The Big Picture - ‘The Killer’ Is Cold-Blooded Genius. And Something More

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Sean and Amanda are joined by Chris Ryan to discuss the trio’s collective favorite movie of 2023, David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ (1:00). Then, Adam Nayman joins the show to give his take on ‘The Killer,’ the state of American auteur directors in 2023, and where the film fits into Fincher’s larger project (48:00). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Chris Ryan and Adam Nayman Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Football is officially back and we've got you covered right here on the Ringer NFL feed. I'm Shiel Kapadia and every Tuesday and Friday, Ben Solak and I will be bringing you extra point taken. Nora Princiati here to tell you that Steven Ruiz and I will be coming to you every Monday and Thursday. Our Monday show will recap everything from Sunday's games. Thursday's show will encompass any news during the week with an eye towards the next slate of games. Subscribe to the Ringer NFL show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to follow The Ringer NFL on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter at Ringer NFL. I'm Sean Fennessey.

I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about David Fincher's The Killer, I'm Amanda Dobbins. did raise your hand for this one. I did. It's often sort of like a spreadsheet, like desperate text message negotiation and you on air were like, can I please come on this podcast? I dig this character. Please. Rattling my cup at you. Later in this episode, we will have your doppelganger, Adam Neiman, who is one of the foremost David Fincher experts. My brother at Sicko Corner Industries. You guys will tag out like Marty Jannetty and Shawn Michaels once did. Yes, I have a powerful 30 minutes to give you. Yes, Amanda. Who are those people? They were known as the Rockers in WWF circa 1991.

Oh, interesting. A wrestling reference. I thought that just tagging brought to mind baseball. Oh, yeah. No, no. Oh, good point. Yeah, but are we going to have to do, are we like getting into wrestling season? Well, the Iron Claw was well-received this week.

I don't want to distract us, but I do think that the funniest possible outcome is if Knox becomes a huge wrestling fan. Again, there are so many things that I loved as a young boy that I am willing to share with Knox. I promise you I can. He's already helping himself. You know, our foremost transportation and infrastructure enthusiast

who also turned on Loki episode one all by himself this morning. So I live in hell. As do we all. Wait till he discovers Jimmy Superfly Snooker. Wait till he discovers David Fincher's the killer. Then the circle will be complete. That's what we have discussed. That's where we come together

let's talk let's talk about this movie yeah I mentioned that I was nervous to do this episode yeah right before we started recording

because I I do get a little nervous when there's a movie that I love so much that I don't I don't want to screw it up I don't want to get it wrong

I want to try to as honestly as I can communicate what I love about something this one is obviously i've been primed for the pump for this movie right i've been awaiting it honestly since 2007 when the rumors of it first started um of course david fincher a huge filmmaker for all three of us we drafted his films and works uh week and a half ago people did very successful yeah people did not enjoy that episode. Nevertheless. I was among them. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

You also saw the movie at the Venice Film Festival. I sure did. And you got me excited about it. Yeah. It is, of course, a film about an assassin played by Michael Fassbender

who bungles a hit and that then leads to a series of violent, episodic moments throughout his life over a contained period of time. That's a very vague way of describing it.

This will be a spoiler episode. We will talk through the specifics and mechanics, though I will say, not a film that is terribly reliant on its plot. It's really more a, it's an exercise. Yeah, but go see the movie. It's on Netflix now. That's one of the marvels of the 21st century is that you can just go open your Netflix account and watch this movie and then listen to this podcast.

And the surprises or the twists or people you may not expect or whatever are fun when they are contained in the movie. So, you know, I don't want to spoil it. You told us after you came back from Italy that you loved the movie. Yeah. No, I after you came back from Italy that you loved the movie. Yeah. No, I texted you as I walked out so that my opinion

would be on record against all of the dummies who were like, hmm, I don't know. Yeah. It was mixed out of Venice, I would say. It was mixed.

It has gotten increasingly positive, I think, as the Fincher maniacs have started to, like, surround the movie, which, you know, is wonderful news for me,

for you, especially for Chris. David Fincher's secret service. We are here to protect this man. Chris, which, you know, is wonderful news for me, for you, especially for Chris. David Fincher's secret service. We are here to protect this man. Chris, what'd you think of the movie we saw together? Can you imagine a filmmaker who gives less of his shit?

David, I'm reporting for duty. I would take a bullet for you, sir. I think this might be my favorite movie of the year. Yeah. When we watched it, we watched it in possibly the most ideal circumstances possible.

Philly's Game Aside. No, I'm sure you saw it in the most magical place. I wasn't trying to say one was better than the other. I just, you guys are excluding me, and I don't know whether it's like your inferiority complex that you didn't see it day one in Venice. It's your inferiority complex that you were partying with me and Chris, laughing our heads off

with this movie. Pounding Amstels and being like, boy. Yes, I am. We did it again. Well, I mean, we only did that

because you beat us to the punch. Did you really have an Amstel? After the fact, yes. But is an Amstel light in your rotation? Sure. I mean,

if it's what's available. It was available. It has to happen. Oh, at the reception. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's just a real my mom circa 95 drink. Okay.

No, I'm not going to unpack that. So I just meant that we had a very lovely, very sacred kind of cinematic experience. I usually don't sit in the middle of the theater. We sat in the middle of the theater.

I felt like we were just, Fassbender was just towering over us. And I love being manipulated by filmmakers. I love having them play all my strings, decide how I'm going to feel when my pace, like when my heart is going to quicken. And this movie is just like, kind of like I would teach this in film school. It'd be like, here's how you make a movie from a very subjective point of view. And here is how you manipulate an audience with editing, with music, with everything. It's just amazing piece of work. Yeah, I don't know if it is the best movie of the year.

I'm not sure if there is an objective best. I said favorite. But it is my favorite as well. It is the most fun I had in a movie this year. I think there are more towering works that had broader ambitions than this movie. But it is the most complete piece of moviemaking that I've seen. And I saw it a second time last night

to prepare for this, and I had a very different experience with it. The first time, I was kind of marveling and laughing and thinking about my appreciation for what Fincher does and what he's done in the past, and it is a movie that is very much him iterating on what he has done in the past and iterating on movies like this about assassins, about lone men.

The second time, I think I understood it more as a pretty emotional movie. And I'm curious if you guys think I'm overreading that because I feel like kind of a summation of a lot of the stories that he likes to tell. And so the first time I was like, this is a joke. He's making fun of himself and me. The second time I was like, this is the thesis statement for all of his repressed feelings and why he works the way that he does. I don't know whether overreach is the word I would use, especially since, you know, you've made yourself vulnerable. You've said you love this. You said you're nervous.

Yeah. Why would you attack me after I did that? Chris is like, like hey that's gonna be nice i was just waiting i didn't know if there was like people think i sit down and i'm like ready to fight in every episode and it's the exact opposite i would love to just be like let's be warm together in the cozy embrace in front of the fire of cinema and and you are like you're cracking your knuckles and you're licking your chops i just sorry i was doing a little podcast performance that's what you're supposed to do no i also watch it again last night and i hadn't seen it since venice and i i think i

told you uh when i texted you after i saw it the first time um that i thought a lot of you, Sean, fantasy during this movie. And I responded to the Fincher self-referential elements. And, you know, I guess I think of you and Fincher in, you know, like a similar little box for better and for worse. Yeah. So I thought of you as well. Dry little perverts working very hard to make things just so. And so I, yeah, that is true i was gonna say control freaks you know and this is like the ultimate control freak movie about a control freak

made like by a control freak i don't think that there's emotion but i and i think that that is kind of the electricity of it but i am interested in your your um you know like the you're picking up of the oppression because i think that you're closer to the movie i think in a lot of ways there's a number of ways to read the movie i'd like to throw the my readings of them at you guys and tell me what you think okay um the last one that i wrote down but the one that speaks to my perspective on this is that this is a movie about an unreliable narrator who is repressing a lot of emotion to, quote, complete a task, but the task that he's completing is avenging a loved one.

And in the process of this movie, someone that he's very close to is hurt because he has failed at something. And when that person is hurt, he then goes out and tracks down every single person who is responsible for the person that he loves being hurt. Now, the Fassbender character, the film takes place, as you said, Chris, it is completely subjective. And Fincher,

when we saw him speak about this, said, it is incredibly difficult to make a movie in which everything that you see is either from the perspective of the character or at least in their sightline or in their world. The film feels like how he feels. Yes. And that, rendering that is challenging. Most movies don't have that. There's no establishing shots in this movie. There's no cutaways to other characters talking a hundred miles away. Movies don't do this. They don't stay inside someone's head. And so I think the reason that they're doing that is because the character doesn't express himself. So you have to feel what he is seeing in order for the movie to work. But it is about a person who, just because he's not not saying I love you to the person

who is hurt, everything he does is informed by how he feels. But the character continues to tell you, forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. You know,

that weakness, empathy is vulnerability. All the mantras that he says to himself over and over again is a person saying like, what's most important is getting the job done

so that I can feel better about how I failed. That's the most creative director point of view story of all time, because you're a person that's responsible for so many things and one wrong move and everything falls apart. Many people who work in creative fields and all professional fields feel this way, but not everybody feels like they have to hold it so tightly. This is so fascinating because both A, you're a lapsed Catholic and you're a father. I did not feel that at all. I thought this movie was completely about the fallacy of control and how, like, he's such an unreliable narrator as he's giving you his, like, because we should say that this film is pretty much wall-to-wall voiceover of this guy's internal monologue. And he is lying

to himself and us the entire movie. Absolutely. He's like reciting his version of a self-help book in real time and his principles. I wrote down so many of the lines of dialogue watching the movie last night. And I was thinking to myself, you could actually just listen to the movie and enjoy it. even though it is not a classically great script the way that that fast bender delivers andrew kevin walker's dialogue is hilarious and kind of hypnotic yes and intentionally and i was imagining uh fincher directing the voice takes of and like i i have to imagine he got to like 300 on some of them you know because you have more time and you don't need as many setups anyway I sort of really agree with you and also

don't agree with you at all I think it's a movie about the failure rather than the loved one if that makes any sense sure and I again and I don't mean this patronizingly like it is very affecting that you are attaching the loved one to it and I feel like in many ways he's just trying to tell us that he loves us and this is his way of doing it. This is about us. I do. And about all of us. And I say thank you.

I say thank you. You're trying to express your emotions so that's wonderful but to me It's about people who are professional that have important jobs to do. Yeah. That have families. That have like...

But like, does... Respectfully, like that family is not really a character. Or like a person. Yeah. But again, I think it's because of the subjective experience. Yeah. I don't think that there's an attempt to like make you understand the Dominican woman that he has fallen in love with.

Like the movie doesn't care about that. The movie cares about what he does and how he works. But I do think that it is all rooted in... And you can see this a couple of different times in love with. Like, the movie doesn't care about that. The movie cares about what he does and how he works. But I do think that it is all rooted in, and you can see this a couple of different times in the movie. There's a sequence much later in the film where he confronts a character played by Tilda Swinton, where he almost breaks a couple of times. Yeah.

And he almost says what he wants to say. Well, he sees another way of life, another way of living. Someone who treats themselves to all the pleasures of life, where he has this aesthetic kind of, I have an iPod Nano, I have my stretches and my mantras. Yeah, but it's so funny that you guys interpret that scene that way. And it speaks to Fassbender's amazing silent performance. I mean, he does the voiceover, but he is all physicality and

reactions in the movie. And he says, I think maybe three words to Tilda Swinton total. Um, but I guess there is a little bit of longing. I read judgment in it and equal measure in what he's doing of like this person, let her guard down and I won't do that again. And, and this is, you know, so I, I guess we all put, know i i hate the feeling of failure more than anything in life um so probably that's why that part of it is responding to me or that i'm responding to that part of it i think i think both are true i think i think one does not overwhelm the other um there are there are a few other things that the movie feels about and it's interesting that the movie i think is being some, some pretty warmly received,

but a lot of the criticism is sort of like, this is slight, this is small because to me thematically, it's very deep and clear. And it's about a lot of things. One of the big things that it's about that I think is right in line with a lot of what Fincher has done in the past is this idea of kind of like the banality and ease of consumer culture and the number of the McDonald's and Starbucks and WeWork and Amazon and all of these series of corporations that have made our lives significantly, quote unquote, easier, have provided greater access to things and in turn have also provided greater access to people who kill

for a living and people who destroy lives. And the fact that no one cares and that no one's thinking about what the consequences are of getting bigger and bigger and bigger. David Fincher, of course, as one of the primary architects of the Netflix revolution in Hollywood, having made House of Cards with them and a series of other films, including this one, also is a part of that. Right. After being the foremost artist in terms of selling Nike. Yes. And Gap. Gap, sure.

And many of your favorite brands and corporations. A corporate whore and high-class artist living in harmony. And, you know, obviously this is the guy who made Fight Club.

He knows of which he speaks. I've always felt there's a kind of self-loving, self-hating thing going on with him. Where he's like, I need you to know obviously this is the guy who made Fight Club. He knows of which he speaks. I've always felt there's a kind of self-loving, self-hating thing going on with him where he's like, I need you to know that I know that what I'm doing is gross but also it's so fun and so great, isn't it? Isn't it fascinating that this year has really been defined by these movies

by filmmakers who have such towering personas? I mean, I suppose that's sort of the best place to be in if you're doing a podcast about movies, but Gerwig, Scorsese, Nolan, Fincher, like we can't have a conversation about these films without also talking about either how we feel about these filmmakers or what these filmmakers represent and how this film is a commentary on the other films that they have made, right? It's kind of interesting. I'm sure that many other years feel that way but maybe because there's been such a dearth of you know actors going out and selling their wares and like we had we didn't get hit with like tan leonardo dicaprio tv and podcast

appearances before killers of the flower moon so instead we're like marty thinking about marty thinking about marty i'm thinking about marty being old i'm thinking about marty being young i'm thinking about what he wants to say about violence in America. And with Fincher, it's like, this is such a Cracker Jack, waterproof, airtight movie. And I'm just thinking about Fincher and all of Fincher's movies, whether or not this movie is. And he's insisting it is not a commentary on his past work or him or anything that is essentially an exercise, which you can take David Fincher as seriously as you take Michael Fassbender in this movie, you know? Yeah, I think even if that were true

and he does not actually feel that way, it doesn't matter because it's an expression of himself. And so he's showing us who he is by making a movie like this. I think I mentioned this last time we talked about Fincher, but that was incredibly revealing when he spoke after the screening that we saw and said that, and Andrew Kevin Walker said that Fincher approached him with the idea for the movie and he walked him through the entire movie.

Andrew Kevin Walker wrote the script and I'm sure is responsible for many of these incredibly funny lines in the inner monologue. This is almost David Fincher in human form, in corporeal form. The big thing coming out of that Q&A, which was fascinating, and it was him and his sort of murderer's row of guys that he's been working with on and off for the last 10 years or whatever, was every time they got asked a question, they would be like,

that's David. That was David's idea. And it was just like, you know, auteur theory being what it is. I mean, these movies are not what they are without Kirk Baxter

and Eric Messerschmidt and Andrew Kevin Walker, but, like, this is a guy who seems to be in complete control of the medium and it's all in his head and he actually knows how to get it. Yeah. I think it's also, he hasn't made a movie quite like this,

I guess since gone girl, but even, I mean, you could maybe even going back further to dragon tattoo is maybe a little closer to this kind of a pure thriller. And he is the best at it. I mean, he is the chosen one at the American thriller in the last 30 years. This is what he does.

That is the thing beyond it being like a remarkable prism for David Fincher movies and whatever you want to feel about, you know, perfectionism and or corporate, you know, capitalist consumerism. It's just like a genre movie that rips, you know, it is just like really good. And he is so specific and so deliberate and he is applying it once again to like increasingly elaborate jet setting set pieces that just move and they get weird and they get vicious. And he can do the visceral quality of the stuff as well as he can do like, you know, here's what I think about the price of like 10 grams of protein at McDonald's, you know, which is incredible. That one's really, really good. Another way, another thing that made me think of you is when he's eating like the hard boiled egg from the gas station, which I've seen you do. Yeah. I do eat that way. I do eat on the go. You eat for fuel. I am trying to maximize the amount of time I have to accomplish my job.

And I wonder if David Fincher lives that way because he of course is an extremely successful man who i'm sure lives in a giant glass cube on top of a mountain in in beverly hills no he doesn't no where does he live he lives in uh los filas oh i mean same difference is that like yeah so is chris sure but i imagine he lives inside of Griffith Park, like at the top of Griffith Park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. He lives, yeah, yes. But nevertheless, like I wonder if he eats that way. So maybe I shouldn't wear my Fincher is Zaddy shirt to Gelson's

because I might bump into him. Should we go into spoiler territory and we kind of walk through some of the episodes of the film? Yeah. The film opens in Paris where Fassbender's character who we're introduced to by a voiceover

is preparing a hit. A hit on a seemingly successful businessman and it is a kind of rear window monkey. You know, it is like an attempt to recreate

the across the street path vision of what is happening in rooms in another building. And clear homage to that film. In this sequence, we see how important his tools and weaponry are, how important his exercises are. We see him doing finger push-ups. You do those, CR? I don't, but I have been trying to get into a daily stretching routine. Okay.

It's really good for you. As you know, I have one as well and I have been doing it religiously every night for a decade. That's not stretching. It's more like Opus Dei. I do do stretching every night. Okay. If I do not stretch at night, I will wake up and be unable to walk. Right, right, right, right.

I thought you were just talking about the push-ups. I do that as well. I will say not to do a digression, but that it's not great to learn stretches from Instagram. I have found that out. Interesting. When there's like a 23-year-old woman.

When this guy's like, here's how to release your thoracic. I'm like, oh no. That doesn't seem like I can do this without some instruction. That's how you tear your labrum. And he, you know, he plans and he plots

and he camps out in a WeWork to fire this hit. And the hit takes place while the successful businessman is about to engage with the dominatrix. And again... It might be his girlfriend.

Could very well be his girlfriend. But she is certainly dressed as a dominatrix and we see her through this window pane. And we see her through this window pane. And we see that he needs to get his blood pressure down below 60. His heart rate. His heart rate down below 60. We see that he has a very specific methodology for executing on his work.

He fires and he misses. He fucks up. He kills the woman, but not the target. And from there, the film is sort of shot out of a cannon it's very methodical and quiet up until that moment it's very much about just hearing who this person is what a weird cliche riddled like control freak he is but also with all of the the tricks of the trade and the i guess not spycraft but like killer craft um which are hilarious and so specific you know he has like his little metal camping cup to not get dna everywhere it's so fastidious um and mundane

but you it has to be exactly right which is just obviously just the the fincher metaphor is like is like right there for the taking you also also, you skipped the work playlist. Yeah, so of course, there is one artist and one artist only that the killer listens to and that of course is the Smiths. It's among the funniest things

in cinema history. As you pointed out, he listens on an iPod Nano. I believe it's called work playlist. Yes. It is, yeah. But there are others

including yoga playlist. Yes, which I wish we could have heard what that would sound like. What if that was just the Smiths, too? And again, this is an amazing... To me, this choice speaks to my point about what an emotional movie this is. Is there a more longing vocal artist in the 20th century than Morrissey?

He's certainly in the conversation. All of those songs that play in this movie from those Smiths records are so deeply felt and intense and laid bare in a movie that is about the opposite of that. That is about closing down and executing. They're also hilarious. That's kind of, I'm with him. I took it as just an incredibly funny joke.

There are songs that, so he has like an 11 song playlist and there's some that are juxtaposed. Like he is listening to Girlfriend in a Coma when he goes to a Home Depot to buy a trash bucket to put a dead body in. Yes. That's good stuff. I mean, so the first, the second Smith song we hear is during this attempted hit and it's

How Soon Is Now, which is maybe the most popular Smith song. And there's something amazing that is done in this sequence that I've never really seen before, which is that Ren Kleist, the sound designer, has chosen to move the music from diegetic to pure stereo soundtracking

as the perspective of the movie shifts. As we are looking inside the room, we hear the song in full. When we get back to Fassbender's character, we hear it through his headphones

and it cuts back and forth and back and forth. How Soon Is Now also as a song about full. When we get back to Fassbender's character, we hear it through his headphones. And it cuts back and forth and back and forth. How Soon Is Now also as a song about killing someone, about preparing to kill someone.

Each song title is literally punning on the scene. There's also another layer to it, which is that when he looks through the sights of the gun and he hits

play and How Soon Is Now starts playing, I think I started levitating above my seat by about five or six feet and I was like, I didn't know, but I was waiting my entire life to see someone

get killed to how soon is now and he, Fincher, knows that I am a troglodyte and keeps taking away the serotonin hit of stupid movie making where it's like, let's just take a little bit of the difficulty of this murder

off by playing a cool song while it's like let's just take a little bit of the like the difficulty of this murder off by like playing a cool song while it's happening and when you cut back and forth and you don't give me the stereo song i'm like i'm aware that my brain is reacting to wanting to have a cool song played while something horrifying is happening and i feel like i have to take myself out of it and think about it. And that is fucking brilliant. You nailed it. That is exactly what it is. It's like, just as soon as we get to the crescendo on the Johnny Marlick, he pulls it back into Fassbender's ear. Such a smart move. Never seen that before. And also it is, it's, it's prodding you and prodding your impulses to

have an exciting moment. You know what you fucking want, you dirty little fucker. You want to listen to this song while he shoots this guy. It's really, really fun. And, you know, of course, the hit goes awry, as I mentioned. And then there's this chase sequence. And this is when Chris started kind of like shaking in his chair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there's this really exciting, very quick kind of dispensing with all of his materials,

packing everything up. I think he steals that motorcycle. No, it's a rental. It's like a lime scooter kind of thing. So that's what the second lock is? Okay. I couldn think he steals that motorcycle. No, it's a rental. It's like a lime scooter kind of thing. So that's what the second lock is? Okay.

I couldn't quite figure that out because he does kind of steal and break into things at various times in the film. Do you rent scooters regularly? No, I have rented a lime scooter once. I was also...

Where? Outside of my house just to ride it up and down. I almost got hit by a car and I never did it again. You think maybe it was Fincher who was driving past you in Los Fios?

He was like, that's a good idea for a sequence. And we get this breakneck classic chase sequence where no one's actually chasing this character, but he feels that he is under pursuit

and he races across town so he can get to a kind of safe house where he can change and shave and go to the airport. By safe house, you mean

a random bathroom. Dirty bathroom. In a tire airport. By safe house, you mean a random bathroom. Dirty bathroom. In a tire shop. Yes. Did he stake that place out? No, it seems like he brings everything with him. Yeah. But, you know, who can know?

He's a really good traveler, like me, you know? All carry-ons. We're not checking bags. Yeah. Well, this film then becomes, it became interesting to Amanda because it became about Delta Miles Club. He never sits first class.

No. You know, he's always aisle and economy plus. Yeah. There's that great. But he does go to the lounges. Yeah, sure. Because they have showers. We have skipped over the moment where he described his look, which is that he is inspired by a German tourist.

Yeah. And so he wears a bucket hat and a kind of khaki jumpsuit. Which is basically what David Fincher wore to the Q&A after the film. He was dressed very similarly to the killer. I mean, I was going to say some fashion inspo for you. Yeah. Not the bucket hat. A man needs a uniform.

Yeah. I believe in that. But it's a lot of like performance fabrics. Agreed. And I'm leaning further and further. Yeah, and i'm i'm you're getting there i'm leaning further and further yeah no i know we're getting closer but they're kind of like in neutral colors they won't show dirt i so here's the thing michael fassbender has an extraordinary physique i mean he is really one of the most well-built humans on earth it is remarkable he is a machine and you

can get away with that kind of beige in your 40s when you are that kind of a machine. Myself, not so much. Nevertheless, he is kind of anonymous. Fassbender's extremely dry delivery of no one wants to talk to a German tourist was one of the funniest line deliveries in years. There are dozens of jokes like that that are the flat affectation, but the writing is so clever. Bobby, have you ever gone to McDonald's, gotten an Egg McMuffin, and discarded with the muffin? No. Okay.

It's coming for you, Bob. I'm a McGriddle guy myself, so I want all those carbs. Please give me those. Oh, if you're going to go to McDonald's, like... Yeah, you got to get the McGriddle. Do this in.

And a hash brown. Don't be a bookie. But he's just, he's fueling up. The killer is fueling up. He's in Paris. He can get other stuff to eat. That's the funny thing. But he doesn't stuff to eat. That's the funny thing. But he doesn't want to beg.

That's going to slow him down. A majority of French people are also in Paris and are just like, you know what sounds great? McDonald's. Yeah, that's part of the point, I think. Which is just like, you know what everybody wants is McDonald's. So he escapes. He gets on a plane. He feels he's being pursued on the plane. And so when he stops over, he spends the night in a hotel room rather than get on the connecting flight the next day to Santo Domingo, which is, I guess, where he lives.

Because he clocks someone who he thinks may be pursuing him, who have a particularly interesting sock wear. There's a lot of focus on the sock wear of his potential opponent. Nothing ever comes of that opponent i loved this little detail re-watching it the second time when he gets into this hotel room at the airport he orders some room service gets his room service and then once the um attendant leaves he takes a glass and puts it on the door handle and then puts the tray underneath the door handle so if anybody jiggles handle, the glass will smash and make a noise and wake him up because he is going to sleep in a chair

for three and a half hours before getting on his next flight. This man is crazy. This is psychotic behavior. The way you describe it, I know, but you're just like, now I'm going to do this. And that's goals.

It's like, this is just like a manual for you for life. The ingenuity of this psycho is very admirable to me. But no one's chasing you. And you're like, I think I might put a glass. No one's chasing this psycho is very admirable to me. But no one's chasing you and you're like, I think I might put a glass. No one's chasing this guy either. That's the thing. The paranoia is real.

Lo and behold, though, this is another thing. His, his cautiousness is what leads to the woman that he loves being injured. Because if he had just

taken the flight, he may have arrived at his home, which he eventually does in Santo Domingo, and finds that there has been a, a fight. There's been an altercation of some kind in his house. It's been broken into. The woman that he loves is not there. There's blood streaked on the mirrors and on the floor and he's panicked and doesn't know what to do. And again, like guilt, like he did it. Like it's his fault. Everything that has transpired to this point is his problem and he has to fix it and so he eventually finds his girlfriend in this hospital

in santo domingo great question at the q a about this about the way that the sound design is used where like when you're in the hospital you can tell that this is more of a developing nation it's run on generators yes and the weather is very bad at this time and you can see the power flickering out and when the lights go out and then the generators turn back on and you can hear all of these, there are a lot of little details like that in the sound design and the way the film is shot that are really impressive. After he sees his loved one, who I don't think gets a name. Does she get a name? No, but he doesn't either.

That's a good point. He really sets off on his mission. And he's going to track down all the people who are responsible for this he gets many names I should say none of them are his real name yes they are all names of 70s sitcom characters

which is an incredible joke and you know of course is a great read on how the fact that like nobody's paying attention to anything like they're just assassins moving through the world

using Sam Malone as their alias a hilarious joke that like now nobody cares if you're named Archie Bunker you know like 10 years ago 15 years ago people were like hey Archie Bunker yes but now it's 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people were like, hey, Archie Bunker.

Yes. But now it's like some guy working at Avis Counter is like, I don't know who, what Alden family is. Right. We have a dead culture now. We were talking about Private Benjamin on the rewatchables the other day. And I was like, not a single person under 35 knows what Private Benjamin is. And Bill was like, that's not true.

And then we were like, Craig, do you know what that is? And he was like, no. And this is the same. Nancy Meyers' only Oscar nomination. We mentioned that. We mentioned that. Yeah. Okay.

It's not her fault. I was going to say, I didn't care about it. Me and Sean throw our bodies in front of that one. The attitude was not whether you mention it. My beef is with the Academy, not with you on that particular one. Very reasonable. Very reasonable. Very reasonable. So there are one, two, three, four,

four kills that come here. Yep. Or four kill missions. Should we power rank them? I kind of wanted to ask you, what was your favorite? I think that the New Orleans sequence is my favorite,

which is when he goes to visit Charles Parnell, who is a legal professor and a lawyer who was his mentor in law school who recognized a kind of sociopathy in him and said, you know, what's much more lucrative than law is killing people. And so he,

they don't really get into any kind of like biographical detail, but that is the implication. And so he is Charles Parnell, who people remember from Top Gun Maverick and Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning and is a great character actor

and is really getting his chance to show his wares. He's been plucked by the auteurs. It's really interesting. It's so good. He gets an incredible scene

of just oration and then he gets several nails shot into his lungs. Yep. It's a very violent sequence and a revelation that this guy is not fucking around that he will he will do damage to people that he knows and has known for a long time it also and chris mentioned this already is preceded by the michael fassbender character doing like curbside pickup for his home. Yeah, he basically oceans 11s himself into this place. Which involves a recycling bin and a nail gun.

And timing the automatic door closing of different like offices. This comes in the aftermath of our tour of his storage unit, which is full of guns and license plates and fake passports. This movie is fucking hilarious, particularly when he kills Charles Parnell and thinks that he's going to have

six to seven minutes to interrogate him and he dies almost instantaneously. Like, this guy's kind of bad at his job a little bit. And that's part of what is so funny about it. So there's a crucial thing that happens in the New Orleans sequence that I wanted to talk about a little bit.

So Charles Parnell has a secretary who seems like a lovely woman and not at all culpable for Dolores. Yes. Anything that's happened in the killer's life.

And she I think takes some oxy to kind of It's Xanax. Xanax. I would take both in this situation. She is zip-tied

to a bathroom She zip-ties herself. She zip-ties herself. On his orders. And she says the most heartbreaking thing in any David Fincher movie, which is, I know like basically who you are and what you're going to do to me. Please don't disappear me. Like, please don't make me disappear.

Like, I don't want my kids to not. My children need. My family need the life insurance. Yes. Is what he says. Or what she says. And. You know what he says immediately after she says that in his internal monologue forbid empathy and he follows through with that because he gets what he

needs from this woman which is the rest of the sort of players in this in this conspiracy against him and there is this moment where they seem to be having a relatively sincere connection fincher also more than any other character dwells on dolores's terror and her fear and her she gets the sole non-subjective moment in the movie yes when she sits alone in the car and attempts to break free and start screaming at the top of her lungs to try and so interesting that choice no one's there even though a guy had been walking his dog a minute ago like no one walks by. Nobody cares. He brings her into the house, gets what he needs, and at the top of the stairs,

snaps her neck and pushes her down the stairs so that it will look like she fell. But the reason why I responded so much to this scene is the same thing for the how soon is now moment, where you're like, it seems like dolores and him are really getting along maybe he's gonna see the light and like give her a break and maybe he'll just like muzzle her and put her somewhere where she'll be found in three days and

it's like nope that's not what happens in his way though he does give her a break i mean a literal neck break but also he but it's the same thing that you're like i think that's the conversation that he the director is having with the audience about their expectations and about their sympathies and about their... It's just always keeping you on your toes. Yeah. I mean, it just also is like what is... It's playing, to Chris's head, with what you, the audience, think of this person, how you're relating to him, whether he's a good guy, whether... He kind of did the right thing,

right? By killing her in a way that her kids are going to get life insurance. But like, how willing are you? Like, how much does someone have to do to get any sort of credit versus like how much, you know, it's the closest he gets to decency. Yeah. And it's completely, it's so completely indecent. No, it's brutal. I mean, it's absolutely awful what he does but it's an amazing ramp up to the next sequence which is probably my favorite just because of the sheer audacity of the movie making that happens which is the brute the fight sequence where he encountered he seeks out in miami the uh the man who is responsible for beating up and and hurting his his girlfriend and again i thought you made a great point which, which is like this jet setting idea of like

each kill sequence is a different place. And we feel that we are in the place. And he goes from New Orleans, a place with a thousand restaurants and one menu, one of my favorite lines in the movie, to Florida, where we can feel the humidity and the dampness and the discomfort and the kind of haze in the air as he tracks this man who is this just kind of gigantic, kind of professional wrestler type figure, MMA fighter. And he tracks him down and follows him and follows his path

and then eventually breaks into his home to kill him. And when he does, the man kind of catches him unawares and they have this brutal fight sequence. And the fight sequence, which takes place almost entirely in the dark, is like one of the craziest things you'll see in a movie this year. The way that it's staged and shot and the brutality and the visceral nature that you were talking about, Amanda, it's insane. It certainly is on par with anything you saw in John Wick 4 except it is like true one-to-one

hand-to-hand combat. There are definitely moments where Michael Fassbender just gets like uppercutted by a 300-pound man and just like

shakes it off. Yeah, which is also like part of the sicko nature of everybody on this project. This has one of the funniest jokes in the movie which is he's been

thrown into a kitchen area and is grasping around for weapons and comes up with a cheese grater. And you're like, ooh, a cheese grater. Is he going to grate this guy?

And he just looks at the cheese grater and he's like, fuck. And like, throws it away. In my second screening, that got a big laugh. That was maybe the biggest laugh line. But I actually thought that that actually helped him because he throws

the cheese grater and it distracts the guy because when it makes a noise he looks in the other direction and then he attacks him so it's like this is a crafty motherfucker here yeah um and he eventually outduels this this this brute and and does eventually kill him my favorite part of this was uh and i'm i am gonna get in trouble for saying this, but there's a dog making quite a ruckus. I love it. And so there's a lot of, you know, there's like a specially designed like dog drugging treat, you know, and he's like doing the calculations of how much a pit bull weighs versus, you know, and how many of. And he fucks that up too. Yeah, he does, which is just very funny and very relatable to anyone who's ever lived next to a loud dog.

Did you, was the expert, the Tilda Swinton, your favorite kill sequence? I think so. Although I am also, I really like New Orleans. You know, the nice thing about this movie is it has something for everyone. The fight sequence, definitely. I was just like, oh, and now you want to film your virtuoso fight sequence? Like, I'm happy for everybody else. And my brain is just like, uh-huh, uh-huh.

I wonder what the dog's doing. But when Tilda Swinton's doing a tasting menu with a whiskey flight. Yeah, and then she asked for her own bottle. Yeah. You know? And I noted her boots. I noted everything. Yeah, it was great.

So he shows up in Beacon, New York. Incredible. Like an incredible, incredible detail. And waits outside her home for her masseuse to leave. And

he's identified Tilda Swinton as the second assassin. And she drives to is it the Waterfront the name of the restaurant? I believe so. Was that in Beacon?

Like downtown Beacon? I don't know. I was going to ask you if you've been to Beacon. There's a lot of like really nice I love Beacon. on the't know. I was going to ask you if you've been to Beacon. There's a lot of like really nice. I love Beacon. On the Hudson restaurant.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. Where she is dining solo. It seems like she's dining like in one of the tables in the bar section, which is just like really the true way to live. You know, she's a regular. It's where you like to eat at Houston's. Yeah.

If you can get one of those like side tables, it's a booth, but you don't have to deal with all of the, it's great. Would you say that Tilda Swinton's character is aspirational for you? The Q-tip? Um, no, that's really funny. Do you have your own bottle of rosé at Houston's that you have? That supposes that the rosé would last more than two visits, you know, which is part of the thing. I don't yet. Houston's isn't really working on a one-to-one basis like that. And that's okay. It's a community thing. Yeah, it's a different experience.

I would love to have my own bottle of something somewhere at some point. But no, I don't think that she's aspirational. But I think I probably identify more with her character's approach to trying to enjoy life sense of style well just sense of uh it's a it's a different form of delusion you know because she gives a speech about you you tell yourself it's just for the money but then you don't you know once you have enough money you don't give it up and so let me ask you what is What is her job? Because Charles Parnell's job, he's the lawyer. He is the sort of attache broker on behalf of the killer. We'll get to the client as we get into the final sequence of the film. Is she the go-between for high-end clients when planning high-stakes assassinations?

No, I think she also does killing. But I think she wouldn't have done what the MMA guy wound up doing when they were both sent to the Dominican Republic. So she was just hired as the cleaner? Yes. Okay. Yeah, that was my understanding. But, so, going back to New Orleans for a second and Charles Parnell, because he says something when Fassbender shows up. And he's like, I never imagined that you would go home.

What were you doing at home? So... This is my point about the movie. No. Like, I never imagined that you would go home. What were you doing at home? So. This is my point about the movie. No. The movie is about a person who has a lot of feelings. And is like, he broke all protocol. Like, he broke the plan. Like, you're not supposed to have a loved one in the Dominican Republic when you're a professional assassin.

We'll get to. I have so much time for your feelings. But, no. I am like, logistically. My question is logistical like so were they sent there specifically for her they were sent there for him right he is supposed to know better to not be there so as not to be caught and so charles palnell was like i had to send them there yes but you know for the blowback yes right like, I don't know if I believe that.

Well, I think that the, the blowback was the intention of making sure that the killer long-term goes in the wind. That the idea was you have this money, you screwed up this job. It was a high stakes job. You're gone now.

And you never go back to where you live. You start anew because you have all of this loose cash. He doesn't do that. And also they don't even, like Charles Parnell may not have even known he had a girlfriend, but he planted roots. And you're not supposed to do that when you're in this lifestyle.

I have to exit, unfortunately, but I do want to say one thing about the Tilda Swinton thing, which is that the more I thought about it, the more I thought he killed her because she has a more normalized life than he does. I think that motivated him. And that watching her eat

and having this like indulgent kind of like, you know, sensory experience with this food that he's just, I eat an egg in a rented van. Right. This person gets to live in normal everyday society and do what I do. But I'm like in the Dominican Republic and I have to have my back to the ocean

because I don't trust anything in front of me. And she's just got this like she's she's has a partner and she gets to go to dinner every night and knows people and has friends and I think that's why he killed her she also killed her because he was like you have something in your purse and I know you're gonna try and kill me too I think he killed her because no loose ends yeah he was gonna kill her no matter what but he was motivated even more so each one of these kills is like him being confronted with different parts of himself in some ways. And I thought that that was really interesting

is that she is this like basically well-adjusted person. She is what could have been for him if he had allowed himself to not live in a sedentary lifestyle. But also she's bad at her job. She's flawed. Yeah. And she loses. She's not vicious enough. Yeah. And he's vicious enough to execute on it.

Chris, I just want to point out, did Arliss Howard raid your wardrobe for his performance in this film? The sub-pop shirt is just dazzling.

I did give a lot of thought to what the killer's favorite Smith's record is. I think he's a hat full of hollow guy, even though the songs are taken from a majority of the albums.

But I think he is like a louder than bombs hat full of hollow type dude. Compilation-y. Yeah. I wonder if he's more of a greatest hits guy.

Yeah. Like, Not a Queen is Dead, Meet and Meet is Murder Person, and then Arliss Howard, I think we decided favorite sub-pop band is Mudhoney.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You agree with that? Sure. He might be into Tad. You think he might be into Tad? I'm not sure.

CR, thank you for joining us. I'm really sorry. I could talk about The Killer all day. Maybe you can again in a future episode, wrapping up the films of the year. That's true. I don't want to make your list for you. No, of course.

It's going to come up. Obviously, he's on it. Of course it is. Bye, guys. Thank you. Bye, Chris. Okay, we're picking back up with our mean pod guy. It's Adam Naiman. What is Adam the author of, Amanda? Adam is the author of a book about David Fincher,

the director at the center of this podcast and also this film. And it is available for purchase wherever you buy books hi adam thank you that that that felt so natural you know that was that was that was great i didn't know he was gonna throw it i volunteered you guys should buy adam's book buy all of his books he has written many books about some of the great directors but i volunteered to do it and then i didn't know that sean was gonna to do it immediately. Now available. The book is the book's very mean, right? That's, that's the thing. Just, just, just, just, just so mean, you know, so, so, so, so hostile and condescending. That's the, that's the brand, right? So we've been talking, well, I'm going to use that as a segue

because we've been talking about this movie, which i think could be seen in one direction as a very mean movie a very uh a cold-blooded you know hard-bitten procedural thriller from the man who brought you seven um but i also think it's uh one of the funniest and most deeply felt movies of 2023 uh what would you make the killer i wrote about it for uh for your website for uh rigger rigger make the killer? I wrote about it for, uh, for your website for a rarer rarer.com. And, uh, I read about it pretty positively. I had to watch it twice. Uh, when you write a long book on a filmmaker, especially one who does not lack for, you know, reception commentary, like Fincher, like you kind of owe it to yourself to, to write on these movies well. And so in that book, you have the advantage of seeing all these films even mank you know five six times and for the

killer like what are you going to write as your initial uh and i thought that's what's going on here no hey i i'm i was more towards the positive end on mank than most of the people most of the people i know on so on social media who thought that a good way to review the movie was just to write the title as if it was just inherently funny. You know, Mank was a great joke, but I think that, you know,

the first time through the movie, I don't know what you guys have said about it yet, but it seemed kind of self-evident and self-contained. Like this was obviously a bit of directorial self-portraiture. There's a lot of references to his work. There's a lot of references to his mythical methodology. There's a sense of a kind of self-allegory there, like speaking of Mank, what if you missed? What if you're a really talented guy and your financiers are like, hey, that didn't go so well. And so I kind of was so caught up the first time

in this idea of reading it and figuring out what it was that I wouldn't say I forgot to enjoy it, but it was like very much on hold as a viewer. Like it was a very alert, active, I've got to figure out what my feeling on this movie is. Second time I went to see it again, theatrically here in Toronto, not as much at stake in terms of the plot

or where it was going. And I found it funnier and a little less, um, what's the word I'm looking for a little less obvious the second time it opened up interpretively for me beyond just the Fincherness, uh, of it all. I mean, I still have some ambivalence about it. I don't know, you know, where I would draft it. Uh, you know, I, I didn't do ambivalence about it. I don't know, you know, where I would draft it. Uh, you know, I,

I didn't do your David Fincher draft. I don't know where I would draft it, but I certainly was interested to read about it. And I found it interesting to, to talk about with colleagues because, you know, we're not exactly drowning in shows of talent by great American filmmakers these days.

So something is at stake, I think, in talking about this movie. Do you think that's true? Do you think that there is some, because that's an aspect of this conversation is as you pointed out, you just fired up on Netflix right now.

Yeah. So like, what is at stake for David Fincher with The Killer? Like for me, it is very clearly one of my favorite films of the year. I had a kind of an inverted experience with Adam. The first time I watched it, I was like, this sicko is the funniest filmmaker around, and I really enjoyed the movie.

And then the second time, I think I thought a little bit more kind of critically and structurally about the movie. But I saw it in an Alamo draft house last night. I don't know how to—I'm curious to hear how you saw it as well. And it was a half-full theater, and some of the people seemed to be really lapping it up, and the other half seemed to be receiving it quietly. And— Aren't those the rules at an Alamo Draft House? That's a good point. And there's no box office report on the movie. And I'm sure it will be number one on Netflix over the weekend, but we don't even really know what that means.

David Fincher hasn't really been in the circle of public financial reception for a long time now. He hasn't released a movie to the public since Gone Girl in the traditional theatrical style. So I actually, I don't, what do you think is at stake with a movie like this? It's a good question. I saw it again at home, courtesy of the Netflix Corporation. Thank you. Thank you to them. You know, I had to write the email being like, I saw it on a big screen for the first time, I promise.

No, but they were very nice about it, which is, I think, how a majority of people will see it. I don't know anyone outside of our circle of people who cover movies for a living who have seen it. Who went to go see it. Yeah, even though it is a David Fincher movie, and I would say that I know many people in my life who are at least, you know, casual

or, you know, he has been at the center of pop culture and was for, I guess, 15, 20 years. And some of that is the nature of movies and the nature of Netflix and also this strike. I mean, he has been out promoting this movie as, as much as he can. As much as he's willing.

As much as he's willing comfortably. Yeah. I mean, I meant as much as he constitutionally can, you know, which is like not much. Not a sufferer of fools, David Fincher.

Yeah. But I, I don't know that there are that many stakes because I, we don't really think it's in the Oscar conversation, even though I think that's a mistake. But we talked about on the David Fincher podcast that the Academy is just absolutely dead wrong when it comes to David Fincher and has been for almost his entire career. it just seems like a movie that can be released and people will watch it and enjoy it which in some ways is like in keeping with the Fincher-ness of

his career and of this movie of just like I'm just like a person who's trying to like do things as well as possible and then on to the next on thing. But they're products. Yeah, exactly. He makes product and he made a product for Netflix and they will serve up the product. Yeah. So maybe it's just all upside. What do you think, Adam?

I mean, you spent so much time thinking about the arc of his filmography. Was anything at stake here? Well, I took a quote that he had years ago. I think he was doing a mutual interview with Mark Romanek, also a very good music video director and became a feature filmmaker, where he talked about working Fincher for Propaganda. You know, that was the music video startup company, the commercial and music video house that ended up having a lot of pretty cool people on their roster in the end. Like, I think in the beginning was people like Simon West and Fincher, but eventually like Spike Jonze and Michael Bay. And Fincher likened it to a jukebox, right? He's like, you put your quarter in one end and something comes out the other.

And it was a really mercenary quote. It's like, we have the talent. We don't care what we're making. And I think Fincher is very obviously more of more than a mercenary. He's an artist. But when you guys say that his work is, is, is content and he makes products, I think that's true. And then always with like that little kernel of self-awareness

right where branding and product and that idea of content they figure thematically into so much of his work i mean like when you re-watch some of his movies in light of that especially stuff like fight club you know it's very obvious that that's kind of his subject so when you ask what's at stake in the killer i think of lines from the movie like when Fassbender's talking about all the people who are born and die every day and he's like, I'll never make a dent in those metrics. Yeah, of course. this mixture of cynicism and resignation about what it is to make something now and how hard it is to make sort of an impact. I mean, I think that what's at stake is what does it mean that some of our best filmmakers are working for streamers in the first place because they get the blank check and they get the opportunity to make uncompromised work at a moment where studios

seem terrified and allergic of anything good, but then the movies become weirdly ephemeral and kind of lost. We talk every year, seemingly, at the end of the year, especially since I started doing these year-end pods with you guys, where the Irishman is in the conversation. That's one of the films of the year, or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, or even something like Roma. And yet, these movies don't seem to belong to the real canon. Not because they're bad, I'm not putting them down. They don't seem to belong to the real canon. Even when some of the Netflix movies get put out on a really physical form of canonization like Criterion, there's this weird kind of invisible asterisk and I don't know how to account for it yet. I feel like we can still on some level feel a difference. Even if it's not a difference in the artistry or the movie itself,

they kind of don't feel real. I know you've hit on something that I think is true. That is not necessarily a criticism, but a lot of movies that have been concretized in our mind in the last 30 years as part of that thing played on like TNT on a Tuesday afternoon. Or you might catch a snippet of on HBO as you're flicking around. Or maybe you rented it from Blockbuster. And you had a kind of, either you sought it out or it sought you out. And you had to take an action beyond clicking a button for it. And in this case, you're right. Roma is hallowed in the Criterion Collection,

and it is available in theory and perpetuity on Netflix. But it doesn't feel like it is participating in the same way. The killer is interesting in the same way to me, because Roma and the Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, and I'm sure there are many other examples of this that I'm not thinking of right off the bat, but those are all films from quote-unquote master filmmakers who are responding to their own work and life and experience and they're using the outsized corporate power of

a streaming service to do so and they probably wouldn't be made if not for those services because of the nature of hollywood but hollywood might not be in wouldn't be made if not for those services because of the nature of Hollywood. But Hollywood might not be in this perilous state if not for the streamers in the first place. So like there is this kind of snake eating its tail aspect

to this sort of thing. The killer I find particularly funny because it does feel like self-portraiture. But it also, I think if it were kind of like marketed and treated like a traditional hollywood movie and we might have talked about this last week i definitely think people would go see a hitman movie starring michael fassbender if they just treated it like a movie that you

should go see in a movie theater it might not be a 500 million dollar movie like gone girl but it's pretty commercial um and there are artistic flourishes of course and i wouldn't say it has the most satisfying conclusion it actually kind of ends and It has an anti-conclusion in some ways, but it is really well made, propulsive. As you said, the pacing is great, fun, funny, very violent and kind of satisfying in that way. And we'll just never know. Like, we'll just never know. Like, we'll, like I said, we'll know it's on a chart and then it will just be in the giant cloud of interesting movies that Netflix has financed in the last seven years. And that's it. I think that's a little bit true, but it will also be in the Fincher canon, you know? And I think that, I guess we are losing that centralized canon that Adam spoke of, or these things that we all have seen together and agreed on, but at the same time, we're getting Fincher making exactly the movie that he wants to make. And he has already established, it's not like Netflix established his career. So there are

other ways to find it. I think you just, where it fits in history is a little bit different. You know, Marriage Story is another Netflix example of, I think Baumbach is a great filmmaker. Has he yet reached Scorsese Heights? You know, not really, but Netflix has just been funding that continuing project. And I guess there are minuses to that in that they don't have the opportunity to go as wide,

but I don't know. But there are a lot of nerds like us with Netflix accounts who are like, oh, great, a new Fincher, a new Baumbach, a new... Baumbach is an interesting kind of counterexample to me, though, because he's a person who I feel has been elevated significantly by his experience with Netflix. Like he now has a film that was nominated for Best Picture. And I'm fairly certain he did not have that before he started this long partnership. This has allowed him to make movies with Adam Sandler.

And this has allowed, you know what I mean? Like I saw that his next film was announced. I think Sandler is starring in his next film too. And it was like, it was about, it was like a relationship drama about adults. And I was like, so a Noah Baumbach movie? Like what is that? I don't even know what that means. So he's kind of an interesting, he's somebody who used the system to elevate his status in some way.

Whereas Fincher and Scorsese and a handful of these other people are almost like facilitating and kind of brand managing their legacies by way of these companies, which is an interesting turn Fincher, I mean, you know, one of the things that is true about him and the degree to which this is like myth-making or image management or received wisdom is fascinating. But it's like there's the chip on the shoulder in the primal scene of Alien 3, right? Where it's like the contradiction of you're drafted to the big leagues, you're given $60 million for a really valuable franchise. And then you have producers calling you like you're a shoe salesman on the phone, you know, on these conference calls, which he never got over that. One of the producers of alien was like,

you sell shoes, like shut up, you know? And it's like the chip on the shoulder is interesting when you're working for a studio, whether it's a major or a minor, or whether you're looking for fine to put financing together from distributors.

There's something about Fincher's movie movies. I'm not saying actual movies because Mank and the Killer are actual movies. And Amanda put it very smartly where she's like, it's part of the Fincher canon. They'll never become obscure because he's a major auteur and people write 70,000 word hardcover illustrated books about him. Available wherever you buy books. But there's something about a movie like Seven

where it's like a miracle that it ever got made, not because he had a blank check and total control, but because he had to find ways to completely micromanage and control that movie against all common sense. And Netflix is kind of the absence of common sense, right? Netflix is really just like, here is the complete budget of a movie,

you know, go for it. And I don't think it makes the work lax or lazy or less impressive, but it contextualizes it differently. It's like spending the reward instead of building the brand in the first place. And that's why I think he's thematized and turned into a subject, that weird idea of you have total control and your financiers have total faith on you, in you. And then this weird narrative of like, he just misses. Like, did you guys talk about this when you talked about the movie? We did, yeah. That's the funniest part of the plot is that he just misses. He's not that good.

That's- And there's all these little hints and disparities throughout the movie that what he's telling you and what the movie is showing us, there's at least a little daylight between those things. And for that, for Fincher in his 60s, to make that kind of part of the texture of the movie, total control and still capable of missing, it's really fascinating. So I almost want to know what he thinks his misses are. And I don't know if he would ever actually, obviously Alien 3 is a kind of a disaster from his perspective. But the idea of the unreliable narrator is something we talked about. And there are other instances in the film,

the Charles Parnell, you know, attempting to keep him alive for six to seven minutes based on his calculations. And then he instantaneously dies. There are a number of things he does where he just fucks up. And even though he's kind of- Drugging the dog incorrectly. Right. He doesn't get the dog right. Like There are a number of things he does where he just fucks up. And even though he's kind of- Drugging the dog incorrectly. Right, he doesn't get the dog right.

Like he screws a lot of stuff up. And the fact that art is not an exact science feels like a metaphor onto this movie as well. And so that's rich and really funny. I mean, he's always, like I said, he's always been very wry and knowing about his persona and the work that he does. Very similarly to Kills of the Flower Moon,

I had the same feeling at the end of this movie, though, where I was like, this kind of could just be a last movie. You know, this could be, this would be a fitting conclusion to this story. I'm not asking for David Fincher to stop making movies. I hope he makes 15 more. But it has the feeling of like, this is what I wanted to say,

and what I would like to do now is lay by the pool with my wife and drink a cocktail and not listen to the Smiths anymore. You know, like I, I love, I love that for him. You know, I hope,

I hope he finds happiness and can abandon his control. I just want to let you in on the narrative surrounding this movie, which is that it's, it's about David Fincher in a lot of ways. And it's also just like about Sean. And Sean fincher in a lot of ways and it's also just like about sean um and sean has really seen a lot of himself in it and just everything that you say including like i'm good and now i'm ready to sit by the my wife with the pool and have some drinks is just i maybe david fincher wants to do that as well i'd like to to think that David Fincher is like doing that all the time that he's not making them.

You know, he's like a war card. I don't think so. You think he's like a tortured perfectionist always. Not to take anything away from our special guy, Sean. Yeah. But there is an entire generation of semi maladjusted male cinephiles on Twitter who in the last four weeks have published something to the effect of, I'm listening to the Smiths while working.

He's just like me. He's like me for real, for real. Yeah. No, for sure. He's like me for real, for real. I mean, I don't know how much you guys talked about that, but it is funny that the movie came out framed by these two really funny news things,

like one being the disillusion of WeWork, right? That WeWork is clapping, but the other being that Morrissey can't get a label to release his album. And in an amazing piece of video, if you guys haven't seen it, he actually talked about it and performed on like a local New York news morning show because he doesn't have a label to, to book him places. I mean,

Morrissey has kind of been soft canceled, right? Yeah. And without like trying to get too into this, like there's rumors that Fincher wants to make a movie about cancel culture. Like this is one of the projects that he's kind of considering doing. There's even a little bit of a snide provocation and soundtracking a movie entirely with Morrissey in 2000 and 23,

you know, like beyond just the fact that Morrissey is what he is and what's inherent in the music. Like that's pretty funny considering how completely out of the loop and out of the mainstream and out of like being allowed to like, like Morrissey things have gotten to this point. That feels fascinating. Entirely fascinating entirely intentional yeah and very funny and and the other thing i was saying about that in particular is you know what who who is a more longing and emotional artist than morrissey during that period and the way that he's saying is so the the opposite the emotional

you know inversion of what the killer is trying to present adam can i ask you a question that we've been a little divided on is this an emotional movie you know what i wrote in my piece that the stuff with tilda swinton is very interestingly evocative of benjamin button like this lonely dinner in this big hollow restaurant that feels like it's at the end of the world and there's this moment of connection and i thought that in benjamin button you know there's really big feelings in that movie almost kind of oceanic feelings that to me are competing with kind of eric rothian screenplay shtick yeah very mixed feelings about benjamin button and here they're not and here they're not competing with like sentimental schtick. They're competing with just absolute cold-blooded kind of cynicism. And here's where you got to give it up for Tilda Swinton, which is she's a good enough actor that in these scenes in The Killer, the movie actually gets kind of an emotional pulse. flights of with the flight of whiskeys and you know asks about ice cream and stuff i i felt

myself kind of feeling something in total distinction to the fact that fast bender's clearly not right or he's kind of well but he you know so the one thing we pointed out though is that that is the one time in the film when it seems like he might break and start saying what he really wants to say and i think it's because of what you're describing where she is presenting and chris chris located this when we were talking about it that she maybe is living the life that he could have lived a more normal life while still operating as a violent person well sure because he has that line about the bedroom community and you know the fact that you can get to a via am track and he feels kind of mixed about it I mean it's a good I mean Amanda's question is a is a good one because

it also can kind of depend on the viewer. I mean, I think anytime an artist is talking about their work or themselves, there's obviously some emotion and some feeling in it. And I found that the Smiths go a long way towards lubricating that, right? Sure. Because they're kind of like the subliminal voice of the movie. Not just the misanthropy, but the passion that's sort of in there. But I can't say that I was like deeply

deeply moved. That's not exactly what I'm saying. I'll try to explicate my feeling about it. One, obviously this is all Larded and Amanda being like, this movie is about you. And so then me questing for something beneath the surface of just like, I like my shirts folded just so before I go on a trip.

But what I like about the movie is obviously there is very little expression of emotion. And that's by design. This is a Melville movie. This is a Kurosawa Samurai movie. This is all that stuff, right? This is the Walter Hill, the driver movie. He's riffing on all those things. That's obvious.

That's an easy read on the movie. But you talked about the miss and the idea of the miss. And certainly for David Fincher, the director, a miss means a studio loses a hundred million dollars and his reputation takes a hit in the case of the killer, a hit, a miss means that his family is in jeopardy and that someone that he cares

about is, is wounded is more, maybe mortally wounded. And those are the highest stakes possible for a, a, a person in the world. That's the, that's the worst thing that can happen to you.

And that's not a mistake that they organized the movie around that and that his revenge mission is motivated by that decision. And so even though Fassbender never gives you that, he never gives you like, I will get my vengeance for what you did because that's not that kind of movie. That would be the Tarantino version of this movie, honestly. That is how he expresses emotion. In the Fincher version, of course's it's a repressed emotion but what's under the surface the same way like think of the shot um in seven when uh brad pitt is aiming the gun at john doe when they're out in the middle of the vast wasteland when he's just been told that he cut his wife's head off and he starts to cry and then he sinks back and he flips his head back and he opens his eyes and he re-cocks the gun and aims and then eventually kills him it's like all of

these movies Gone Girl is the same way you know like everything that Amazing Amy is going through is like her coping with what she feels was done to her when she was a kid and exploited and he's trying to locate that without ever letting her break the facade like he does this over and over in all of his movies. So to me, it just feels like a continuation of a theme about people who don't say what they're feeling and either push all their feelings into their work or into the things that give them pleasure. Sometimes those two things are correlated.

And so I feel like it is a very, it is not just a thematically coherent movie with his work. It's like a thesis in a lot of ways. Again, if I'm over-reading it, I feel comfortable with people saying that to me, but, and I don't know if he even specifically feels this way, but I feel like I'm right in reading it that way. Well, well, conscious and unconscious with him are fascinating because like you look at a movie like room two 37, that movie could only be made about Stanley Kubrick because people assume everything has intention, right? There's other filmmakers where part of their filmmaking myth is that there's a certain amount of improvisation or a certain amount of discovery. People don't put Cassavetes

under that same kind of microscope or Elaine May under that same kind of microscope. It's a different kind of filmmaking. With Fincher, because everything is so controlled, because he's the kind of filmmaker who will put a sign on a wall. Like in the social network, there's like that half second shot during one of the party montages, there's a poster on the wall that's like boobs versus brains or whatever. And you're like, you know, you know that that was fussed over forever because he's a semiotician. That's he's an ad man. So that idea of subliminal meaning that half second shots can sort of be legible, right? You want to sort of go, it's all meaningful, but you know, some of it might be unconscious. I think the reason he likes serial killers so much, I've joked about this in my book and in other articles is because consciously or not, he's a recidivist.

He repeats himself. He repeats compositions. He repeats character types. That's why his movies about serial killers are good because they get the psychology so if there's emotion in the movie whether it's conscious or not but you know i found mank which i don't make fun of you know i i found mank to be quite an emotional movie too not just for the obvious not just for the obvious reasons but again having to do with your art and your craft and your voice within an industry. So I don't think you're over-reading it at all, but of course his stature obliges us to have something to say. And that is

sometimes antithetical to the idea of a lean, mean genre entertainment. Because when we romanticize those things, we're kind of thinking of movies without obvious authors sometimes. We're like, just like a EuropaCore five million dollar hitman movie from the early 2000s or something yeah i we didn't really get into this when we last spoke about him last week but i think that the dual entertainment is kind of his mode his whole pursuit is to make a movie that could be just perceived as a conventionally entertaining hitman movie if that's what you want absolutely and that he knows that that sells that that's the good sneaker commercial but he also knows that he loves

alfred hitchcock and what is alfred hitchcock too he makes conventionally entertaining movies that have deep confused emotional themes that is an artist trying to explore how he feels about the world sexuality violence all these great big ideas about life. And so he's always pursuing that in some way. I think, obviously, there is a kind of coldness to the execution of all venture movies. So if you're like, this is a big emotional teddy bear of a guy, he's obviously not. But I think that he chooses projects now based on whether or not he can kind of get his feelings up about them. And I felt like Mindhunter and Mank and this are three movies slash series about

kind of like what is it all for? And I feel like he's kind of circling the idea of like what did I really devote my life to? Yeah, I guess it's funny because during our draft you quoted a separate line from this movie which is skepticism often gets confused for cynicism. And I guess my interpretation of this movie is that it's a lot more cynical or, you know, or nihilist than certainly yours is, Sean. And I think I view most of his work that way. And that is kind of what's electrifying to me. That used to be what was appealing to me about his work that way. And that is kind of what's electrifying to me.

That used to be what was appealing to me about his work. I've been thinking a lot about this, another quote from The Pigeon Tunnel, which is the Errol Morris,

John Lecrae documentary. And, which I can't wait to talk to you about. But, John Lecrae says at some point, I mean,

there's this recurring thing about his movies where you're like trying to get into the recurring thing about his movies where you're trying to get into the lockbox and his characters. You're trying to get to the heart of things, the secret of power. It's what fuels his books, his work, his life in a lot of ways. The room beyond the room.

The room beyond the room. And then when you get there, there's nothing in it. And I have been thinking a lot about that as a thesis for this movie and the idea of work and perfectionism and and like maybe even like these emotional connections a little bit which is perhaps me putting it on there but you put things in a lockbox that's your thing sure but i just

you know i like i don't think that you're wrong that it's about i don't i think he's definitely exploring ideas and exploring even this idea of revenge and trying to make a wrong right or make a failure not a failure anymore um or what it means to be a failure because as we've all noted he's like very bad at it um but i guess there to me there's like a what's it all you know but to me, there's like a, what's it all, you know, but like for what there's like a Fincher shrug at the end of all of it, which he also does, you know, in interviews when he talks about like, maybe it's not that deep or maybe, maybe I'm just going to have it both ways. But by far the funniest moment I saw, Adam, I saw the film at the Academy Museum and Fincher

was interviewed afterwards and, afterwards and they opened it up to audience questions, which I thought was a psychotic act to let people in the audience ask him questions because he just has such a disinterest in answering dumb questions. I love him so much. But there were actually a couple of certainly

cinephilic, lonely film Twitter bros, but their questions were good. They were very specific about process, which is, he's really excited to talk about it. And this movie is about process.

Yes, and his team was there, and they got to talk about, Ryan Kleiss was there, and Eric Messerschmidt, and Kirk Baxter, and so they talked about how they made

their decisions, but one guy near the end stood up and said, in this era of TikTok, how do you make iconic movies? And then kind of

rambled a bit. And Fincher sighed exasperatedly and performatively. And he said, when I set up a shot, I don't think, dude, how can I make this more iconic? Like, that's not what anybody does. Obviously, in many ways, he designs everything he does, but he doesn't do it with the intention of, That's not what anybody does. Obviously, in many ways, he designs everything he does, but he doesn't do it with the intention of...

Honestly, do you think, Adam, this is a really good question for you. Do you think when he's making work 20 years ago or today, that he wants to be chronicled in a book like David Fincher Mind Games? No. And I know that I've had various responses from filmmakers to work in books that I've written about them, right? I won't name who said what.

I've never heard anything from him. And if I had to guess, I don't think he'd probably like my book. Not because it's negative, although it's not that positive, but because there's a certain intuiting of intention and a certain level of interpretation. And since he controls everything, I'm sure if you're wrong about his intention, he'd tell you. And if he doesn't agree with your interpretation, he wouldn't care. So what I mean is, what do I think? I mean, I think that this is the guy who, when he was however old, 24, figured out that a baby smoking a cigarette as a reference to 2001 is incredibly powerful iconography, right? And putting it in a commercial that was sponsored by the American Cancer Society is sort of genius. But I don't think he cared if

someone's going to say that in a book 20 years later. He serves his material. That's why the jukebox analysis is so fascinating to me, because here's a mercenary, and inside that mercenary, working in tandem with the mercenary skill set and mindset is a great artist. Like I don't try to use superlatives and like apex mountain or Mount Rushmore. Like I don't like that stuff, but I will say shot for shot. He's up there for me as someone who's written about movies for 20 years in terms of who is good at directing movies, right?

If you're that good at directing movies, you're not sitting around thinking about iconic shots. You just have the eye and the ear and the sensibility that you could go frame by frame through the work, know it's their work, and know that it's in the service of storytelling. When he's good, I don't think the Fincher, I don't think Killer's top tier for him,

but I will say that when he is good, I have never seen any contemporary filmmaker who can push your attention to what he wants you to see, how he wants you to see it, how he wants you to put that information together visually and narratively as effortlessly as he does. He's a genius, right? And when you can do that, I don't think you're sitting around worrying about TikTok or questions about TikTok or your own iconicity or anything like that. But he also knows how to get big effects. And there are some images in his movies where I'm pretty sure when he figured them out, he was like, yeah, that's going to work.

Definitely. Is this top tier Fincher for you? Recency bias, but it could be i mean i part of what i like about this movie is that it is immaculately made has supported us all arguing about it for an hour and a half and also is just a barn burner you know like i just really liked watching it i've seen it twice i enjoyed it both times i would recommend it to people who only want to watch a genre movie about a hit man, I would recommend it to people who like want to think while they, but it can go both ways. And that's really hard.

And to Adam's point, it looks effortless, but it's not effortless, you know, and you don't see the work behind it, which is, but, but it's there.

And so I give him a lot of credit for that. It's also, you know, it's a globetrotting. So the action sequences are in Paris, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans. I'm forgetting what Florida. And good old New York City. Well, Beacon, let's be clear.

No, the client, the Arliss Howard character. Oh, right, right. No, I thought he was in Chicago. Oh, is he in Chicago? Maybe Chicago. beacon let's be clear no i the client the client the the arliss howard oh right right no i thought he's in chicago oh is he in chicago maybe yeah anyway listen like all great cities and locations around the world so it could be a lot of your boxes it checks a lot of my boxes whereas does like fight club check a lot of my boxes it it does not though i understand historically why it's important i guess um here's something I wrote down. This movie would make a neat pairing with Fight Club,

two very funny films about sociopaths whose inner monologues rationalize brutal violence as expressions of a personal mission. I wrote in the piece that they're very close because of the complicitous narration. Yeah, yeah, they're connected. They're the two Fincher movies that are driven by first-person narration

and a first-person narration where the tone is, you're with me. Yes. Yeah. Right? You're with me, and in Fight Club, that facilitates this major twist about the nature of reality. I find the nature of reality in The Killer is interesting, not because it goes into flights of magical realism or hallucination like Fight Club. It's sort of an objective movie, but underneath that objectivity, it's such a surreal view of existence. I mean, in Fight Club, the Edward Norton character is like building the

model home, but at least he has a home. I mean, the killer is this completely transactional, liminal spaces, hotel rooms, airports. He spends time in the car. When he goes into people's homes, he's like breaking their necks and kicking them down the stairs or blowing them up with a Molotov cocktail. Like no one lives anywhere in this movie. But the interesting thing about that movie is that Fight Club is a movie

that is sort of about a person who's having kind of an extended psychotic episode and has dual personality. And the killer is not. I think there may be something wrong with Fassbender's character. But in theory, he is a functioning member of society.

He murders people for money and is incredibly fastidious in his actions to the point of parody. But he's just a guy doing his job. You know, Fight Club is about the breakdown of society and the male psyche. but he's just a guy doing his job. You know, Fight Club is about the breakdown of society

and the male psyche. The Killer is about a guy who's like, shit, I fucked up at work. And that's amazing to come like 20 years later and land there, you know? Yeah, well, I mean,

a lot of people have pointed out the gig economy thing. And I love that even though he's, you know, obviously got a certain amount of control and the advantage in most situations, he's always in these very servile disguises you know he's a delivery man he's uh he's he's a driver you know that kind of of of anonymity you know the one joke that didn't land i don't know if you guys talked about it it didn't land just because it was done in

another movie that people probably forgotten even exists but the whole uh tv character aliases thing that was a that was a joke of the cable guy it was that that that was that was a that was a joke of the cable guy just to give credit where it's due it's true and it wasn't 50s tv characters in that movie and this was 70s and 80s tv characters in this movie yeah that was the one kind of pop culture joke where i get it i mean you get it from the beginning but unlike the smiths where i laughed every time every time there was a Smith's cue, I was like, fine. I didn't laugh at the TV character names of this, but every time there was a logo in this movie, I laughed because they were deployed so well. The Amazon Dropbox thing is so funny. The lockers. It's brilliant.

The Amazon lockers is, is, is, is so funny when you sort of talk about, you know, products on demand and also weirdly instructional. I hope a lot of buildings are reevaluating their security after the killer is... Have you acquired a fob copier? A fob copier? No, not yet. Okay. How will you break into my home unless you get a fob copier? That's true.

Yeah. copier that's true uh yeah yeah like the the the recognition of kind of satirizing and also kind of acceptance of our corporate consumer culture it's also a lot part of a long daisy chain of finchirian experience you know like the god of of nike and and madonna telling us like boy maybe maybe amazon has gotten a little out of control here. You know, maybe there's too many Starbucks in America is just very rich. Yeah. And even, and I mean, if you want to talk about a funny, I'm sure you guys talked about it, but a funny visual joke about how everything eventually gets kind of commodified. I love Arliss Howard and the sub pop t-shirt. It's really good. That was also like a laugh out loud. Like I high-fived myself in the

dark kind of being like, yeah, Fincher, that's funny. It was really, really good. That was also like a laugh out loud. Like I high-fived myself in the dark. Kind of being like, yeah, Fincher, that's funny. It was really, really good. There's an amazing echo though, which is that there's a quote about the Green River Killer at the beginning of the film. And he says, you know, he wasn't a very smart man. He couldn't spell cat if I spotted him the A and the T, which is just magnificent shit.

But then of course there was a band named Green River that was assigned to Sub Pop. So, you know, it all comes back to grunge. It all comes back to the late 80s and early 90s in Seattle. That's really what it's all about, Amanda. Great. Great.

As always, I'm thrilled to be podcasting with you. For people who can't see the look of horror on Amanda's face, I'm looking at these guys through Zoom. Contempt, really.

That was freeze-worthy, truly. I never comment on this stuff. Imagine if she was generous one time. Just once. I thought I was very kind about your feelings. I completely disagree.

Incredibly rude. You have to forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Stick to the plan. Stick to the plan. Stick to the plan. Don't improvise. Anticipate.

That's what I have to do with you twice a week for years. Adam, any thoughts on the killer and david fincher uh no you know uh thank you guys for having me on to to talk about it so so meanly and so high-handedly for all my favorite for all my favorite listeners of the i told you that i ran into someone the last time at tiff who listened to the podcast, like, you're not mean. I was just in New York recently doing stuff at the NY FF and a couple of people were like, oh, I hear you on the big picture. I'm like, yeah, am I

mean? They're like, no, you seem very nice. I'm like, thank you. I appreciate that. You're a nice, you're just like David Fincher. You're a nice guy, but with a wicked blade. You know, when you cut, you can really cut. Wicked, but you know, standing outside the New York Film Festival premiere of Ferrari is where someone like me gets recognized.

Nowhere else in the civilized world. I'll be perfectly honest with you. Alex Ross Perry made this exact same joke when he was on the show two weeks ago. He was like, you know where I get recognized is outside NYFF and they tell me I heard you on the big picture. Oh, well, you know.

You're in great company. Alex and I go way back. Thank you guys for having me on your show and I go way back thank you guys for for having me on your show I appreciate it thanks Adam and you'll be back early next month

when we talk about the best movies of the year I will I'm allowed back please come back yeah you're on the schedule oh man that's awesome I can't wait

I have to see some movies I like I gotta go I gotta go I gotta go I gotta go find some I gotta go see what I gotta go see what

is TV allowed. Can we talk about the curse? Uh, perhaps I think I will be on the ringer podcast network. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that, that's good.

Anyway. Yeah. Thanks Adam. That's good. Bye bye guys. Thanks so much to our producer, Bobby Wagner for his work on this episode thank you bobby what are we doing next week next week we're talking about the marvels joanna robinson's coming yeah we saw the marvels we saw have you seen that the film's been getting some positive reviews really yeah have you seen that from who people have seen it um i haven't really been

consuming any reviews of it to be quite honest i'll text you some okay i have um my own homework to do for that okay which is i'm gonna two book plugs in one podcast i will be reading joanna's book mcu which is available also available wherever you purchase books yeah um and then i guess i'll read something about the the film itself i saw it that seems like enough i got thoughts I got thoughts. I got thoughts too. We'll see you then.