THE KANE EVENT

Everything is Orson? Well, maybe not. David Fincher’s Mank explores the origins of Welles’ magnum opus, bringing his own Hollywood experience to bear on a 30-years in-the-making black-and-white masterpiece that feels like it could have been found on a shelf next to Citizen Kane. Total Film meets Fincher and cast to talk Hollywood past and present.

- MATT MAYTUM

Even with a heavyweight like David Fincher behind it, it’s hard to imagine a film like Mank getting made anywhere else than Netflix. A period film, shot in black-and-white, looking and sounding like it could’ve come from the ’30s: a textbook Hard Sell. “Unless you’re making a tentpole movie that has a Happy Meal component to it, no one’s interested,” says Fincher, who was trying to drum up interest from studios as far back as 1997, as soon as his writer father Jack Fincher (a journalist and author) had finished the script.

A passion project for Fincher Sr. and Jr., David suggested the retired Jack write a screenplay about the film he introduced him to as a teen: Orson Welles’ seminal 1941 debut, Citizen Kane. Well, not about Citizen Kane, per se, but about its creation, and specifically the input of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, aka Mank. Over the years, it’s been contested just how much input boy wonder Welles had in the landmark film’s screenplay. Critic Pauline Kael brought the suggestion to mainstream attention in her 1971 essay, Raising Kane (director Peter Bogdanovich later countered with his own piece, The Kane Mutiny).