David Fincher sees Todd Phillips‘ Oscar-winning film Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, as a “betrayal of the mentally ill,” he tells The Telegraph.
Fincher, who rose to fame directing blockbusters like Fight Club, also weighed on his deal with Netflix and Hollywood more broadly.
“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.”
He said that Hollywood will only greenlight deals that they think will “make them a billion dollars”.
Fincher’s first feature since Gone Girl, Mank, will drop December 4th on Netflix. He hinted at another project he’d like to do on cancel culture: “At its heart it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology. If you give a truly heartfelt apology and no one believes it, did you even apologize at all? It’s a troubling idea. But we live in troubling times.”