David Fincher is pretty selective when it comes to work and that’s hardly a quality in him that can be criticized, as most of his work throughout his career has been highly praised. Now, just fresh off landing himselfan exclusive four-year deal with Netflixthat will allow Fincher to fully define his creative efforts the way he wants, the director has some thoughts for some of the industry’s practices.
That last part should not come as a surprise, given that Fincher’s film debut wasAlien 3, an often misunderstood entry in the franchise that was marred by what the man himself deemed lack of trust and creative licenses from the movie’s producer and studio, aside from it being rushed. Put simply,Fincher hatesAlien 3more than anyone.
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Thus it’s not hard to see where Fincher is coming from in a recent interview withThe Telegraph, where provided his succinct view of Todd Phillips’Joker: take “[Taxi Driver] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars”.
Jokerwas a financial and critical success story, nabbing $1 billion in box office revenue on a relatively modest budget of $70m and at the same time clinching a Best Actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix. In Fincher’s eyes, studios simply “don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars”, so for this particular director it pretty much comes down to superhero spandex summer or Oscar bait end-of-year movies, something he feels severely limits creativity.
It’s true thatJokerfound itself on both ends of the aisle, with some experts in the medical field calling it a misinformative and stereotypical portrayal of mental disease; and some others praising it for exposing mental health awareness to mass audiences. However, Fincher’s comments don’t seemill-intended towardsJoker, but instead more a dig at the current state of Hollywood that drove him to settle down at Netflix, where he feels such constraints are less prevalent.
Whatever is to be made from his comments, it’s obvious Fincher will feel quite at home in the Netflix environment where his next project is the upcomingMank, which was based on a screenplay written by his father, Jack Fincher; notably a particular piece of work he’s claimed would have had a hard time been greenlit elsewhere.
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