How David Fincher Turned ‘The Killer’ Into a Mean, Lean Punch to the Gut

The man is a consummate professional. In the outside world, he could be anyone — just another ridiculous looking dude somewhere between the ages of 32 and 48, the everyguy in line behind you at an Ace Hardware store or in front of you at McDonald’s. But sitting here, in an unfinished WeWork office space, is this slender, limber apex predator in his natural habitat, and an extremely patient one. He’s perched here for days, just staring out the window at a ritzy apartment in Paris. Watching. Waiting. Whiling away the hours, doing nothing. It’s a key part of the job. “If you can’t stand the boredom,” he says, via voiceover narration, “the work is not for you.”

Should you suggest to David Fincher — world-class filmmaker, notorious perfectionist, and a gentleman who genuinely appreciates a good joke — that the line spoken by the title character of his new film The Killer is also a warning to audiences hiding in plain sight, he will laugh. The director will go into detailed explanations about why the unnamed antihero, played by Michael Fassbender, is not just a hit man but a very, very unreliable narrator. He’ll mention that the script, written by Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, borrows the idea of long interior monologues in lieu of nonstop action directly from the source material. And he’ll admit that they knew that any movie “probably being sold with an image of a guy with piano wire in his hand or putting someone into cold storage,” yet “starts out with 25 minutes of someone sleeping on sheetrock in an empty office, musing as to what it’s all about,” might potentially have viewers wondering what they’ve stumbled into. But Fincher will not say you’re wrong.

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“We never articulated it, but yeah,” he says, calling in from an office in Tribeca. “You could say it’s in there early for a reason. We assume most people are familiar with stories like this, and when something is supposed to happen fast and sudden, and when something needs to be slow and excruciating. So we’re able play with the expectations and the taffy-pull tension of that. Our attitude was, we can paint between the lines here. But let’s really lean into using some tertiary colors.”

Besides,The Killer is as much about the art of hiding in plain sight as it is about stripping things down or tearing them apart. An adaptation of the first of many French graphic novels written by Alexis Nolent (pen name: Matz) and artist Luc Jacamon, Fincher’s addition to the loneliness-of-the-long-distance-assassin subgenre takes great delight in making its central killer as generic and nondescript as possible. The uniform of this meticulous, methodical murderer is designed to make him as faceless as he is nameless: a mix of khakis, button-ups, and bucket hats that allows him to easily blend into a crowd. Never mind that the person wearing this wardrobe-by-Old-Navy outfit is one of the last matinee-idol stars left in Hollywood’s I.P.-centric solar system. He’s still an invisible man. All the better to make a clean getaway after pulling the trigger and successfully completing the task at hand, just like he’s done a million times before. Until, naturally, something goes unexpectedly wrong.

Fincher first came across the comics in 2007, when a friend passed him an English-translation collection of Nolent and Jacamon’s stories. Paramount and Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B picked up the rights, with the intent of Fincher directing an adaptation; a Variety article reported that screenwriter Alessandro Camon (The Messenger) was writing the script, “about a top assassin suddenly plagued by his conscience and a highly competent cop hot on his tail.” A draft was completed, Fincher said, but because he was deep into finishing and promoting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, he’d been unable to read it right away. “I’d been preoccupied, and then the rights lapsed and returned to the author,” the director says. “It just sort of went away at that point.”

Then, in 2015, Nolent reached out to Fincher and asked if he was still interested in possibly turning what was now a series of graphic novels into a movie. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m always interested,’” he recalls. “But if I can get Andy Walker involved, then I’m that much more interested.” He remembered talking to Walker about the book around the time Plan B first got involved, laying out several ideas about how he might tell the story via a five-act structure. The writer had done some uncredited work on a number of Fincher’s movies since Se7en helped both of them level up, and the two had collaborated on several projects (like a remake of ‘70s horror-mystery The Reincarnation of Peter Proud) that never made it past the preproduction stage. Now that The Killer had once again entered the conversation, however, he felt that his longtime friend would understand how to translate the mix of the philosophical and the pulpy. First, however, he asked Nolent to take a crack at writing his own draft.

“I asked him to do a pass at it, partially because I wanted to understand what he was going for with the graphic novels,” Fincher says. “I gave him the idea of doing it in a five-act structure, with different 20-minute sections, and that was the script we ended up taking to Netflix around 2019 or so, I think. Then I took his script to Andy, who said: I don’t want to read this. I want to go back to the original comic books. At first, he wouldn’t take the gig. He said, ‘Let me see if I can find a way in.’ And then he off he went….”

“I didn’t know how I would lift the tone of the voices in his head off the page and on to the screen, honestly,” Walker says, in a separate interview. “I didn’t want him to be so loathsome that you just tuned out after 10 seconds. You know, I had saved the notes from that original conversation we had a dozen years prior, and I remember Dave saying, ‘If he’s morally reprehensible, he can’t talk like he’s morally superior.’ So I went back to the comics, I read Camus’ The Stranger, I looked at some research on Nietzsche from when I’d done a polish on Fight Club.

“And then,” he adds, “I was trying to just place the killer in that room, where he’s waiting for his target to show up across the street. Dave had mentioned something about the guy having a mantra, just this thing he says to calm himself down. It’s part of how this inner voice we’re hearing is not a prescription for how others should live, but how he makes sense of his own life. I just started writing, ‘Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight. Trust no one.’ And when you realize that this is what he tells himself even when he begins falling apart, and his actions contradict what he’s saying to himself… I felt good enough to go back to Dave and really start working on this.”

Fincher and Walker began what the former calls “about four months’ of lunches, in which Andy would take out his John Doe composition books” — a reference to those serial killer journals from Se7en — and they began breaking down each of the five acts that Fincher had in mind. Each would be divided by a different location (Paris, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, etc.); each would have a chapter heading (“The Hideaway,” “The Brute”). After the first act, in which a botched job leads to blowback, which in turn leads to the hit man seeking revenge against his benefactors, Fincher imagined what he colloquially refers to as “a series of Bernie Bernbaum scenes,” referring to John Turturro’s character in Miller’s Crossing. Walker imagined a series of aliases all named after old sitcom characters (Archibald Bunker, Felix Unger, Sam Malone).

After a lot of back and forth, they had a solid script to work with. They just needed a killer.

“I’d originally been thinking of Brad [Pitt] back in 2008,” Fincher says. “But his response had been, ‘Eh, a little too nihilistic for me.’ OK, so, who? We needed someone who would embrace that aspect of the character. Then a dozen or so years later, when Andy and I were in the middle of hashing it out, I thought of Michael Fassbender.” The Oscar-nominated actor had been busy raising a family and pursuing a side career in car racing — he actually competed in the 24-hour Le Mans race — but Fincher sent him the script with a note saying, ‘I’d love to send this to you to read, I don’t know what your life is like now, I know you’re racing…’ And a few hours later, he called back and told me he was in.”

According to Fassbender, who’d talked to journalists on set before the SAG-AFTRA strike, he’d been watching a lot of old movies in between races and had come across Le Samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 thriller in which Alain Delon plays a tight-lipped assassin with a very Zen-like approach to his job. I’d like to do something like that, he allegedly told his agent, and apparently Fincher’s script showed up a few days later. “He told me that exact story while mixing martinis at the wrap party in Paris, actually!” Fincher says. “When we took the still we were going to use for the poster with him wearing the bucket hat, I told him, ‘Touch the brim. This is our Le Samouraï shot.’”

And when it came time to shoot, Fincher notes, Fassbender’s tenure behind the wheel came in handy. “He likes a physical challenge, and because of his racing, he has this incredible precision. So we’d get on set in the morning, and map out the scene: pick up the knapsack, bring it over to the window, drop it down, put on rubber gloves, reach out of frame and pull up a scope. Keep in mind we’re shooting the interiors in a set in New Orleans, but all of the POV shots will happen in Paris, so I’m also relating to him what he’s seeing: ‘OK, you’re gonna see the doorman and then the guy come out of the coffee shop, now look up to the apartment…’

“Then he’d just hit everything he needed to do in the scene,” he says, “and it became a matter of: OK, you got across the room and did everything you needed to do in a minute and 29 seconds. Can we get it down to a minute? And he’d go, there’s no way I can physically get over that fast, David… but let me try for a minute and 10 seconds.” Fincher laughs. “You have this person who’s a bit of a cypher, he has little to no dialogue, and you can’t trust the voiceover — so action really is character here! I mean, it’s practically a silent movie. And he was able to give the audience everything they needed to know simply by doing exactly what he did efficiently, precisely, and without a single word.”

There was one other tool that Fincher had handy in terms of giving folks a glimpse into the psyche of this former professional-turned-psychologically disintegrating psychopath, however, and that was his musical preferences. Much has already been made about the way The Killer makes expert use of the back catalog of the Smiths, with Fassbender’s assassin consistently soundtracking his jobs and daily routines with the ultimate Eighties moody-teen Manchester band. It is one of the few things that Fincher will cop to in terms of having anything in common with his character.

“It all started with using ‘How Soon Is Now?’” the filmmaker says. “That was the entry point, because I love that song and I find it very… soothing, which is maybe a strange thing. The idea that you have this hit man putting on this meditation tape to calm himself before a hit, and it’s that song — it was both funny to me and felt oddly right. We cut the assassination sequence to that song, with it playing loudly during POV shots and fading into the background when you went back to him, so you could hear the voiceover. Once we did that with that song, it became a rule: OK, POV shots, we hear it like he hears it.

“Then we had this whole other selection of songs we were going to use,” Fincher says. “Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Erasure — basically, it was [MTV’s 120 Minutes Host] Matt Pinfield’s dream mix tape. I mean, I love the idea of this hit man in a bucket hat going off to kill someone and going, ‘Oh, I have the perfect playlist for this!’ At a certain point, however, it started to become like: Is he beginning to come off like he’s a music critic in his spare time? Then we tried a version that was all Mozart, one with disparate classical music, one with Dusty Springfield — we did one that was mostly Tony Bennett songs, and that really did not work. So as we’re trying to get the rights to things, or songs dropped out, we’d keep dropping in ‘This Charming Man’ as temp music. Finally, Trent [Reznor] threw a flag on the playing field and said, ‘Why are we dancing around this? Morrissey is the voice of this guy’s inner monologue. Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth!’ After that, we just used as many of their songs as we could.”

It’s one of the few arch touches in what is otherwise a lean, mean throwback to the glory days of real pulp fiction. Because despite the A-list star, the A-plus soundtrack, and the ace supporting cast (notably Tilda Swinton, who does more in her late-act guest appearance than many performers do in decades’ worth of screen time), The Killer is really just a modern version of a vintage B movie. Mention this to Fincher and Walker, and both will agree that that’s exactly what they were going for. The director recalls going to Netflix before they began production and telling them, “I’m going to do it stripped-down. This is a Don Siegel movie. It’s a fucking Michael Winner movie. It’s Charley Varrick, Get Carter, The Mechanic. This is meant to be ballistic.” Even the rapid-fire credits sequence that opens the film was meant to evoke the tough-guy procedurals of yesteryear. “The style can be described as: a Quinn-Martin production,” he says, bursting into laughter. “It’s Mannix chic.”

And though it’s possible to glean deeper meaning in the film’s sideways glance at how cutting-edge technology has fostered a culture of isolation and anonymity that allows the killer to ply his trade minus interactions, or the blatant use of a WeWork office (what is an assassin but the ultimate gig-economy job?), Fincher will tell you point blank that he’s not trying to make a grand narrative statement here. The Killer is one of his lowbrow exercises in high style, closer to something like Panic Room or The Game than, say, The Social Network. And he knows that when he uses stories like this to flex his filmmaking chops and talent for tweaking the audience’s nervous system in lieu of “loftier” aims, some folks are bound to think he’s punching below his weight.

“Oh, I realize there are expectations, yeah,” Fincher says, sounding more amused than irritated. “I knew that people would judge it against past works. That’s just natural. It’s so funny that we ended up premiering The Killer in Venice, because the last time we were here with Fight Club, we were run out of town as fascists. No one liked the movie. Entire rows were leaving — they were finding emergency exits that we didn’t know existed! And now, 20-plus years later, we brought this movie here and it’s like: ’Why aren’t you making movies like your earlier, more complex ones?’ Oh my God. You know, all you can do is go: Yeah, OK. This is just fodder for my future version of Stardust Memories.”

“But here’s the thing,” he says. “The question we asked ourselves going in was: Could you hitch a ride with a sociopath who may not have a lot of emotional bandwidth, make it an intensely subjective experience, but still give somebody something that’s compelling to watch, rather than repulsing them? And I think it’s an effective invocation of what we were trying to do by that criteria. I’ve done movies that have twists and turns, and maybe people are waiting for that stuff. Andy and I didn’t want to make a maze. We wanted to make an arrow: something that flies straight in one direction and hits a target.

“I’m not trying to say the bar needs to be lowered to take this movie in,” Fincher adds, before signing off. “People could say that I’m aiming low, but as someone who’s done it: It’s really hard. It’s not as easy as it sometimes seems.”

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