The actor who wouldn’t recommend working with David Fincher: “He wants puppets”
Once a director reaches a certain stature in the industry, rumours start to filter through the aether about how they run their sets. The director is the captain of a production. While the producers might hold the purse strings and do the hiring and firing, it’s the director who establishes the tone on a set and interacts with the actors to extract their best performances. Clint Eastwood is known for saying little and moving quickly. Stanley Kubrick was known (and feared) for being exacting and relentless. And David O Russell is infamous for being verbally and physically aggressive with his cast and crew.
David Fincher falls more in line with the Kubrick directorial style. Since he burst onto the scene with the grisly Biblical serial killer thriller Seven in 1995, he has been somewhat notorious for how many takes he insists on doing. Rooney Mara revealed that he forced her to do 99 takes of an eight-page scene. When he filmed the biopic Mank, he forced Amanda Seyfried to do upwards of 200 takes for a certain scene over the course of five days.
Mara, Seyfried, and others have described their experiences with him as challenging but ultimately rewarding. Jake Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, downright despised his time making Zodiac with the director. “David knows what he wants, and he’s very clear about what he wants, and he’s very, very, very smart,” the actor told The New York Times in 2007. “But sometimes we’d do a lot of takes, and he’d turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there… ‘Delete the last ten takes.’ And as an actor, that’s very hard to hear.”
One actor who didn’t even deign to wrap his distaste in a compliment was R Lee Emery. You might know Emery as the shouty drill sergeant in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. He’s not onscreen for long, but he’s one of the most memorable things about the film. Not surprisingly, he was typecast as intense alpha males after that, which was how he ended up playing a police sergeant in Seven. Suffice it to say, he despised working with Fincher.
“He’s afraid to take chances. He’s afraid to let anybody change one word in the script,” Emery said. “He wants puppets. He doesn’t want actors that are creative. If you’re not worth a shit at acting and you’re not creative, then I would recommend that you go work with David Fincher because he won’t let you act, even if you are a fucking good actor.”
Interestingly enough, given his reputation, Kubrick supposedly let Emery create his character in real-time and even allowed him to rewrite and ad-lib his dialogue. He got the job after he was hired as a technical advisor on the film. With his years of experience in the military, he knew firsthand how a drill sergeant would conduct himself. When Kubrick saw his example, he fired the actor who had been hired to play the sergeant and replaced him with Emery.
Fincher clearly wasn’t interested in the actor’s improv skills, even if they were good enough for the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He later shrugged off Emery’s comments, saying, “You cast them for this certain thing that they bring to it and maybe not for another thing that they would like to bring to it. And I think it’s difficult for actors.”
That might sound condescending, but he has a point. Fincher’s stars regularly earn Oscar nominations, and he doesn’t seem to struggle to find A-list actors who want to work with him.
