Filmmaker David Fincher has been pretty active on the press rounds lately as he promotes his acclaimed new Netflix series Mindhunter. Recently, he shared his thoughts on Marvel Studios and how he feels it makes it challenging for directors to tell complex stories, and now he’s been talking to Empire about another Disney-owned franchise in Star Wars, revealing that he passed up the opportunity to head to the galaxy far, far away.
“I talked to [producer Kathleen Kennedy] about that and look, it’s a plum assignment,” said Fincher. “I don’t know what’s worse: being George Lucas on the set of the first one where everyone’s going, ‘Alderaan? What the hell is this?’ Where everyone’s making fun, but I can’t imagine the kind of intestinal fortitude one has to have following up the success of these last two. That’s a whole other level. One is that you have to endure the withering abuse of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, and the other is you have to live up to a billion or a billion-five, and that becomes its own kind of pressure. I think [The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner] had the best job. He had a pretty great script and he had the middle story. He didn’t have to worry about where it started and he didn’t have to worry about where it ended. And he had the great reveal. You’d have to really clear your head, I think. You’d have to really be sure this is what you wanted to do because either way it’s two years of your life, 14 hours a day, seven days a week.”
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Despite his reluctance to take on a Star Wars movie, Fincher has long been linked to another blockbuster, with a possible reunion with Se7en, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button star Brad Pitt on the sequel to World War Z, and he also provided a brief update on the status of that project:
“I worked on a show for HBO that didn’t see the light of day and at the same time was doing [Mindhunter], and I’ve been working for about a year now with Dennis Kelly on World War Z… We’re hoping to get a piece of material that’s a reason to make a movie not an excuse to make a movie.”
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Mindhunter is available to stream now on Netflix.
Originally published October 23, 2017. Updated December 16, 2019.
