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Critics are hailing David Fincher’s The
Killer as his most experimental film since Fight Club: “a
subjective, cinematic tour de force,” says Bill Desowitz at IndieWire, in which we get inside the mind of Michael
Fassbender’s titular assassin after he experiences his first misfire in Paris.
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The movie, now streaming on Netflix,
divided into six “chapters,” each with its own look, rhythm, and pace tied to
Fassbender’s level of control and uncertainty. According to the film’s editor,
Fincher regular Kirk Baxter, ACE, the editorial process necessitated the
creation of a visual and aural language to convey subjective and objective
points of view for tracking Fassbender.
Baxter (Zodiak, The Social Network) goes
into detail about working on each chapter with IndieWire. We learn
that the opening sequence set in Paris took the most time for Baxter to
assemble because it was stitched together from different locations including
interiors shot on a New Orleans stage.
“I love the whole power attack, the stretching of time, the patience of what it takes to do something properly,” Baxter said. “And I love that it’s grounded in the rule of physics and how practical it is that each detail in order to do something correctly deserves the same amount of attention.”
Later, in a chapter set in New
Orleans, the Killer exacts revenge on a lawyer. The setup prep is slow as he
cunningly enters the lawyer’s office dressed as a maintenance worker.
“It was one of the hardest things to put together,”
Baxter tells IndieWire. “It’s a little like a Swiss watch in terms
of how exacting it can be in his control. David had like 25 angles in the
corridor, but when you put it all together, I love how that scene unfolds by
playing both sides of the glass [between the office and corridor]. Typically,
he’s gonna say as little as possible and his stillness controls the pace, and
when he gets fed up, these little, tiny subtle looks from him are letting you
know that’s enough and where this conversation stops.”
The nighttime fight between the assassin and a
character called The Brute in the latter’s Florida home is depicted as a
contest between two warriors in the dark. Speaking to Dom Lenoir, host of The Editing Podcast,
Baxter explains how he and Fincher choreographed this fight as well as talking
more broadly about the director’s shooting style.
“David does always provide a lot of
coverage [and] that gets misinterpreted as a lot of takes [but] what he’s
extremely good at is making sure that I’ve got the pieces to be able to move
around as needed, or to keep something exciting. It means I can edit pretty
aggressively and use just the best pieces of everything. David knows these
rhythms he shoots for an editor. So, if it’s a really long scene, you will find
in the wide shot that they’ll often be blocking, for example, somebody coming
into the room. You sort of work your way [into the scene].”
Baxter says all that matters to him
once in production is the material Fincher has captured. “I will read the scene
again so that I understand the blueprint of it. You know what its intention is,
but then it can be thrown away because David can evolve beyond what the script
was based on, whether a location or how our actors are performing. He’ll
recalibrate and readjust.”
Although The Killer proceeds on a
fairly linear trajectory (hey, like a bullet…) Baxter says appearances can be
deceptive when it comes to cutting.
“I found it to be one of the more challenging
movies to make because it’s not juggling a bunch of different character lines
or going back and forth from past to present and that sort of thing,” Baxter
told IndieWire. “It’s just a straight line, but the exposure of
that [means there’s] nowhere to hide. It’s like everything is just under the
spotlight and you’re not having dialogue and interaction to kind of dictate
your pace. It’s a series of shots and everything has to be manipulated in order
to give it propulsion, or how you slow it down.”
He continues this train of thought
with Lenoir, “It was a challenging movie to make from my perspective because
you are showing an expert on the fringes of society but he’s still a person
that operates with precision. You’re trying to illustrate that by showing
precision. And it is just a lot of fiddling to make things seem easy.”
He also discusses perhaps something
that you may not notice in a first watch which is that The Killer doesn’t seem
to blink. It doesn’t just happen in this film either but in other Fincher
movies where Baxter says he has consciously selected shots of actor’s not
blinking.
“I don’t think that it was an effort
to remove them through the film,” he says. “It’s just the nature of how his
performance was. But there’s been an effort to remove them in previous films
when they’re all kind of landing off rhythm. It’s mostly about when you get
into the meat of a scene and you’re in close ups and you want something
delivered with intention and purpose.”
Audio was crucial to The Killer as
well. Rather than be smoothed out in the background with the edge taken off all
transitions, Fincher and sound designer Ren Klyce wanted the audio to be driven
by point of view. The rules of the film’s soundscape are established in the
opening sequence. Given that the protagonist is not predisposed to be chatty,
we learn as much from his internal monologue as from his methodological
movements.
“We crawl into his ears and sit in the back of his
eye sockets instead of how it’s being presented,” Baxter describes to IndieWire.
“From the moment when the target turns up, it was David’s idea to try a track
that was what he plays in his headphones. And when you have his POV, we turn
the track up to four, and when you’re back on him, the track drops down, and
you get the perspective of it playing in his ear.”
They devised rules for how to apply his voiceover but realized they couldn’t have voiceover and music at the same time because there would be too much “sonic noise” for the audience.
“So one’s got to occupy one space and
one take the other. The logic said to us what’s blaring in his ears and when
he’s in a monologue is when we’re looking at him. That was the rule of what was
subjective and what was objective,” says Baxter.
“We tried the notion of ‘vertical’
sound cuts,” Fincher explains. “By which I mean, you’re coming out of a very
quiet shot and cutting into a street scene and – boom! — you pick up this
incredibly loud siren going by. You’re continually aware of the sound.”
This makes for an unusual but
effective experience. For instance, there’s a scene in a Parisian park where
the sound of a fountain constantly moves around depending on the featured
character’s POV.
Was matching that vertical sound
cutting hard?
“I guess even when you’re creating chaos, you’re trying to affect it in your own way,” Baxter tells RedShark News. “You’re always seeking your own version of the perfect way to do this.”
Jennifer Chung, ACE was one of the assistant
editors on the film — part of a 14-strong editing department. She also spoke
with RedShark News about the tools they used.
“Obviously we use Premiere, and we
heavily use Pix also,” she says. “We do a lot of our communication in post
through Pix, especially during production during the dailies grind, where we’re
uploading not only the dailies but selects that are coming out so that we can
get that to David.”
Adobe After Effects is also used
extensively, with the team using Dynamic Links to round trip the content out of
Adobe Premiere and back in. Some of the assistants also script, so Python or
even Excel, in some cases, were also deployed to help automate some of the
critical processes.
The Killer was
shot in 8K using RED V-Raptor and according to Chung proved a little tricky
initially to grade in HDR.
“We definitely had some kinks we had
to figure out early on,” Chung says. “We all needed HDR monitors, but we didn’t
have HDR monitors at home, though we had HDR monitors at the office. We also
use a lot of Dynamic Links in Premiere, and we were having some color space
issues going from Premiere to After Effects back to Premiere, but because we
have such a close relationship with Adobe, we were able to figure that out.”
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