David Fincher Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Deadline kicked off movie-awards season Saturday with Contenders London, which featured creatives and key craftspeople from 13 buzzy films that will be at the forefront of kudos conversations leading up to the Oscars in March.

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.

After sitting it out last year, Deadline’s Contenders film series returns to London this weekend with a strong lineup featuring Ridley Scott, Emerald Fennell, Todd Haynes and Michael Mann among the panelists on tap to attend the awards-season event.

The Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival, running from October 18 to 24 in the Spanish island’s capital of Palma, has unveiled its full line-up.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The “Saw” films have always been rightfully tagged as torture porn, but they come on as flesh-ripping morality plays. Each victim, strapped into his or her loopy-ingenious electro-medieval Rube Goldberg slicer-dicer-chopper-gouger, is being put through the agonies of the damned only because of some sin that he or she committed in the real world. The whole concept of sin, articulated this heavily, is more than a little corny (that’s one reason I think the seven-deadly-sins premise of David Fincher’s “Se7en” is that film’s most rickety dimension, rather than its most dramatic), but there’s no denying that in the “Saw” movies the concept serves a canny purpose.

David Fincher has a strong relationship with The New York Film Festival; he made the world premiere debuts of “The Social Network” (2010) and “Gone Girl” (2014). “Mindhunter” screened at the 2017 edition, and if the filmmaker has a new film in the wings, it’s generally in the wings for an NYFF discussion, at least.

Like many filmmakers, the lost and unmade movie list of David Fincher list is long, so long we did an entire feature out of it back in 2014, and it’s more than 30 films long. The list includes “Black Dahlia” (which Brian DePalma eventually made), “Mission Impossible 3,” “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” and more (interestingly enough, both “Mank” and “The Killer” were on it, then-unrealized projects that seemed like they would never get made).

The 23rd edition of the Tribeca Festival will unspool June 5-16 in New York City, organizers said today, and submissions are now open.

The pipeline from music video to feature film director isn’t discussed enough. Many beloved filmmakers started with music videos and commercials from Spike Jones to Gus Van Sant to David Fincher.  Joining the ranks now is Aristotle Torres, who is known for beginning his career as the creative director for his college classmate J.

Everyone wants to be David Fincher when you’re making a capital S serious, severe procedural, and grim murder mystery like Netflix’s uneven but still fascinating “Reptile.” And to be sure, gray and sinister —like all good serial killer or intricate murder thrillers are these days— director Grant Singer might reference a Fincher shot here and there or try inventively add a little Steven Soderbergh paranoia ala “KIMI.

Fight Club author Chuck Palahnuik has revealed what he didn’t like about David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.In an interview with Variety about his new novel Not Forever, But For Now, Palahnuik explained how the inclusion of the ticking bomb in Fight Club‘s closing scenes was not to his liking.“I wasn’t a big fan of the ticking bomb, that counting down clock near the end. And [screenwriter] Jim Uhls stuck it in because there’s obviously such a trope, and I’ve grown to accept that it is a trope.”In the closing moments of Fight Club, The Narrator (Norton) attempts to disarm the explosives planted below a series of credit company buildings by his imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden (Pitt).

Depending on who you speak to, Aggro Dr1ft has either been a hideous blight on the fall festival circuit or… Well, currently, there’s not exactly a consensus on what there is to love about Harmony Korine’s in-your-face fantasia, a nightmare vision of Florida made all the more hellish by its refusal to resemble anything you might expect even — or perhaps especially — from the director of Spring Breakers.

Refresh for latest…: The 80th Venice Film Festival officially draws to a close this evening with the main awards, including the top prize Golden Lion, soon to be handed out inside the Sala Grande.

It surprised no one earlier this year when Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross officially came on board to score David Fincher‘s “The Killer.” After all, the pair have scored all of Fincher’s films since 2010’s “The Social Network.” But it surprised audiences at the movie’s world premiere in Venice last weekend when Reznor & Ross’ work didn’t feature prominently in “The Killer” at all.

David Fincher has explained why he chose to include tracks by The Smiths on the soundtrack for his upcoming film The Killer.Michael Fassbender stars as a troubled assassin in the upcoming thriller, which is based on the French graphic novel by Alexis Nolent. It was adapted by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who previously worked with Fincher on Seven.While the film’s score is composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Fincher explained at the Venice Film Festival how The Smiths also came to feature heavily on the soundtrack.“The Smiths were a post-production addition because I knew I wanted to use ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and I love the idea of that song specifically as a tool for assuaging his anxiety,” Fincher said (via IndieWire).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Is it something in the air? At this year’s Venice Film Festival, the unofficial theme appears to be hit men. David Fincher’s “The Killer” is all about an icy methodical professional executioner. Woody Allen’s “Coup de Chance” turns on an act of murder-for-hire.

David Fincher and Boots Riley are both very good filmmakers. In terms of Fincher, some put him up there as one of the best working today.

Justin Timberlake stars in the upcoming thriller Reptile, and now, the director is explaining how it went down.

Total admissions to theatres at this year’s Venice Film Festival have hit 114,851, up 18% on last year, according to figures published by the Biennale this week, as the film event passes the midway point. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Busan International Film Festival put aside many of its recent internal and local political problems to Tuesday unveil a large selection ranging from bleeding edge art titles to international festival favorites. “The difficult times are not behind us, but hard work has made this year’s festival better than ever,” said programmer and interim festival chief Nam Dong-chul, speaking at an online press conference. International guests expected to attend the festival include Luc Besson, Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing, Japanese directors Hamaguchi Ryusuke and Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Korean Americans Justin Chon (“Gook”) and Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”). Hong Kong-based superstar Chow Yun-fat has been named as Busan’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year and will be in person to receive the award.

David Fincher’s latest feature, The Killer, earned 6 minutes and 45 seconds of applause Sunday evening after the lights went up on the film’s world premiere screening at the Venice Film Festival.

David Fincher spooked Venice with the world premiere of his latest movie “The Killer,” which stars Michael Fassbender as an assassin. The Netflix drama earned a respectable 5-minute standing ovation at its screening on the Lido on Sunday night. Fassbender and co-star Tilda Swinton couldn’t attend the premiere because of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

The question of whether or not technology has killed the classic crime thriller has popped in and out of the discourse as the years saw pocket watches morph into sci-fi-looking gadgets capable of getting one both dinner and a first-class ticket to Dubai in the space of a couple of minutes.

In principle, using the rainy-day, kitchen-sink post-rock of Manchester band The Smiths so prominently in a film like The Killer seems incredibly perverse, given that it’s an exotic, globe-trotting thriller about an American assassin. But in reality, it’s actually very sound choice indeed: legend has it that the band’s singer, Morrissey, had two reasons for naming his band so, the first being that “Smith” is one of the most common and thus unremarkable surnames in the world. The second, and much more subversive theory, suggests that it’s also a reference to David and Maureen Smith, brother-in-law and sister of ’60s serial killer Myra Hindley, the snappily dressed couple whose testimony blew open the Moors Murderers case and whose beatnik likenesses adorn the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album “Goo”.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the bravura opening sequence of David Fincher’s “The Killer,” we watch the title character, a cold-as-dry-ice professional hitman who is never named, as he prepares to assassinate his latest victim. The hit is taking place in Paris, and the target is some sort of powerful corporate tycoon who we, like the killer, know nothing about. His home occupies the entire penthouse floor of one of those ornate block-long Parisian apartment buildings.

David Fincher is in town today for the world premiere of The Killer starring Michael Fassbender as an assassin who battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt while insisting none of it is personal.

The Venice Film Festival began August 30 with opening-night movie , an Italian World War II drama, kicking off a lineup for the venerable fest’s 80th edition that includes world premieres of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, David Fincher’s The Killer, Ava DuVernay’s Origins, and new films from lightning-rod directors Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Luc Besson.

As the Venice Film Festival kicks off this week, so too does it begin the Fall film festival circuit.  Telluride also starts this weekend, then onto TIFF, NYFF, and the BFI London Film Festival. And Variety has the scoop on the full line-up for London this October, which features several major films that premiered at Cannes and other fests earlier this year.

Jeymes Samuel’s sophomore feature The Book of Clarence, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Boy and the Heron by Hayao Miyazaki are among the titles that have been announced within the full lineup of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) 67th London Film Festival. Scroll down for the full list.

Naman Ramachandran The 67th BFI London Film Festival has unveiled its full lineup, which includes galas and special presentations of films by contemporary masters. As previously announced, Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” will open the festival and Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya’s “The Kitchen” will close it.