These freewheeling digital techniques weren’t available when the first draft of Mank was written by Fincher’s father, Jack, in 1992. The movie almost went into production on multiple occasions—Mavromates, the co-producer, recalled working up preliminary budgets in the late ’90s and the mid-2000s. “In 1999, [David Fincher] had been thinking about the movie for a couple years. Now he’d been thinking about it for two decades,” he said. Following years of failed attempts, Mank finally got the green light from Netflix after a major studio project that Fincher was attached to—a sequel to the zombie blockbuster World War Z—fell apart. Mavromates thinks those intervening years not only helped Fincher refine his ideas for the movie, but also allowed technology to catch up: “Not shooting it on film [gave] him a whole lot more control he wouldn’t have had in 1999.”
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By the time preproduction began, Fincher knew what he wanted Mank to be. The costume designer, Trish Summerville, put it this way: “He has seen the whole film, start to finish … in his head for probably a year. When he starts explaining it to you, it’s the first time we’re hearing it, but he’s already edited the whole thing in his [mind].” The task for his collaborators, then, is to try to see inside his brain and translate that into reality—something that the production designer, Don Burt, described as the starting point for his own creative process. “[Fincher is] the one director I’ve worked with, more than any other, [who,] when you start a movie, he knows in his head what it’s going to be,” he said. “Within that, there’s room for creative expansion … I listen, I take notes, we discuss things, and we start to see things.”
Those collaborative talks led to a design approach that emphasized realism over stylization. Burt scouted actual Los Angeles locations to give Mank a less “theatrical” feel than Citizen Kane, while Summerville tried to keep the characters’ fashion grounded not only in their time but also in their respective ages. “These were real people, and not all of them were glamorous,” Summerville said. “Even Hearst, a man who was very moneyed, because of his age, he wore clothes that were dated to the era.” One key exception to the realism rule was the casting of 62-year-old Oldman as Mankiewicz, who was in his 30s and 40s during the events of the film. To Fincher and his casting director, Laray Mayfield, that didn’t matter. “[Oldman is] actually older than Herman [Mankiewicz] was when he died. But Herman was beat to shit. People during that time period, somebody could be 20, or they could be 40, and you didn’t necessarily know,” Mayfield told me. “There’s so much more into what goes into being a human being than how they look.”
Perhaps the most aggressively stylized aspects of Mank come not in the casting or visuals but in the sound, which is booming and echoey even if you’re watching the movie on your iPad at home. The sound designer, Ren Klyce, who worked on the film in isolated conditions demanded by the coronavirus pandemic, could have created that effect digitally, but he found that an old-fashioned approach worked better. “The task was to figure out what it is about old movies that makes us feel this nostalgic feeling,” he told me. “[Fincher] wanted the movie to sound like it was playing in a giant theater, the way that people used to see movies … [Today] we do everything in our power to design movie theaters to not have an echo, but they used to be built for live performance, and they wanted the acoustics to be grand.”