LOS ANGELES – Acclaimed film-maker David Fincher, who directed crime thrillers such as Se7en (1995), Zodiac (2007) and Gone Girl (2014), has made another artsy but crowd-pleasing murder movie.
This time, it involves a hitman played by Michael Fassbender in Fincher’s new Netfix film The Killer.
Meticulous and emotionally detached, the unnamed assassin makes an uncharacteristic blunder on a job that causes him to fall out with his employers and then go on a killing spree.
Based on the French indie graphic novel series of the same name (1998 to 2022), it is told from the killer’s point of view, and with most of his thoughts narrated in voiceover.
Fincher says he responded to the intensely introspective nature of the storytelling, which had “a subjectivity I hadn’t seen”.
“I’ve made movies that have voiceovers before, but there was a commitment to being inside the eye sockets of this guy, and I thought it might be a good test,” he says at a screening of The Killer in Los Angeles last week.
The American director – who received Best Director Oscar nominations for the dramas Mank (2020), The Social Network (2010) and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008) – relished the fact that his protagonist also needed little introduction.
“It seemed like if you were this dedicated to one specific point of view, that we could do without a lot of backstory – a lot of gabbing about where this guy came from or where the people in the story (came from),” says the 61-year-old.
The audience is also left wondering how reliable a narrator he really is.
“The way that the audience understands the voiceover is, ‘This is the truth, right? Why would this guy lie to himself?’ And yet most of the people I know are lying to themselves, so I thought that was an interesting way in,” Fincher says.
Played by Fassbender – the 46-year-old Irish star of the X-Men superhero films (2011 to 2019) and science-fiction adventure Prometheus (2012) – the character is also a sort of everyman version of James Bond: someone who moves through the world anonymously by dressing nondescriptly, and by using gadgets he buys on Amazon.
Fincher says: “I understand how James Bond gets through the world – he has bazillions of dollars behind him and an entire security infrastructure to help him at every turn.
“Our guy’s a little different – he’s flying coach and he’s putting his entire wardrobe together as he walks through an airport.”