David Fincher Compares The Making Of "Joker" To "Fight Club"

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David Fincher, Joker, Fight Club
David Fincher explained how Todd Phillips' "Joker" reminded him of making "Fight Club."

Director David Fincher spoke about Todd Phillips' Joker, and how surprised he was to see the supervillain origin story become such a massive success.

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“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,” Fincher said. “I’m sure that Warner Bros thought at a certain price, and with the right cast, and with De Niro coming along for the ride, it would be a possible double or triple. But I cannot imagine that movie would have been released had it been 1999.”

Fincher continued to suggest that the film's production reminded him of his time making Fight Club: "The general view afterward among the studio types was, ‘Our careers are over.’ The fact we got that film made in 1999 is still, to my mind, a miracle.”

Despite his contempt for allegedly avaricious studio executives, Fincher says streaming services like Netflix, which he has worked with numerous times, are far better at funding “medium-priced” projects: “The reality of our current situation is that the five families don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars,” he said. “None of them want to be in the medium-priced challenging content business. And that cleaves off exactly the kind of movies I make. What the streamers are doing is providing a platform for the kind of cinema that actually reflects our culture and wrestles with big ideas: where things are, what people are anxious and unsure about. Those are the kinds of movies that would have been dead on arrival five years ago.”

Fincher's upcoming film Mank will release on Netflix, next month.

[Via]


About The Author
Cole Blake is currently an Editor at HotNewHipHop based out of Brooklyn, New York. He began working at the site as an intern back in 2018 while studying journalism at St. John’s University. In the time since, he’s graduated with a bachelor's degree and written extensively about a wide range of topics including pop culture, film & television, politics, video games, sports, and much more. He’s also covered music festivals such as Gov. Ball and Rolling Loud. You can find him publishing work for HNHH from Monday to Wednesday or on weekends. On the sports front, Cole’s a passionate NBA and NFL fan with his favorite teams being the Indianapolis Colts and Los Angeles Lakers. He also roots for the Yankees whenever he finds himself at Yankee Stadium or the Red Storm when in the company of other SJU alumni. His favorite hip-hop artists are billy woods, Earl Sweatshirt, Cam’ron, MIKE, and Mach-Hommy.
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