With SHOOT’s 50th Anniversary Issue and “Then, Now & Looking Ahead” series still prominent in the proverbial rearview mirror, it’s apropos that we kick off 2011 with special coverage of The Social Network, a lauded film which reflects both change and a constant, in some respects underscoring the blend of new and enduring dynamics that carries relevance for the new year as it applies to the industry.
Indeed change is ripe in the The Social Network’s storyline which brings to the fore the web and the social networking phenomenon, which have profoundly influenced contemporary culture. Meanwhile the alluded to constant is collaboration, which was integral to the making of the movie.
On the collaborative front, sharing his insights into the longstanding working relationships behind The Social Network is its director, David Fincher, whose career spanning music videos, commercials and theatrical features has been chronicled by SHOOT over the years.
Several of Fincher’s prime collaborators on The Social Network have also contributed to his past clips and/or spots as well as other feature-length movies–among those artisans being cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, production designer Donald Graham Burt, and supervising sound editor and sound re-recording mixer Ren Klyce.
Fincher observed, “Films are wars–battles waged over months in the hope that even with some days resulting in lost ground, you can get THERE. They require constant vigilance on the part of many departmental overseers to make sure that the newborn is not tossed with the suds. If you’ve been through it before, you know the value of those who can maintain focus and keep front and center that which is narratively essential. Those are the people you owe it to yourself to invest in; the people who make you look wise and responsible, the people who are dedicated to what the audience will see and feel most.”
Here’s a look at several of those people and their collaborative filmmaking history with Fincher:
Jeff Cronenweth, ASC
Fincher recalled, “I met Jeff working with his father [legendary cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, ASC], and asked him to shoot Fight Club in 1999. Jeff is genetically incapable of ‘over lighting’ and is a great and pragmatic problem solver.”
Fight Club is one of a select number of features Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, has shot over the years (including K-19: The Widowmaker for director Kathryn Bigelow, and One Hour Photo for director Mark Romanek). The cinematographer made a conscious decision to be extremely selective about feature cinematography gigs in that they are generally time consuming and his personal priority has been to spend more time with his family. However when Fincher called him regarding The Social Network, Cronenweth–who’s repped as a DP by Dattner Dispoto and Associates–was all ears.
“For one, it was three to four weeks on location, with the rest of the shooting in Los Angeles, meaning I could be close to home,” related Cronenweth. “But more importantly, I was hooked when I read the script–it’s a cerebral movie that’s all dialogue. There was no dark side other than how you interpret the actions of Mark Zuckerberg and those around him. There are no chase scenes or complex visuals, It’s essentially a courtroom drama without a courtroom. Instead it’s set in two deposition rooms and in surroundings where certain events took place. The visual approach was more reality driven, contemporary–these were events of the past six or seven years. It was an exercise in constraint–visually adding to the performances and the words being said. It was great to see how one of our industry’s brightest and most talented directors tackled this.”
At the same time, Cronenweth observed, “If Fincher calls you, do you even need to read the script to decide if you want to work with him? Of course not–the chance to work with David is too good to pass up. You know the project will be ambitious and challenging.”
Cronenweth shot The Social Network on a state-of-the-art RED One camera, which filmmaker Steven Soderbergh provided for Fincher. Cronenweth had used RED in the past but found this new iteration with the Mysterium X chip to be advantageous. “I believe this was the first major movie to use this new chip, which offered increased dynamic range in latitude and color, the ability to hold highlights better than its predecessor, the capability to deal with warm light. So many of our locations dictated what our lights sources would be…Had RED not progressed with its new chip, then the demands of this movie would have been an issue.”
Fincher has been proactive in digital cinematography on his features in recent years, going with the Viper on Zodiac (with Harris Savides, ASC, serving as cinematographer) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (DP Claudio Miranda), for example. Cronenweth explained that this digital bent does not stem from an aversion to film but rather Fincher’s desire to own and control as much of the imagery as he possibly can, being less vulnerable to outside forces like film labs where issues like scratches, handling of the work and timing can surface.
Cronenweth himself is open-minded about new tools, going with what’s best for the particular project. He earlier for example had a positive experience deploying the Sony F35 on a Fincher-directed iPhone spot produced by Anonymous Content for TBWAChiatDay and Media Arts Lab, L.A. (Cronenweth has shot varied commercials over the years for Fincher whose spotmaking home is Anonymous Content.)
Still, Cronenweth is an unabashed lover of film. “There’s no mystery, no surprises per se when shooting in HD which to some is the advantage of HD. But I love the texture of film, the grain, not always knowing what you have.”
On one hand, quipped Cronenweth, “I love not having to call the film lab at 5 a.m. wondering if I will have a job that day. But not knowing exactly what you captured, sometimes having a little fear is not necessarily a bad thing–I’m not sure all the young DPs appreciate that. If you’re brave enough to embrace the mystery and the surprises you can get on film, that pushes you. Without that, there are people who might not be pushing and taking the risks they should be taking.”
Asked for how he and Fincher have evolved over their years of collaboration–spanning spots, two features divided by some 11 years (The Social Network and Fight Club) and earlier Fincher movies for which he served as second unit DP (The Game, Se7en)–Cronenweth observed. “We have grown. We are both better, more concise as filmmakers. We know how to arrive at desired points sooner, easier. We communicate better with each other. I understand his language. There’s more short hand between us.” (Cronenweth, incidentally, is currently shooting Fincher’s latest film, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.)
Having worked with the likes of Fincher, Bigelow and Romanek, Cronenweth noted that these experiences have helped him as both a cinematographer and director (he and brother Tim comprise the helming duo The Cronenweths at L.A. production house Untitled). A prime lesson learned from these filmmakers, said Cronenweth, is “all of them have strong creative convictions. They believe in themselves. They believe in ideas and fight hard for them.”
Donald Graham Burt
Fincher related, “Don Burt was someone Ceán [Chaffin, Fincher’s longtime producer] introduced me to on Zodiac and I love his taste and willingness to sublimate beautiful design to the needs of the story.”
Zodiac started a string of Fincher/Burt collaborations that went on to include Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Burt earned an Oscar for best achievement in art direction for Button (shared with set decorator Victor J. Zolfo).
Burt, who’s handled by The Skouras Agency, has also served as production designer on several Fincher-directed commercials for such clients as Hewlett Packard, Nike and Apple’s iPhone. Burt has spotmaking roots that date back to when he first got to know Chaffin.
“With David, you feel you are in a collaboration,” related Burt. “Sometimes you work on projects and the director is unavailable or busy elsewhere. David is always available, always there. You can discuss ideas with him. David gives you space and at the same time is there for discussion. He is so involved. He wants to hear you, he wants to see you. He values the art department and you feel he values you and what you can contribute.”
As for the biggest challenge he faced on The Social Network, Burt cited “the recreation of Harvard, which has a no filming policy. We had to recreate Harvard, doing extensive research regarding what the dorm rooms and hallways were like back then. We had to recreate Harvard in such a way that created the right tone, serving the dramatics of the script and the narrative.
Angus Wall, Kirk Baxter
Reflecting on his working relationship with editors Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter of edit house Rock Paper Scissors, Fincher related, “I had worked with Angus for years on music videos and commercials, and he introduced me to Kirk. We have worked harmoniously together on three features (Zodiac, Benjamin Button, The Social Network). Each brings an incredible skill set, but also a great sense of curiosity, experimentation and determination to make each moment count.”
Wall and Baxter earned a best editing Oscar nomination for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was after that movie was released that SHOOT first discussed with the two editors their collaborative bond with Fincher on both spots and features. At the time, Baxter related, “I’ve found it incredibly simple to work with David. He’s very clear, very helpful yet is always there if you stray off the path. He will talk to me about a scene as if I’m an actor who’s going to go out and perform it. He will talk about it in an ethereal way, keeping things loose so we can consider and then use the right building blocks. As things start to form, he gets even more useful and specific to help each artist with his specific craft. You very much want to please David. You try to do things proactively to help him since he has such a great understanding of how to give you freedom and help you at the same time.”
Wall observed, “David understands that the nondestructive aspect of the process is post. In production you can have the figurative gun to your head to get stuff done, It can be a pressure cooker. But in editorial you can stretch out and see what is right for the piece. David is the easiest guy to work with. Editorially he’s very clear, open and collaborative. He’s a fantastic director who can give you the big picture while also commenting on how the reading of a single syllable should sound in someone’s performance. Obviously he is going to give you all the pieces you need to put a scene together. As an editor, you just try to take it that five percent further to make the work even better.”
Wall added that his experience on Button “highlighted the fact that the creation of pictures doesn’t end with photography. Post is such a fascinating place to be because it is increasingly where pictures are being made, not just being put into a format for people to see. Image making continues throughout postproduction. The top directors understand this–that images are going to be part photography and part animation. So many creative possibilities are inherent in this approach.”
Baxter noted that “while David keeps it simple and allows us to go off and edit, he also brings others in to help us so that we all collaborate on certain scenes. Angus and I edited scenes separately but we also collaborated on other scenes. Sometimes movies are divided in half like in The Godfather I understand one editor’s work ended and another’s began at a certain point. But with David it’s an organic experience for some scenes–we’re sending material back and forth, there’s sort of a group effort involved. There was a dinner scene in the movie where Cate [Blanchett] is wearing a red dress and is out to dinner with Brad [Pitt] who had just come back from the war and is moving a lot slower. By contrast she’s moving and living life a hundred miles an hour. I assembled the scene to a rough piece of music. Angus took a crack at it later but turned the flow into dissolves. He showed it to me and I thought that was twice as good as what I had done. We then worked to continue to refine that. Based on our changes, David got Cate to re-read the voice faster to fit the pacing. We laid the new voice to the scene and it moved twenty percent faster. We trimmed the scene down and tightened it up. [Sound designer] Ren Klyce [whose spot roost is his own Mit Out Sound] refined the music. We went into DI and changed the whole section of the dissolves to make sure there was no ugliness in them. Claudio [cinematographer Miranda] monitored this as well. When you think of how many hands touched that one pure scene to make it just right–with David all the while running up and down the sidelines as the coach or referee, it was a wonderful collaborative experience.”
Wall said that he and Baxter “leaned on Ren heavily. Ren helped us all the way through [Button] in terms of rough mixes, music from New Orleans that kept in time with scenes. Way before composers came in, Ren was there finding the right palette of sound to help drive our work. David and Ren have known each other since their late teens. There’s a trusting creative bond there.”
Trust came in handy all the way around as Button, while gratifying to work on, was also a daunting experience given the sheer size and scope of the project. Major contributions were made by such visual effects studios as Asylum [tugboat scenes], Digital Domain [Benjamin Button’s face] and Lola [“youth’n’izing” actors], among others. “You don’t ever want to look at the top of the peak of the giant mountain when you’re climbing it,” said Wall. “You learn to watch your feet and that’s what we did on this film…David used to ask the question, ‘How do you eat a whale?’ The answer–‘one bite at a time.’ So we just worked long and hard each day. And part of what kept us going was that the film was so well written and the project was so challenging. We would feed off of that.”
Baxter and Wall added, though, that the challenge wasn’t added to unnecessarily. “We didn’t get caught up in the aging process being in reverse for the lead character,” related Wall. “Even though that’s a departure from the norm, it’s still a very linear story. That’s one of the aspects that’s interesting about the movie. It doesn’t make a huge deal about Benjamin’s predicament. The movie treats him as an ‘everyman’ who just happens to be aging the other way. That’s the approach David took for the film. It’s an approach that brought realism to the story.”
Wall met Fincher in 1998 back during their days together at the now defunct Propaganda Films. “I was the vault guy and he generously give me a commercial to edit,” recalled Wall. “Originally Jim Haygood was supposed to edit it but he had to leave for a family emergency. So I got the chance.”
The commercial was “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” for Nike and it helped to launch Wall’s career as an editor. “I owe David a huge amount for the opportunities he’s given me.”
Those opportunities span assorted spots, including some memorable Nike fare, as well as the Fincher-directed features Panic Room (which he and Haygood edited) and Zodiac. Wall also was an editorial consultant on Fincher’s Fight Club (edited by Haygood).
Baxter doesn’t have quite as long a history with Fincher as Wall, but the collaborations have been notable, the first feature being Zodiac for which Baxter did some cutting before landing the full-fledged editorial gig with Wall on Button. And the commercials Baxter cut for Fincher along the way include Stand Up 2 Cancer’s “Stand Up For Something” and the alluded to Apple iPhone launch.
For The Social Network, Wall and Baxter culled through some 268 hours of footage, finding the subtleties in each take that best served the narrative. Now the two editors are teaming on their latest Fincher project, the aforementioned The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Ren Klyce
Fincher recollected first meeting Ren Klyce “as a production assistant in 1981 and we’ve worked together on sound ideas and soundtracks for over 25 years.”
In an interview with SHOOT after Benjamin Button was wrapped, Klyce provided more detail on his chronology with Fincher. Klyce recalled that the two met when they were 18 years old while working for maverick independent filmmaker John Korty in the Bay Area on an animated film Twice Upon A Time. Klyce was an art assistant in the animation department while Fincher was working in visual effects. Korty and others on the movie started handing out shots to the various animators, giving Fincher what amounted to a second unit photography gig.
“David wanted to direct those shots–whether they be 8, 10 or 15 seconds–completely,” recalled Klyce, “and he came up to me and asked if I wanted to do music and sound. He knew that was what I was interested in pursuing.”
Around that same time, Fincher directed his first commercial, the American Cancer Society’s “Smoking Fetus,” which created quite a stir for its imagery. Klyce did the music and sound on the piece. “Even back then at the age of 18, David had this ability to get everybody to listen to him,” related Klyce. “He could describe ideas so passionately. It was like watching entertaining and engaging television. You could visualize what he was saying.”
A strong friendship was born but there was a prolonged stretch during which the two went their separate ways professionally. Fincher moved into the music video world while Klyce cut his teeth in the studio on music production and recording. Trained in musical composition, he started to explore the French musique concréte movement of the 1940s which experimented with sound as music, a philosophical precursor in a sense to sound design as we know it today.
Then what was to become a long fruitful collaboration on features and spots began when Fincher called to tell Klyce he had just landed a feature, Alien 3. At the time, Klyce didn’t have enough experience to be sold to the studio powers that be as a sound artisan on the film. Nonetheless Klyce helped out as much as possible, researching scores from the prior Alien films, and other works by composers who worked on those movies, assembling a catalog of music. Klyce handed Fincher a bunch of DAT tapes reflecting these relevant scores to be used as a foundation or starting point of sorts from which to build on.
Meanwhile commercials emerged as projects for which Fincher and Klyce could directly team. The first, Coke’s “Blade Roller” (an homage to Blade Runner) came in ’90. And then there was Nike’s “Magazine Wars” in which people pictured on magazine covers at a newsstand come to life and engage in a raucous game of tennis. The spot won a Clio, helped bring Klyce into prominence as a sound designer and began his track record of notable work with Wieden+Kennedy for not only Fincher but other filmmakers such as Spike Jonze (including Nike’s Emmy-winning “The Morning After” spot; Klyce’s collaborations with Jonze also include the big screen with Where The Wild Things Are.)
Klyce’s start in the feature film arena came in ’93 when Fincher brought him on board Se7en as sound designer/sound effects editor/sound effects supervisor and music consultant. Later Klyce served as sound designer on Fight Club and Panic Room, sound re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor/sound designer on Zodiac, and sound re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Klyce earned Oscar nominations for best sound effects editing in 2000 on the strength of Fight Club, and best achievement in sound in ’09 for Benjamin Button.
Klyce shared the latter Academy Award nomination with audio colleagues David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten whom he also teamed with on The Social Network.
Fincher and Klyce’s ad collaborations over the years include such spots as adidas’ “Mechanical Legs,” and a mix of breakthrough Nike fare such as “Magazine Wars,” “Gamebreakers” (a spot which helped Fincher win the DGA Award as Best Commercial Director of 2004), and “Fate” (one of the spots–showing us the bond of friendship and competition between NFL stars Ladainian Tomlinson and Troy Pomalalu–for which Fincher earned a DGA nomination in ’09).
“There are filmmakers who don’t really understand sound,” observed Klyce. “For a feature, they will handpick a cinematographer, their picture editor. But when it comes to sound, the studio usually turns them on to and hands them some sound people who handle the audio end.
“But there’s a way,” continued Klyce, “in which if the relationship between a filmmaker and a sound designer can be cultivated, then the filmmaker can realize all the power that film can render through sound. It’s only through working and learning from each other that we can realize more of our potential. I remember working on some director’s cuts for David on commercials many years ago and I told him that I cleaned up some dialogue, taking keys from other parts of the spot so that the words being spoken by the actress were more understandable and had better diction. I zoomed in on an ‘s’ and placed it in her dialogue. At the time, David didn’t know that could be done. He not only discovered another possibility but the art behind it. The discoveries, though, go beyond actually working together. As friends over the years, we have conversations about craft and you constantly learn. I have learned way more from him than he has from me.”
Asked if Fincher’s success comes from giving creative space to those he works with, Klyce replied, “Yes and no. He will give me the creative freedom to explore things, certainly. But at the same time, it’s not like he doesn’t check in. He will want to hear something immediately–over the phone or via the Internet. I remember sending him different versions of Brad Pitt’s voice as a young boy in Benjamin Button. On the Internet, we very much go back and forth constantly over every little nuance. The beauty of all this is David gives you feedback. Often what happens with sound is there’s little communication between the filmmaker and sound designer so the sound designer doesn’t truly know what the creative people want and ends up all over the map. With David, he lets you get inside his head. You know if you have nothing or the right sound approach. You can get him on the phone. He’ll respond immediately to an e-mail. It all comes down to my being able to get good feedback, great direction from him throughout the process whether it be for a feature or a spot.”
Klyce described Fincher as being “very disciplined, an absolute craftsman, the finest craftsman. It’s an amazing treat to work with him on his commercials and movies.”
Networking
Conversely, Fincher–who earlier this month on the strength of The Social Network earned a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award nomination for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2010–talked about his special connection to and communication with collaborators Klyce, Wall, Baxter, Burt and Cronenweth.
The director noted that The Social Network “needed to be made quickly–I felt that if we’d been allowed a ‘realistic’ pre-production schedule, we might’ve missed the opportunity to actually get the film made while it was topical. I felt that the few years removed from ‘Ground Zero’ of the Facebook phenomenon was okay for the purposes of emotional clarity, but we didn’t want to make too much of a ‘period’ piece. All of these artists are people I trust to serve the intention of the narrative. We all have a shorthand.”
Among other accolades recently earned by The Social Network are: Best Picture of 2010 distinction from both the National Society of Film Critics and the L.A. Film Critics Association, a Writers Guild Award nomination for Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, and Golden Globes for best drama, director, screenplay and musical score.
