David Fincher Got Some Incredible Clickbait Treatment Over The Weekend
This headline was everywhere on movie sites over this weekend, and I'm sure it generated a shit ton of clicks to these sites. 'Joker' is already a hot topic that people online love doing "da discourse" about, regardless of if it came out over a year ago or not. Add David Fincher to the mix and you have a clickbait cocktail. That said, lets take a look at the full quote:
“Nobody would have thought they had a shot at a giant hit with Joker had The Dark Knight not been as massive as it was. I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, ‘Yeah, let’s take [Taxi Driver’s] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy’s] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars,” he said.
This is not David Fincher describing the entire movie "A betrayal of the mentally ill"
This is David Fincher saying that's what the movie is about.
This is a very important distinction to make. And again, I get it. Clicks by any means, baby. But don't drag Fincher's name through the mud. Clickbait shame M. Night Shyamalan or Lena Dunham. Don't do my boy Fincher like that. I do have to note that while he did get severely misquoted here, he did start a few more fires by shredding Orson Welles (who is one of the topics of his new Netflix movie, 'Mank'), and also big budget movies like the Marvel and Star Wars franchises.
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Unless you’re making a tentpole movie that has a Happy Meal component to it, no one’s interested… There’s really only two seasons for movies. There’s ‘spandex summer’ and there’s ‘affliction winter’. You’re making your movie for one of two seasons. And if you miss, you’ll fall into one of those other two seasons, which are nominally dumping grounds.
He also had some thoughts on "Cancel Culture". He is exploring making a series about it:
“At its heart it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology. If you give a truly heartfelt apology and no one believes it, did you even apologize at all? It’s a troubling idea. But we live in troubling times.”
I love Fincher, man. Dude doesn't give a fuck and to me, that makes him very unique in the movie making business. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what he says, if he wants to make a black and white movie about Citizen Kane based on his father's script, you bet your ass Netflix is shelling out $40 million for it. You know why? Cause he's David Motherfucking Fincher