Director David Fincher has emerged from whatever filmmaking hole he’s been to drop some opinions about Joker and what he thinks of cancel culture.
It’s a little hard to believe but it’s been seven years since David Fincher directed a movie, which was 2013’s Gone Girl. But after a few years of working on Mindhunter, the genius director is finally back with his latest big screen offering, Mank, and with it some hot takes about what’s been going on in the movie and entertainment world.
And it seems like David Fincher has been bottling up those opinions for some time because he held nothing back with his scathing criticisms of Joker, Orson Welles, and even “cancel culture” (which isn’t a thing but we’ll pretend it is for the sake of this article).
In a wild interview with The Telegraph, Fincher took Joker to the woodshed as he slammed the film for its piss-poor portrayal of mental illness, noting how it was a subpar rip off of Martin Scorsese.
“I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, yeah, let’s take [Taxi Driver’s] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy’s] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars,” says Fincher.
Ouch, but also fair since this is David Fincher we’re talking about and he knows his films.
Fincher also didn’t hold back on legendary filmmaker Orson Welles, who is a central focus in Mank, saying how Welles’ “tragedy lies in the mix between monumental talent and filthy immaturity.”
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“Sure, there is genius in Citizen Kane, who could argue? But when Welles says, ‘It only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography,’ pfff… Let’s say that this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have [cinematographer] Gregg Toland around him to prepare the next shot… Gregg Toland, damn it, an insane genius,” says Fincher.
That was just the warm up to the main course: “I say that without wanting to be disrespectful to Welles, I know what I owe him, like I know what I owe Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, or Hal Ashby.”
“But at 25, you don’t know what you don’t know. Period. Neither Welles, nor anyone. It doesn’t take anything away from him, and especially not his place in the pantheon of those who have influenced entire generations of filmmakers.”
“But to claim that Orson Welles came out of nowhere to make Citizen Kane and that the rest of his filmography was ruined by the interventions of ill-intentioned people, it’s not serious, and it is underestimating the disastrous impact of his own delusional hubris.”
Again, ouch but also fair.
And the cherry on top of this glorious Fincher interview was how he said he’s thinking about making a miniseries about “cancel culture” as part of his sweet new deal with Netflix, saying “At its heart it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology. If you give a truly heartfelt apology and no one believes it, did you even apologize at all? It’s a troubling idea. But we live in troubling times.”
I mean, okay then. Look, I’ll withhold judgement until I see what becomes of this miniseries idea.
Honestly, I’m absolutely live for these uncensored David Fincher hot takes and I wish he would drop them more often rather than once every few years.
Check out the trailer for Mank by David Fincher:
