It’s been 24 years since David Fincher brought one of his
movies to the Venice Film Festival, and the last time, things didn’t go so
well.
“I came here with a little film called ‘Fight Club’” in
1999, he told me during an interview on the Lido. “We were fairly run out of
town for being fascists.” Even before the premiere of that controversial Brad
Pitt flick, the director could sense trouble. “I looked down and the youngest
person in our row was Giorgio Armani,” Fincher said. “I was like, ‘I’m not sure
the guest list is the right guest list for this.’”
اضافة اعلان
So what makes lofty Venice the right place to premiere “The
Killer,” Fincher’s new thriller and his first film since the Oscar-winning
Hollywood drama “Mank”?
“Nothing,” cracked Fincher. “Venice seems like it’s very
highbrow — important movies about important subjects — and then there’s our
skeevy little movie.”
Still, Fincher has always enjoyed toying with people’s
expectations. He does it even within the world of “The Killer,” which premiered
in Venice on Sunday and stars Michael Fassbender as a hired gun who has to
improvise after a fatal assignment goes awry.
Based on a French graphic novel and adapted by Andrew Kevin
Walker (“Seven”), the film at first feels like a high-end take on the usual
genre tropes: yhere’s the assassin with no name, the innocent woman in the way
and the methodical list of revenge targets to be pursued. But then our
protagonist’s constant patter of narration starts to show cracks, as the Killer
often thinks one thing and does another. By the end, you’ll wonder if we know
this guy at all, or whether he’s ever really known himself.
And then there’s what he’s wearing. Though Hollywood would
have us believe that assassins always look impossibly chic and well-tailored,
Fincher puts his protagonist in Skechers, a zip-up fleece and a bucket hat.
“He’s totally dorky!” the director said. “We were never
intending for it to look glamorous.”
Inspiration struck when Fincher flipped through reference
photos and landed on a German tourist snapped wearing those nondescript items
on the streets of Paris. “I was like, ‘All of this stuff could be purchased in
an airport,’” said Fincher, who sent the photo to his costume designer, Cate
Adams. “I said, ‘This is what he needs to be, a guy who can get off a plane and
buy a whole wardrobe on his way from the gate to the rental car.’”
Fincher found no complaints from his leading man, who wasn’t
in Venice because of the SAG-AFTRA strike: “Michael’s cool. He was not freaked
out about having to look a little dorky.” And that aesthetic extends even to
the Killer’s escape from a botched job, which takes place not via high-speed
car chase but with a zippy little motor scooter, though Fincher considered
taking that sequence in an even dweebier direction. “At one point, we even
debated the Razor scooter,” he said, nixing that only because it wouldn’t
perform well during a stair stunt.
So though the Killer remains a mystery to himself, at least
one thing can be said for sure of this indifferently dressed man: He ain’t
exactly John Wick.
“The $3,000 suit seems like it’s played out,” Fincher said.
Still, he was surprised to find someone wearing his protagonist’s silly
headwear in another recent assassin movie: “It’s funny because when Pitt told
me he had selected a bucket hat for ‘Bullet Train,’ I was like, ‘OK, dude,
you’re stepping into our sandbox.’”
Though Fincher has a skill for image-making that extends
back to the music videos he directed for the likes of Madonna, with “The
Killer,” he was more interested in dismantling that sort of cinematic
iconography. Instead of a glamorous lair, Fassbender’s character keeps his
weapons in a mundane storage locker, and instead of using high-tech gadgets to
break into targets’ homes, he orders key-duplication tools off Amazon.
“I was like, ‘I want James Bond by way of Home Depot,’”
Fincher said. “By the end of this, you should be like, who’s the guy in the
rental car line with you, and why is he wearing that outdated hat? You ignore
the German tourist at your peril.”
And while the movies would have us believe that the world is
full of clever, high-flying assassins, Fincher sought to ground his character’s
tunnel vision in a more mundane reality. “I love the idea of a Charles Bronson
character who’s maybe misdiagnosed adult autistic,” he said. “And before 2023,
I’m not sure anybody would have gone, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”
So if the Killer’s fashion choices or inner motivations
sometimes stump you, just know that’s by design.
“He seems to have a hard time reading the room,” Fincher
said. “And any room that he goes into, eventually, he’s the only guy in it.”
Read more Entertainment
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
