Thoughts On The Similarities in Kubrick and Fincher Directing Styles

From Musick Hund

Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher are often compared because both had/have notoriously exacting standards for their films, demanding brutally high rates of takes, and psychologically terrorizing actors in order to to push them deeper into their respective directorial visions of the characters. The two most well-known examples are Shelley Duvall (Wendy Torrence in The Shining) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith in Zodiac). 

Kubrick claimed that he treated Shelley more harshly than Jack Nicolson because he wanted to bring out the blubbery hysteria that characterizes her behavior when she finally realizes her husband has lost his mind and turned into a murderous psychopath.

Fincher has said that Jake was not successfully making the transition from mild-mannered boy scout cartoonist to obsessed private investigator who breaks up his own marriage in pursuit of the Zodiac throughout the 1970s. The cordial relations between Jake and Fincher apparently really broke down—not the case with Shelley and Kubrick—to the point where Jake has sworn off ever working with the director again, saying that Fincher “paints with people.” The other difference is that even though she would not care to repeat the Kubrick experience (before his death in early 1999, obviously), she admitted it made her a much better actor, a fact remarked on by Robert Altman when she worked with him on Popeye (1980) after she had previously worked with him on 3 Women (1977).

As far as I know Jake has not come to that self-realization, but Olivia Armstrong in a fine post that can be found here, makes the case convincingly. It really is hard to imagine Gyllenhaal so brilliantly pulling-off the sociopath Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler without the trial-by-fire inflicted upon him by Fincher.

My second remark about Kubrick and Fincher has to do with method. Both really did/do HUGE numbers of takes. Ken Adam, who did production design on Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon said there were times when he thought actors would simply go to pieces and conceivably threaten the integrity of the production itself (Ryan O’Neal, in BL for instance). Fincher, in his own way (probably less mellow than SK…) does the same thing. There are reports of Fincher demanding 50+ takes of scenes that last less than one minute (like someone getting into a car) which invokes Tom Cruise’s tale of Kubrick making Sydney Pollack in Eyes Wide Shut spend two weeks walking 15 feet and opening a door.

Stanley Kubrick famously never used storyboards, so high take rates were, to some extent, his way of figuring out HOW the movie should be shot (“I’m waiting for the magic” he used to say). Cursory research reveals Fincher does use storyboards, and is purported to be as obsessive about them as Hitchcock or the Coen Brothers. So one can only conclude that his high take rates are about wishing to totally shape performances. I admit that it must take a remarkably thick-skinned actor to endure the feeling of another person taking away their creative process and imposing his own.