‘The Killer’: DP Erik Messerschmidt, Editor Kirk Baxter & Sound Designer Ren Klyce On “The Joy” Of Working With David Fincher – Contenders London

In the David Fincher-directed film, The Killer, from a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, and based on a graphic novel, Michael Fassbender stars as an assassin battling his employers when a hit goes terribly wrong.

Speaking during a panel at Deadline’s Contenders London event, editor Kirk Baxter addressed a rumor that the role required Fassbender to not blink at all.

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There were many times watching the dailies where he heard Fincher’s voice saying, ‘That’s terrific, but let’s see that once again without the f—ing blinking.’ Baxter added, “Not so much that Fassbender needing that direction, it’s just been a thing.”

He added, “I’ve always been opposed to that idea, that if somebody’s delivering a key moment in a scene, especially if it comes with dialogue and this is the reason they did it, and if you want them to have gravitas and it’s up close, and it’s closing a scene, and if that same line is blinking all the way through the delivery it’s diluted of any power.”

Asked how much the original graphic novel of the same name was referenced, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt said, “We really looked at it from a place of composition and story structure and how we would use the frame. The film is very much, I think, about process and procedure and state of mind and graphic novels have a lot in common with cinema in terms of how they tell a story visually. We certainly used it as a place to start.”

Speaking on the experience of working with Fincher, Messerschmidt said it was “a joy” because the director’s “decisions are immediate”, which is “great when you’re under the pressure a cinematographer is under.”

And Baxter joked of the way he and Messerschmidt work together: “Whenever Erik’s able to he pops into the cutting room… apparently when it’s playing I talk all the way through it, because I don’t want to get a note from him, so I kind of narrate this thing the same way you get a DVD extra which gives no one room to say, ‘Have you thought of…?’ [It’s ] I’m f—ing working on it!”

Sound designer Ren Klyce described his process for the multi-location project as “trying to stay ahead of what is coming visually,” adding, “the film has chapters, each chapter is a location. We’re in Paris, we’re in the Dominican Republic, we’re in New Orleans et cetera. So the sounds of those locations and collecting those noises and curating those sounds, it’s kind of like what Erik Messerschmidt does when he’s composing a shot, I would imagine. In sound we’re trying to do the same thing, we’re trying to define the space, so when we’re in the Dominican Republic what are those sounds? We may not see the Dominican Republic, we may not see Paris, so we need to help the audience understand where we are sonically, because we may not see it visually right away.”

Asked about the use of music in the film, with The Smiths frequently playing, Baxter said, “It was David’s idea from the start that we sort of live in the back of the killer’s skull, and we see what he sees and we hear what he hears… so when it’s his POV, the music that he’s playing takes over all the sonic space and it just goes blast. But we’re also working with his inner musings, so it became this pattern of full-blast Smiths, and then coverage of him and then we’ve now got room to put in the voiceover, so it’s doing this sort of vertical editing with sound. So once we established that rule and thought that it worked well in one key scene, we decided to apply it everywhere and to stick with this idea of vertical sound editing that gave Ren a lot of room to do something different.”

Check out the panel video above.

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