◡◶▿ Are you "obsessed" with "doing things for real"?

🕹️ 3 Filmmaking Tips from David Fincher's Haunted Watercooler | Hypernormal filmmaking.

Jan 08, 2024

Hello! Welcome.

And welcome to all our new students! So many new year sign-ups. “Self-improvement.” Good. I hope you’re using the winter break to unlearn what you already know - and make space for a new semester’s worth of arcane filmmaking knowledge.

Today, I’d like to share some thoughts about a blockbuster film I saw in the cinema last year. A highly competent, flat film about an incompetent hitman with great posture. The Killer (Director: David Fincher, 2023).

The Killer is a film that invites “discourse.” People like to use it as a point of reference due to its mix of sophistication and stupidity:

It is very close to being a pure genre piece but it is not quite.
It is very close to being a work of art, but probably isn’t quite that, either.
It is near the border that separates “genre exercise” from “genre deconstruction,” though perhaps not as close to that border as Fincher might hope. Or maybe it is. Who’s measuring?

Prefer not to read it? My argument is summed up by this humorous four-minute short from 2016. Watch that instead. We’re on winter break, after all.

Meticulous David

I felt compelled to bring these thoughts about The Killer to your attention. Compelled after watching a short “visual effects sequence & breakdown” video from the VFX company that worked on the movie. And compelled after watching this Methodical Opening Scene Break Down from The Killer’s cinematographer, Erik Messerschmidt.

*The 20% rule: the margins of the image, and by extension the hidden background, are far more eloquent than the superimposition of the Killer in his helmet.*

David Fincher is a very methodical, meticulous, and precise filmmaker. In recent years, he has harnessed the power of digital video and CGI tools. Harnessed those tools to turbo-boost his meticulousness. This development is a gift to other filmmakers, putting our clumsy, mortal struggle with life and filmmaking into stark relief.

Fincher’s technique is a near-parody of filmmaking as an art and a pastime. And The Killer is a near-parody of the “hitman” genre. The meticulous hitman of The Killer is a metaphor for his meticulous filmmaking technique. David Fincher probably knows this. Playful!

But in the movie, Fincher’s Killer lacks precision only at the moment it matters the most: hitting his actual target in the head, heart, or lungs. The Killer’s killing attempts are most effective when they’re messy or improvised - or even when he didn’t mean to kill anyone at all. Is that part of Fincher’s metaphor? What might Fincher take home from this lesson, as a filmmaker? What might we?

The breakdown videos detail the techniques that Fincher uses to create the precise images he has in mind. Let’s look at how you, a mortal filmmaker, might interpret them in the context of your own clumsy practice.

1. Peeling and pasting

David Fincher and his team make prodigious use of 3D modelling and green screen effects:

Fincher arrives at a carefully chosen location with his cast and crew, props and outfits.
He then carefully peels away every layer of the location, outfit, and cast until he and his cinematographer are essentially revolving in the blank non-space of a proto-cinematic nether dimension.
Fincher’s people then create, with atomic precision, 3D models of each of these layers and glue them back together in the edit suite.

This technique recalls an old Armando Ianucci sketch. An old Armando Ianucci sketch that ‘reveals’ the high-tech truth behind the TV soap opera Eastenders: that “all the glasses and bottles in the Queen Vic pub were shot in a CGI studio, away from the actors,” and then composited into the actor’s hands in post-production.

Funny! But notice how both Fincher and Ianucci constantly question the joins between the disparate elements of the reality that we build in our personal lives and in our stories. Notice how every layer of existence must re-negotiate its neighbouring layers. Thorough!

As it turns out, the Ianucci Theory isn’t too far from the truth. One particular stabilisation technique “allows Fincher and his editors to reframe entire shots after the fact and to construct seamless split-screen composites, suturing different takes into one,” explains Jonah Wiener in his 2020 profile of the director: “it’s an effect Fincher deploys on material as seemingly inconsequential as a character setting a drink on a table, and he wound up stabilizing every single shot in “Mank” — a film he calls “as labor intensive, on a pixel-by-pixel basis, as any Marvel movie.””

Which brings us to the second technique.

2. The ol’ megapixel “loosey-goosey”

Fincher and his squad routinely frame their digital recordings up to 20% wider than the final picture. “This creates a buffer of excess visual information that allows him to digitally correct for the slightest trembles, lurches and late starts, erasing all imperfections from the camera movement,” explains Wiener. !.

Now, those of you who took our Advanced Amateury and Rotting the Image programs in 2023 will already have a good idea of what happens when you capture an extra 20% beyond the intended frame. That’s right: the extra 20% defaults to being more interesting, poignant, and meaningful than the central composition. This shifting 20% space is the shimmering borderland between:

The intended and the unintended.
That which will survive and that which will be cast off.
The introverted image and the extroverted image.

This 20% is a literal margin of error. In other words, a great idea for a film.

And it is the closest that most audience members will get to the edge of the diegesis. Here, in this maybe-space, you might spot:

A little pile of props, scripts, and snacks that were pulled out of the central image at the last moment.
The clumsy joins at the edge of the wallpaper, which the set designer assumed would be cropped.
The extra who’s thinking about his lunch or about Fincher’s beard.
Rogue shadows.
Stark irrelevance.
The touchingly banal.
In a word: gravy.

Shooting 20% over frame allows Fincher to smooth out the human hand behind the camera. He then recreates this camera movement with digital motion. This loosens the grip of the human eye on the unfolding action, creating a godlike third cameraperson. Nothing wrong with that. “I want it to feel omniscient,” says Fincher.

But this third cameraperson, in looking for what’s best or most relevant, sees so much less than the human eye. Particularly the human eye of the late-night editing assistant who gets to go home with the offcuts from around the edges of that which makes it to the finished film.

This was actually the realisation that flipped Béla Tarr - a filmmaker with a very different meticulous technicality - from making busy, dramatic movies to making slow, observational ones. Tarr tells us that midway through his career, he found himself in Japan, looking at a painting of a black dot on a large white canvas. His Japanese host noted that Tarr was staring at the dot; the real story, the host told him, was the grand expanse around the dot.

The margins of Tarr’s movies are much larger than 20% of the whole picture. And these margins are not just of the image. Tarr applied this 20% rule less to the picture frame itself than to his movies’ temporal and dramatic frames. Taking in ‘unnecessary’ moments, characters, ideas, and gestures. Sending his camera operator into the mud on a wobbling dolly to fish for gravy.

*How to film a man riding a moped along the street using nothing but the combined technical know-how of the world’s space agencies and intergovernmental physics labs.*

Fincher seems less interested in the 20%. It exists only to cushion the main action. As a ‘procedural,’ The Killer details the moments and methods of the hitman’s missions. But it does so in a manner as lean as its leading man.

Everything that’s just outside of the visual and dramatic frame seems more interesting:

the admin required to fill those lock-ups with so many spare documents and tools,
the odd couple relationships of Hodges/Delores and ‘The Brute’ and ‘The Expert.’
- (There’s a whole Samuel Beckett play in the latter two smoking ciggies outside the Dominican mansion. Waiting for Fassbender.)
The empty Parisian streets and their imaginary substructures.
The toilet breaks of the lone assassin on assignment.

Right?

3. Nine-camera minimum

Of course, The Killer was not entirely made on a computer. It’s not a cartoon! On the contrary, The Killer’s DoP Erik Messerschmidt explains how they:

Took nine (9) (!) imposingly physical RED cameras to Paris,
set them up on the top floor of a beautiful old building,
and then went back to the studio and shot the scene on a sound stage.

Messerschmidt further details how they constructed the opening scene using a meticulous combination of background locations, green-screened studio sets, and digital façades. “It is all meant to appear as real and perfect as possible,” says Messerschmidt. “The aberrations and lens flares, we added in post.” Back at the computer, Messerschmidt found himself “art directing” the artificial lens flares and other aberrations. A beautifully ridiculous task.1 But I am sure most of us can imagine less convoluted ways to film something to look real.

*Adding digital murkiness to the virtual Fassbender.*

Watching Messerschmidt’s breakdown, it becomes clear why these human touches needed adding. The movie itself is, sadly, dead behind the eyes. Lifted from the schematic pages of a comic book and plastered over the digital screen without so much as a gulp of air. Processed internally. Hermetically sealed.

This flatness echoes the movie’s themes of the virtual workplace, the Uberization of everything, and the ghost town watercooler. Great. A thematic through-line from the text to the production to the finished work. But if the flatness of the movie was intentional, why add lens flares?

Maybe they’re a nod to the aesthetics of the classic action thriller, but with the cynical subtext of the downloaded VFX bundle. With Clippy📎 achieving full sentience and becoming a bigger part of our emotional lives, maybe computer-generated lens flares were the most apt creative choice. The most apt creative choice for a self-aware genre film about hired killers in the age of Fiverr.

It is easy to dismiss The Killer as ‘soulless’ due to Fincher’s inhuman devotion to the quality imperative (the assumption that quality and precision are fundamentally desirable in filmmaking and anything else). And perhaps this prognosis is correct. Or perhaps ultra-precision is Fincher’s way; his personal, spiritual art. Nothing wrong with that! “It takes all sorts.”

But there is a better lesson to learn from Fincher’s dedication. The sheer absurdity of it. Fincher’s technique is ‘filmmaking as Rube Goldberg machine’: he follows the most absurdly convoluted route to achieve shots that could be made with far simpler means. The folly of all human effort and accomplishment is embedded in every over-engineered, underwhelming, and deeply vain digital frame. That’s got to count for something!

An “obsession” with “doing things for real”

Fincher’s cinematographic feats of gamer-athleticism are impressive on their own terms, regardless of the outcome of the actual movie.2 People are impressed.

“[M]y mind is blown by how seamless and well-disguised the visual effects are in a David Fincher film,” says one YouTube fan. Fair enough!

“Film culture is increasingly obsessed with “doing things for real,”” writes Next Best Picture’s Brendan Hodges, “but THE KILLER is quietly one of the most impressive technical achievements of the year, with all the lens distortion, bokeh, and handheld achieved in post.” Credit where it’s due!

Great. “Handheld achieved in post” is such a delicious concept. And it is perhaps where those who are impressed by Fincher’s computerism and those who are more tickled by the whims of the real can find common ground. We should be giving video editors Wii-style controls to shake at their “buffer of excess visual information.” Or perhaps they could shake the actual preview monitor to get that authentic handheld effect.

There’s one thing we can be sure of. Noted camera operators should start copyrighting their signature ‘handheld moves,’ since AI will learn to imitate them before long. You, too, can have an Anthony Dod Mantle plug-in to add just the level of Dogme 95 jitter you require in the edit suite!

What else might we achieve in post? We already brush hair away from faces and add sweat in post. How about kissing scenes? That will get around the awkward issue of ‘intimacy coordinators.’ Just cram their 3D-modelled heads together and lash waves of blocky saliva between their mouths.

But I would be more “impressed” by technical achievements that achieved what was impossible or unimaginable to achieve when “doing things for real.” Let’s talk more about that sort of thing next semester.

Digital underpants

I won’t get too caught up on a casual Twitter comment. (Or maybe I will!3 ) But is film culture “increasingly obsessed with “doing things for real””?

We’re at peak CGI. We’re on the cusp of AI. It is over a century since Erich von Stroheim bought hundreds of pairs of authentic silk underwear for his extras to wear, at great expense, and insisted the aristocratic characters in his movies should drink real champagne rather than a cheaper, non-alcoholic substitute.4 So the “obsession” may be intensifying but “doing things for real” is a far rarer pursuit. Endangered, even.

If small pockets of film culture are categorised as “obsessed” with doing things for real, it’s because “doing things for real” is interpreted as aberrant behaviour. It is not normal. It is not time- or profit-efficient filmmaking practice to do things for real, except for perverse outliers such as the Barbie movie (which eschewed CGI for the charm of puppet show mechanics and painted backdrops).

Doing things cleanly and efficiently, productively and profitably, is normal. And Fincher’s Killer technique is ultra-normal, hyper-optimised, and frictionless. As a highly talented, tech entrepreneur-style filmmaker, Fincher was awfully close to making a powerful movie about his Killer Ken doll. With a drop of real humour, a drop of humility, it might have been different. But he chose normal, and turned it up 11.

Are you “obsessed” with “doing things for real”?

Is the culture?

Perhaps the notion that film culture is obsessed with doing things for real was inspired by old-skool special effects of Gerwig’s Barbie or Wes Anderson’s painted polystyrene worlds. Then, how are we to interpret Gerwig’s progression from “doing things for real” in the grim apartments of her noughties mumblecore associates to “doing things for real” by opting for vast revolving backdrops and man-sized Barbie extras hanging from giant cranes? How are we to reconcile Anderson’s ever more ambitious and playful physical world-building with his ever-greater alienation from all that feels true to the human heart?

Let me know in the comments!