David Fincher is one of the most exciting, innovative, and daring filmmakers of the modern era. While the filmmaker got his start in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as a music video director, he soon moved on to helming some of the most impactful films of the late ‘90s onward, from Se7en to Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and beyond. In recent years, Fincher has become a frequent and exclusive collaborator with Netflix, having not only directed several films for release on the platform (Mank and The Killer) but also overseen numerous other projects, such as Mindhunter, Love Death + Robots, and Voir.
Now, it sounds as if Fincher may be planning to direct a bold new kind of project: a documentary. Filmmaker and critic Kent Jones has been making the rounds to promote his newest film, Late Fame, and has revealed some fascinating details about potential further collaborations with Fincher in the process. Fincher was previously featured in Jones’ documentary film, Hitchcock/Truffaut, in 2015. Now, it sounds as if Fincher is looking to collaborate in a more comprehensive manner but tackle similar subject matter in the form of none other than another master of cinematic suspense and scares: John Carpenter.
"[It] would be—this is his (Fincher’s) words—sort of like Hitchcock/Truffaut for the 21st century, right? Meaning that it addresses the technological stuff that’s happened since Hitchcock and Truffaut passed away and the circumstances that have changed, etc., and talking about different… this is just us talking," Jones explained of the new project. "We’ll see, you know. But we’re talking about different filmmakers, and David was the one who said, 'Actually, what about John Carpenter? He’s a really interesting guy who’s really stuck to his guns and also is a really, really formidable filmmaker.'"
For context, Hitchcock/Truffaut was initially a novel written by Francois Truffaut himself in 1966, in which the acclaimed filmmaker sat down with iconic genre filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and spoke at length about the latter filmmaker’s work, craft, and overall approach to filmmaking and life. The novel proved instrumental in recontextualizing Hitchcock's work through a critical and analytical lens, at a point in time where his films were predominantly viewed as populist entertainment. It’s not a stretch to say that Hitchcock/Truffaut as a novel is one of the load-bearing pillars of Hitchcock’s modern-day legacy in cinematic history. It’s an absolutely fascinating read, and decades later, Kent Jones took the audio recordings of the filmmakers’ conversations and turned them into a feature-length documentary, also titled Hitchcock/Truffaut.
The idea of anyone making a Hitchcock/Truffaut-style documentary about John Carpenter is an immensely tantalizing idea. He is one of the most widely important and influential filmmakers of the past several decades, having crafted iconic genre films such as Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Starman, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness, and Escape from L.A. In recent years, his body of work has begun to be re-evaluated by many and appreciated for the enormity of its impact, but any feature documentary seeking to further that goal even more would be a net positive.
But to take that idea and pair it with Fincher, potentially giving audiences what would essentially be positioning Fincher as the Truffaut to Carpenter’s Hitchcock? That truly sounds too good to be true. Here’s hoping this project becomes a reality sooner rather than later.
Add us as a preferred source on Google