David Fincher Casually Teases His Next Projects, Including A "Film Appreciation" TV Series
After a six-year absence from feature filmmaking, David Fincher finally returned with his acclaimed Hollywood drama Mank, which is enjoying awards buzz that could take it all the way to this year's Oscars. And it looks like Fincher won't be stopping that momentum any time soon, with the filmmaker juggling several upcoming projects on both the big and small screen.
Fincher has kept himself scarce over the past few years, occasionally popping up to develop and direct TV series like Mindhunter or Love, Death & Robots, but mostly focusing his attention on his passion project: a biographical drama penned by his father Jack Fincher that would become Mank. And now that Mank is out to the world, Fincher is keeping himself busy, revealing that he has several irons in the fire on a recent appearance on The Director's Cut – A DGA Podcast (via Collider):
"I am playing with adapting a French graphic novel about an assassin. I am playing with...Robert Towne and I are trying to break a limited series, sort of a prequel to Chinatown. Jake Gittes' time in Chinatown with Lou Escobar. And I'm working on a show about film appreciation and about movies that I love, with guests I love, about movies that they love."
The French graphic novel adaptation we've known about for a while — the project, based on The Killer by Alexis Nolent, is another longtime passion project of Fincher's that the filmmaker has been trying to get off he ground for 14 years before it finally landed at Netflix last month. The Chinatown prequel is also a project that Fincher has been working on since at least 2019, also for Netflix. But the "show about film appreciation" is new, and one that Fincher just casually dumped at the end of this sentence.
Likely an unscripted series featuring Fincher and guest hosts, this seems like just the kind of project that perfectly suits the famously critical director, and one that he could feasibly squeeze in amidst all his other projects. What could it encompass? A carefully curated collection of movies from Fincher's personal favorites? An overall appreciation of film technique that could play out like a Fincher Master Class? Ideally, it would resemble something like Fincher and Brad Pitt's move nights, in which the director spends the entire time over-analyzing every frame of a movie while Pitt just finds the whole thing hysterical. Oh, to be a fly on the wall during those movie nights.