char­l­ize sug­gest­ed Joe. He’d writ­ten The Road and she real­ly loved work­ing with him. We pitched him what we were think­ing and he went away and came back with what was the real epiphany, which was that we can’t do it with Ressler and Dou­glas. We need to be able to sep­a­rate these char­ac­ters where we need to sep­a­rate them. We’re not only talk­ing about a time and a place, we had to be able to appor­tion the char­ac­ters cer­tain behav­iour­al traits that we need­ed to drama­tise the sto­ry that we want­ed to tell. Joe’s solu­tion, and I think it was the right one, was that we need­ed to fic­tion­alise. We can’t get into or deal with who real­ly did what. We’re gonna stay with the peo­ple who were inter­viewed, and we’re gonna talk about and drama­tise those inter­views, but Joe was the one who said, ​‘I can’t be behold­en to this book. I need to be able to move to draw the best dra­ma and not be wor­ried about who would get cred­it for what.’

There are a lot of ideas that need to be trans­mit­ted to the audi­ence in terms of what the lead char­ac­ter is try­ing to do, so that when the first ser­i­al killer inter­view with Ed Kem­per comes, they’re effec­tive­ly ask­ing the same ques­tions of him as the FBI agent. You once said, ​“The first rule of cin­e­ma is that a movie has to teach an audi­ence how to watch it.”

I sent it to a friend of mine who’s a stone-cold genius, just this great screen­writer. I showed him the first two episodes and his com­ment was real­ly inter­est­ing. He said, ​‘You’ve done the exact oppo­site of tele­vi­sion, where your char­ac­ter is always the per­fect per­son to solve the dilem­ma of the show. They may have a prob­lem with alco­hol, or may have lost a loved one, but they’re always the per­fect per­son to wres­tle with the prob­lem that the show is going to posit.’ He said what we’ve done here is tak­en some­body who’s in some exis­ten­tial malaise – which is some­thing that Joe and I talked about a lot – and it’s the most dif­fi­cult thing to drama­tise, some­one who doesn’t feel like he’s accom­plish­ing what it is he needs to accomplish.

Joe did some real­ly inter­est­ing think­ing about how we intro­duce a char­ac­ter and intro­duce his naïveté́. I mean, John Dou­glas is not a naïve guy, Hold­en is a much more naïve char­ac­ter. But through this naïveté́ we get to expe­ri­ence how Quan­ti­co works and what they want­ed from him, and how they expect­ed him to behave, how they didn’t con­sid­er them­selves to be out­mod­ed and out­side the van­guard as it relates to crim­i­nol­o­gy. So we got to expe­ri­ence a lot of that stuff in the first hour. That’s not to say that’s the only way to tell a sto­ry, but we were look­ing to do a bit more of a hybrid between a movie and a TV show.

What does that look like to your mind?

I don’t know that the gold­en age of tele­vi­sion is real­ly tele­vi­sion as we know it. It’s some­thing that’s grown out of cer­tain expec­ta­tions, blur­ring and sub­vert­ing a lot of those expec­ta­tions in sur­pris­ing ways, and I real­ly do feel that what’s inter­est­ing about the Net­flix mod­el – that they don’t have to wor­ry about cap­tur­ing an audi­ence on a giv­en night, that they don’t have to wor­ry about cliffhang­ers – is that the way peo­ple expe­ri­ence it is much more like lit­er­a­ture. You can set the remote down like you’d set the book down, on your bed­side table. It has a dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship to its audi­ence. The movie busi­ness has become about the urgency of Fri­day to Mon­day, and net­work tele­vi­sion has become about, ​‘From the mak­ers of…’ using the hit show as the intro­duc­tion to the new show. Then there’s Net­flix, which is about, ​‘Look, when you get around to it, we’ll be here.’ It’s a dif­fer­ent prob­lem, it requires dif­fer­ent things of the audience’s time. Ulti­mate­ly I think it requires a dif­fer­ent kind of television.

Hold­en uses these inter­views as a means to an end, as the tools to unlock the crim­i­nal mind…

I think it’s lat­er that that becomes the case. What he sees is the val­ue of these con­ver­sa­tions in illu­mi­nat­ing… Look, the FBI was estab­lished to chase Baby Face Nel­son from one state into anoth­er. That’s how it came to be. It was a nev­er about sit­ting with them and ask­ing, ​‘Why did you want to become a bank rob­ber?’ In the Depres­sion, no one real­ly cared what the rea­sons were behind someone’s impe­tus. It was pret­ty fick­le, it was mon­e­tary gain. It was a case of, ​‘I don’t have what’s in this bank, but I have a tom­my gun, and I’m gonna take what’s not right­ful­ly mine.’ There was a pret­ty clear cut motive.

Do you think he knows where all this is heading?

I don’t even think he knows what he’s touched upon, that there’s some­thing to this idea of the uncon­scious or the sub­con­scious speak­ing through these rash, explo­sive, com­pul­sive acts of vio­lence. There was some­thing to the things that Edmund Kem­per was doing that only he knew, and ulti­mate­ly that was the attrac­tion for me, the notion that a mono­lith­ic bureau­cra­cy could only inform itself through hav­ing some kind of empa­thy for peo­ple who should be beneath our con­tempt. That in order to have a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one who is so unlike you that you can’t even imag­ine it, and who has things that are dri­ving them that you can’t even fath­om, you have to have com­pas­sion even for your ene­my to under­stand why they hate you and why they do what they do.

I thought that was inter­est­ing. I don’t think I’d ever seen that. That was one of the hall­marks of Dou­glas’ project. He was very good at test­ing and spar­ring with these peo­ple, but he was also very good at engag­ing them and pulling them out so we could have a bet­ter under­stand­ing. What they do is inhu­man, but they are human. He offered an empa­thet­ic vac­u­um, a place where you don’t judge them, you sim­ply lis­ten to them. That was not a J Edgar Hoover idea, that was very much sparked by hav­ing to change. When David Berkowitz was hunt­ing every night through the bor­oughs of Man­hat­tan, it was some­thing about these peo­ple and these cir­cum­stances and this loca­tion that spoke to him, and that’s when he pulled the trig­ger. For what­ev­er rea­son, they couldn’t get the man­a­cles on him for a year, and he held this entire city in ter­ri­fied thrall. It was an inter­est­ing thing, this idea of a guy in a Mor­mon suit sit­ting down to talk to some­one who’s entire­ly unlike him. It was a piv­ot. It was a change in the bureau, it was a change in crim­i­nol­o­gy and a change in the way that peo­ple talked about aber­rant behaviour.

You’ve spo­ken in the past about not lik­ing to be seen to have a ​‘style’ of your own, yet you’ve direct­ed the first two episodes of MIND­HUNTER, which would pre­sum­ably look dif­fer­ent if, say, Asif Kapa­dia had direct­ed them. Do the require­ments of uni­for­mi­ty through­out the series mean that oth­er direc­tors will have to ​‘do a Finch­er’ mov­ing forwards?

I hope not. Noth­ing makes a film­mak­er more self-con­scious than watch­ing anoth­er film­mak­er doing an inter­pre­ta­tion of what you’ve done. The direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy was fair­ly well versed in what the style was. The style is real­ly just let’s not be afraid of con­ver­sa­tions. It’s My Din­ner with André the Giant. There’s a sequence with Jer­ry Bru­dos that Andrew Dou­glas did that’s just a stain­less steel pic­nic table inside a chain-link cage inside a max­i­mum secu­ri­ty con­crete bunker that has razor wire over all the win­dows. The guy comes in and it’s a con­ver­sa­tion about cig­a­rettes, whether they can un-man­a­cle him, whether he can fix the guy’s tape recorder. I know that there are film­mak­ers who, if you pre­sent­ed them with a long scene of two guys over a pic­nic table would go, ​‘Oh my god, where do you go with this?’

When you’re approach­ing a scene that’s 11 pages of dia­logue, is that all shot and cut in your head first?

You’re always shoot­ing cov­er­age, because cov­er­age just means… Look, you can either embrace cov­er­age like an inte­ri­or house-painter, as in, ​‘I just need to get as many coats as I can,’ but start­ing wide, there are prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions to tak­ing two cam­eras and shoot­ing as wide as you can, as a lot of the time you can learn from them. A few takes and a mas­ter can just be a case of ​‘I got­ta have a mas­ter’ or it can be, ​‘So lat­er when I get into this, are you intend­ing to move here…’ It’s plas­tic. You don’t want to become a Dis­ney­land ani­ma­tron­ic, you want to leave room for inspi­ra­tion. We did not sto­ry­board, but if you say that you’re a direc­tor, I don’t want you to become reliant on close-ups.

I want to see the phys­i­cal­i­ty. I want to see the shoul­ders of this char­ac­ter. I like the worn nature of what these guys wear. How they walk when their gait can only be two feet. What does that do to you? How bod­ies express. The slouch of some­body who has all the time in the world and the erect spine of the guy who’s try­ing to glean some­thing from them, and how the FBI agent plays with his tie or rolls his eyes and is already pack­ing his stuff to leave… All that stuff goes into it, and a lot of tele­vi­sion is, ​‘Get that Tony Scott close-up.’ We talked about all that stuff.

You’re quite vocal about your loathing of the term ​‘auteur’, so much so that you basi­cal­ly gave it to Ed Kemper’s ser­i­al killer as a means of describ­ing his ​“oeu­vre”.

My dis­taste for the term was exact­ly the inten­tion. Like, what the fuck? What is he talk­ing about? The prob­lem with auteurism is that it pre­sup­pos­es that one per­son can impress upon 95 peo­ple, so clear­ly, that the man­i­fes­ta­tion of what­ev­er it is going on in your head can be clear­ly attrib­uted to them. The real­i­ty of moviemak­ing is, y’know, it’s a rat fuck. Every day is a skir­mish, and you might escape every skir­mish, but there are injuries and there loss­es, and there are things that you had 10 meet­ings about that go off per­fect­ly, and there are things that you’ve had no meet­ings about that end­ed up tak­ing eight of the 12 hours in the day because you didn’t think it was going to be so complicated.

So the notion that some­one calls this per­fect, ide­alised ver­sion of the scene… It’s like the jet-propul­sion indus­try, the idea that some­thing is wind-tun­nel test­ed and is gonna go off the way it’s sup­posed to – it nev­er goes off the way it’s sup­posed to. My issue with auteurism is, how do you attribute a mas­ter plan to a hap­py acci­dent? There are cer­tain things that you can count on. You have to work at it, and you have to know what it is you’re try­ing to do and impart that to an army of peo­ple who all have their own ideas about what’s important.

Every­body who comes on to a set looks at it from a slight­ly dif­fer­ent stand­point. You can’t say to the third vio­lin­ist, ​‘This is what the total­i­ty of the thing should sound like.’ You just need them to get them to do their thing. When you hear it, it either moves you or it doesn’t, so you have to fig­ure if it needs a lit­tle bit more of this or that. That’s hap­pen­ing in the rehearsal, it’s hap­pen­ing in the cov­er­age through­out the day. You hone in as you get tighter and tighter and tighter on peo­ple, but you’re also get­ting tighter in terms of time. You’re hon­ing in on one lit­tle thing, and then you do the same again in the edit, with the sound effects, with the music, with the colour grad­ing. Sud­den­ly all this stuff comes togeth­er, and the notion that any­one could say, ​‘This is pre­cise­ly what it’s going to look like,’ to me is amazing.

But there is a direc­to­r­i­al per­spec­tive, a sub­jec­tiv­i­ty that is dis­tinc­tive­ly yours. That isn’t per­haps as dis­tant as Stan­ley Kubrick, or as immer­sive as Steven Spiel­berg, but that’s def­i­nite­ly iden­ti­fi­able and consistent.

And that’s a deci­sion. I love both those film­mak­ers. I like dis­pas­sion because I like what it does to the audi­ence, I like to see things as wide as I pos­si­bly can. I don’t want to be in the mid­dle of every trans­ac­tion. Spielberg’s stag­ing in a lot of ways is about putting you in harm’s way. Jaws and Close Encoun­ters are two of my favourite movies. But I look at the sto­ries I’m inter­est­ed in telling, or I look at the sto­ries that I have been inter­est­ed in telling, and I sort of go, ​‘There’s no place for that here.’ You pick and choose. The impor­tant thing is to know what you intend to impart. It comes from the aes­thet­ic. There are things that you hold dear aes­thet­i­cal­ly, there are things that you hold dear behav­ioural­ly, there are ways that a scene unfolds that feel real­is­tic to you. If you’re respon­si­ble for how it’s all going to come off and for how it’s all going to come togeth­er, there’s no way that you can’t inform that. The notion that some­one is going to direct a film and not reveal what it is they like about cin­e­ma, or how they pre­fer things to be revealed to them or the audi­ence, it’s impos­si­ble. You’re doomed to find your worth.

I recent­ly spoke to Steven Soder­bergh about stag­ing and the impli­ca­tions of film gram­mar, and he brought up you and Spiel­berg, describ­ing you as savants. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

Y’know, it’s tri­al and error. Any­one who does this job has to work at it. When you look at the min­i­mal­ism of Logan Lucky, you could mis­take it for the Coen broth­ers in terms of its wide angle wit. It’s dia­bol­i­cal­ly com­pli­cat­ed. It is not easy to do that. Even that bit in the trail­er, when Chan­ning Tatum’s been fired and he throws his hard hard, and the guy in the fore­ground is like, ​‘What just hap­pened?’ It’s just stun­ning. It’s not easy shit to do.

What are the prac­ti­cal dif­fer­ences between film and TV? Do you have the lux­u­ry of rehearsal?

No, you’ve got a show to put on. It’s Mick­ey Rooney-Judy Gar­land, ​‘I have to put on a show!’ That’s the pres­sure of it. It’s also kind of the beau­ty of it. It’s a cir­cus. Here’s the com­pa­ny and the script is as good as it can be by Tues­day because that’s the day those nine pages are gonna get shot.

So no 99 takes?

I’ve only shot 99 takes a cou­ple of times! When you have six months to prep some­thing that’s going to end up being two hours long, on which you’ve spent a year fig­ur­ing out the tech and anoth­er six months get­ting every­one pre­pared for it… You can tell peo­ple why all these moments link and why you’re expect­ing XYZ, so there are much few­er sur­pris­es. There are more sur­pris­es in tele­vi­sion. You have to fin­ish 10 hours of mate­r­i­al in the same time you would nor­mal­ly shoot your film, not edit, just the shoot­ing part. You don’t get to vivi­sec­tion it in the same way. Actors play­ing roles are con­stant­ly reveal­ing new strengths to you, and weak­ness­es. It’s hard. But one of the love­ly things about work­ing in tele­vi­sion is that you’re meet­ing all these actors that may have done a lot or a lit­tle, and you have to rapid­ly inter­face with peo­ple you’ve nev­er met.

Is work­ing in that way liberating?

You do a lot of weep­ing, but it’s also invig­o­rat­ing. I know that with more prep and with more pre-pro­duc­tion meet­ings, I can get peo­ple to under­stand what my inten­tions are. Often with a tele­vi­sion show you get one con­ver­sa­tion in the hall­way by the cof­fee machine. You may not get an idea exact­ly where you want it, but you’re able to move it over to anoth­er scene and it’ll still be part and par­cel of the tapes­try, you just can’t get it spe­cif­ic. It wasn’t what you intend­ed. So yeah, there were things that made me mis­er­able, but there were also things that were hap­py accidents.

How is the stu­dio block­buster sequel busi­ness treat­ing you these days?

World War Z? We’re try­ing. A lot of stones have been laid. We’re just decon­struct­ing it right now against the mythol­o­gy that exists to see where we can go.

MIND­HUNTER is avail­able to stream on Net­flix now.