Venice Film Festival: Why David Fincher Wanted Michael Fassbender to Look ‘Dorky’

Fincher discovered no complaints from his main man, who wasn’t in Venice due to the SAG-AFTRA strike: “Michael’s cool. He was not freaked out about having to look a little dorky.” And that aesthetic extends even to the Killer’s escape from a botched job, which takes place not by way of high-speed automobile chase however with a zippy little motor scooter, although Fincher thought-about taking that sequence in an excellent dweebier path. “At one point, we even debated the Razor scooter,” he mentioned, nixing that solely as a result of it wouldn’t carry out effectively throughout a stair stunt.

So although the Killer stays a thriller to himself, no less than one factor might be mentioned for positive of this indifferently dressed man: He ain’t precisely John Wick.

“The $3,000 suit seems like it’s played out,” Fincher mentioned. Still, he was stunned to search out somebody carrying his protagonist’s foolish headwear in one other current murderer film: “It’s funny because when Pitt told me he had selected a bucket hat for ‘Bullet Train,’ I was like, ‘OK, dude, you’re stepping into our sandbox.’”

Though Fincher has a talent for image-making that extends again to the music movies he directed for the likes of Madonna, with “The Killer,” he was extra inquisitive about dismantling that kind of cinematic iconography. Instead of a glamorous lair, Fassbender’s character retains his weapons in a secular storage locker, and as an alternative of utilizing high-tech devices to interrupt into targets’ properties, he orders key-duplication instruments off Amazon.

“I was like, ‘I want James Bond by way of Home Depot,’” Fincher mentioned. “By the end of this, you should be like, who’s the guy in the rental car line with you, and why is he wearing that outdated hat? You ignore the German tourist at your peril.”

And whereas the flicks would have us consider that the world is filled with intelligent, high-flying assassins, Fincher sought to floor his character’s tunnel imaginative and prescient in a extra mundane actuality. “I love the idea of a Charles Bronson character who’s maybe misdiagnosed adult autistic,” he mentioned. “And before 2023, I’m not sure anybody would have gone, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”