Mankopens in select theaters November 13.
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In two interviews over a long weekend, the director talked about bringing it to the screen.
You and I are about the same age, and I grew up as a movie buff like you.
When we talked about stupid things like Are the Beatles the best band in the world?
he would say, Well, here are certain perspectives on that.
But when it got down to Whats the greatest movie ever made?
it was without pauseCitizen Kane.I remember at 12 telling him that we were going to be watching a 16-mm.
version ofCitizen Kanein Film Appreciation class.
I was a tad reticent because … a 33-year-old movie?
It seemed like a cave painting.
But when I saw it, I was amazed.
I felt like I had seen something that was important in ways I didnt understand yet.
My dad was raised in a movie theater.
He forgave me my trespasses, but he also took me to seeDr.
Strangelovewhen I was 9 and2001: A Space Odysseywhen I was 7.
We would probably see a movie a week together up until I was in my mid-teens.
My first exposure toRaising Kanewas in microfiche at high school.
It wasnt until he retired from writing magazine stories that he said, Im thinking about writing a screenplay.
I said, Why dont you write about Herman Mankiewicz?
It was [about] a great writer obliterated from memory by this showboating megalomaniac.
When was this in terms of your own career?I hadnt directed a movie yet.
I was just going off to do that.
I kind of resented his anti-auteurist take.
So I knew that part of him held Welles in awe.
Then the script came in and I thought,Whoa, whos this?
And that cant happen if youre making a movie.
You dont get to just do your thing.
At the time, it didnt strike me as a middle-aged man taking stock of his lifes contributions.
How could you come from intellectual parents who wanted so much for their kids and end up in Hollywood?
[Herman and his brother Joseph] had come out to help save the spoken word in cinema.
I was always pretty sure that Herman thought he was slumming, and I know Jack did.
So this was a place where the three of us could relate.
Id think,Contain yourself.
Its just a music video with a bunch of supermodels.I could relate to that.
Did you keep working on it together?We never quite cracked it.
The decision to bring in the Upton Sinclair governors race feels incredibly resonant now.In what way?
I believe that Mankiewicz went into this thing because he needed the money.
In that regard, there are two lines I want to ask you to unpack a little.
One is from Kaels essay.
The movie business is not like that.
You are stitching those garments onto bodies up to the last 45 seconds before that person walks that runway.
Its a shitshow, an incredibly chaotic circus.
Its not cold and its not calculable.
Its a warm, wet art.
The other line is from your fathers script.
Where he takes it, thats his job.
My stay here is done.
Then, like Superman, they take off.
Ill work again.He took the gloves off, and he did his best work.
And theres absolutely no argument Welles was a fucking genius.
The fact that this is his first movie is beyond shocking.
Theyre not in the same league.
I think its about alcoholism both sides of alcoholism.
Its a little pathetic to watch somebody whose wife has to help him out of his clothes.
But thats also who he was.
Sometimes those people are ten times more brilliant inebriated than they are straight.
Its definitely a conflicted view, but it felt more realistic to me.
By 2001, we had kind of agreed to disagree.
It went on the shelf and then he got sick.
We made our peace with it.
Do you have anything that youve always wanted to make?
that I said, Yeah, actually.
It suddenly came into sharp relief.
I gave them the script and they said, We would make this, and here we are.
They would have said, Why are you talking about this?
So there are some fake newsreels youve got to give them an A for effort!
Oh, and black-and-white?
Yeah, no thanks.
So shooting in black-and-white was always part of the plan?Always.
How much was the script reworked?Eric Rothand I went back through the script and talked everything through.
Hell call bullshit on stuff that he just doesnt understand.
I dont have to answer to any vice president.
Im here to make whatever movie I want to make, so its you and me, buddy.
Eric said, Oh my God.
You just have to make it good.
What would your response be?
His response was, Trapped.
In that moment, I knew this is the guy I had to talk this through with.
Look, nobody has more respect for writers than I do.
Youre in the foxhole with them and theyre in the foxhole with you.
The foundation of it has to be searing, blinding honesty and vulnerability.
And they have to be able to tell you, Why would you not want to aim high?
So we tossed it and started over.
But its a 90-hour work week.
It absorbs everything in your life.
Had you been spending a lot of time in Pittsburgh?We lived there for almost three years.
We had an apartment there, and a car.Mindhunterwas a lot for me.
So isMindhunterdone as far as youre concerned?I think probably.
And on some level, you have to be realistic about dollars have to equal eyeballs.
The acting style definitely feels pre-Brando, pre-Method.
So it was an interesting first couple of days, just getting people to just go spit it out.
Not to say that thats all that was expected, but we started very much with that.
What Brando did for cinema was an unbelievable gift, and a curse.
How easy was it to get your cast into the films period speaking style?Gary can do anything.
Its like, Its not a question.
A lot of those little things needed to be squashed out.
Gary, to me, looks like hes my age.
Herman, at 43, looked like he was 55.
And by the time he died at 55, he looked 70.
He did himself no favors through cigarettes and alcohol.
Again, we could look for a desiccated 43-year-old, but in my business, the best actor wins.
Did the pandemic impede you at all?We originally planned on looping the entire movie.
We didnt do as much of it as we had planned on doing, but we did a lot.
Because [laughs], and I dont know if you know this …
I shoot a few takes.
In what way?We would go into a studio, and everyone would wear masks.
It was insanity.Amanda [Seyfried]did all of her looping from her home in upstate New York.
They sent a whole rig for her, and she did all her looping by Zoom.
Everything has been compressed and made to sound like the 1940s.
What youre hearing is a revival house an old theater playing a movie.
Its funny because Ive played it for some people who ask, What is going on with the sound?
We went three weeks over schedule on the mix trying to figure out how to split that atom.
Its one of the most comforting sounds in my life.
Theyre so little that theyre very difficult to hear until you hear them.
And you dont take credit for the contributions that Im sure you make to those scripts.Im not a writer.
I dont take credit for things that I dont do.
Listen, Im the offspring of a writer.
Ive watched somebody put a blank piece of paper in a 1928 Underwood and sit there for 45 minutes.
I know how lonely that is.
She said to me, Youve been thinking about this movie too fucking long.
Its not doing you any favors.
There are people in this movie who werent born when the script was written.
Two years is enough pre-visualization.
Twenty years is too much.
I have nine drafts on my shelf.
Im cleaning off that shelf.
Its time to take a deep breath.
It really helps if youre standing three feet to the left of Gregg Toland.
Welles and Mankiewicz were people who desperately needed one another.
To go after Hearst took a kind of hubris that not a lot of people had.
I wanted to talk about that.
I wanted to talk about collaboration.
How do you solve a problem like Herman Mankiewicz?
How do you push him out of his comfort zone?
