And Now: A Relatively Brief Interrogation of Jonah Weiner on The Matter of His Recent David Fincher Profile.

A Q&A isn't cool. You know what's really cool? A FOSTERTALK.

HI, HELLO, I’M STILL HERE, look, I know, I know! I’ve been away and we’ll get to the Where I’ve Been of it all at some point below. If you just opened this thing looking for juicy media gossip shittalk between vignettes of me dry-sobbing into my keyboard about staring into Gerhard Richter’s mirrors while thinking about my irredeemability and also if I should maybe adopt a child as a bachelor and dress it in Baby Bode, which I believe is superior to the Big Bode line in many ways? I’m sorry, that won’t be on the menu. We have, instead, something better. Let me tell you about today’s special:

Okay, so, did you see that David Fincher profile in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago pegged to the release of Mank? I read the hell out of it. Did you? You should. Know why?

The thing was a technically perfect profile, a clinic. It’s just good writing. If you haven’t read it, it’s okay. Read this Q&A, you’ll want to. Before that, know this: Its 6500 words fly by. It was literally years in the making, with a star-studded cast of secondaries (Steven Soderbergh, Brad Pitt, Trent Reznor, the guy who played Tench on Mindhunter) speckling a wonderfully-observed story about an under-documented obsessive Hollywood auteur. And you’ll walk away from reading it with the thing every profile writer strives (or should strive) to achieve: An understanding of their subject. As someone who’s been working on a profile of someone for over a year myself (and would like to know exactly when one just starts trepanning in order to get a first draft out) but mostly as someone who genuinely loves talking about Process, and How We Do The Damn Thing, and great writers on a roll, I had a few questions about its contents (“WHAT’S IN THE BOX??!?”) and how it came together.

So I emailed its author, journeyman profile writer and UNBEATABLE RECON purveyor Jonah Weiner. 

Jonah’s a nice guy, so he wrote back.

1. Okay come on this thing really went on for six years?

[It] started in 2014 as an assignment from the New Yorker. I’d done a Justin Timberlake profile for Arts & Leisure and talked to Fincher for it, so I had a contact for him. My editor at the New Yorker asked me to see if he’d be up for a profile, and that’s when I got back in touch with Fincher and he invited me to his office while he was cutting Gone Girl, which is the first section in the story. I was there for an hour or two, and I probably said some version of what I tend to say at the outset when I’m profiling anyone who makes things, which is that I really, really, really want to see work happening.

Then this show he was going to make for HBO kind of took two years to fall apart and during that time Fincher stopped replying to me about the story, and then the line went totally silent, and by 2017 I made my peace with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. At the start of this year, though, my editor at the Times Magazine, who is a huge Fincher fan and who didn’t know any of this, asked me if I wanted to try to write about Fincher for Mank. I sent Fincher another note, and this time — maybe because of how personal the project is to him, and maybe because of our meeting 6 years ago — he was up for it.

2. “Fecund uncertainty,” “productive demystification,” “glottal-stopped.” About those three phrases: I loved them. They stick out. Two sent me to a dictionary. Your prose style in this piece is a lot of finesse, not a ton of flash/unnecessary poetry — critical in something like this, where you’ve got so much raw material (quotes, color) to let simply speak for itself. But those three phrases were distinct flourishes. Were those all you? Or the hand of an editor? Did you have to fight for them (or anything in this)? 

Whenever possible I want to write a story where I get so much lively and illuminating first-hand material that my job is to sort and frame it and, as much as possible, “let it speak for itself.” Two of those phrases you quote are me, but “glottal-stopped” is actually Fincher talking to an actor during ADR, and I liked the anatomical specificity of that phrasing — he’s as capable of scientific precision talking to an actor about what his throat is doing as he is talking to a colorist about the lumen levels on an actor’s collar. It’s funny that the other phrases jump out at you, though — both of those are doing something similar, where I’m just putting a positive modifier in front of a noun that could otherwise be seen as negative? But you don’t always know as a writer what readers are going to respond to, because your own phrases hit your inner ear differently than they’ll hit other people’s.

3. What did you, personally — as someone making creative work in their own right — take away from your time with FIncher? The profile, writ-large, seems to suggest the virtue of meticulousness and genius, no matter how punishing. Is this mode of the auteur (not just in film, but everywhere) a dying breed?

I might not use the word ‘virtue,’ though I am definitely in awe of someone as meticulous and as gifted as Fincher. Writing about someone like him, apart from my specific admiration for him as a filmmaker, what excites me is that, through him, I can write about something that’s typically treated as fundamentally ineffable and intuitive — the creative process — and show how it actually breaks down to a series of concrete decisions and choices and negotiations. Writing about Jerry Seinfeld was the same thing — we tend to regard laughter as this borderline-mystical thing, but here’s a guy who approaches laughs like an engineer and can tell you how deleting three words from an 11 word punchline will make it noticeably funnier. As far as whether someone like that is a dying breed I think they’re always rare and will continue to exist in rare cases!

4. I loved that Jake Gyllenhaal passing on speaking to you for the story made it into the piece. Same with Fincher dismissing your idea for a walk around his childhood neighborhood as “twee.” How important is it to get those in there, and what do we get from them?  

Well, Jake declining to talk to me about Zodiac is in there because if you’ve got someone telling one side of a story you’ve got to go to the other person and give them a chance to talk. With Fincher dismissing the walk as “too twee,” I love that because it might tell you almost as much about who he is as the theoretical childhood-neighborhood-scene would have done. He sees the potential for a hokey feature-writing cliché approaching and wants no part of it — it’s a quick, lively moment where you sort of glimpse his meta-level alertness to the ways a narrative can be built, and it’s also just funny because he’s (gently) roasting me.  

5. Fincher asked you what you thought of the movie. You told him you liked it. Would you have told Fincher if you didn’t? Don’t lie.

If I really hated it I would have had to think about how to connect that distaste to more broadly interesting ideas and questions about Fincher and the movie — and then put those questions to him in a way that wasn’t insulting or off-putting but, hopefully, conducive to us having some illuminating exchange. The same thing was true even though I really liked it, actually, in the sense that me telling him “I loved it” or “I hated it” wouldn’t be enough, because the reader isn’t reading for my thumbs up or my thumbs down.

6. There’s a decent bit about David Fincher’s father [who wrote Mank] in the profile, and there’s a Freudian weight class fight to be had. But you didn’t really go there. Fincher shut all the father talk down quickly. Could that thread have been pulled on more?

Maybe, if I were a different writer! Fincher is very explicit about how uninterested he is in “going under the hood” — I have quotes from him to that effect in the bio section, when he’s talking about the highly therapized “human potential”-era Bay Area he grew up in — and I actually have pretty low interest in psychologizing myself, personally and as a profile-writer, in the sense that I might bounce some “creative-writing character study” type theories off somebody and see what they think, but I’m typically not “building a case," at least not in any tidy way where there’s a mystery and “his dad” comes in at the end and substantially “solves” it — I talked about this with Steven Soderbergh in the context of Fincher and Citizen Kane, actually, where Rosebud very famously kind of means everything and nothing, and Soderbergh and I agreed that it would be horrible on several levels to give this piece its own Rosebud ; )

7. Was there anything you had to leave on the floor, any darlings that absolutely killed you to kill?

I sat in on Zoom sessions between Fincher and Amanda Seyfried, Charles Dance and Tom Burke that unfortunately I didn't have room to include, but it was great to see him do take after take after take with actors and see what that actually looks like in practice -- it really did strike me as a process of discovery rather than a process of attrition. (Maybe sometimes it's a process of discovery *through* attrition.)

8. Last one, who was your editor on this thing? They did great. Also, please give us a fun fact and/or shameless gossip about them.

Sheila Glaser has edited me at the Magazine since my first piece there in 2011, and she is the greatest. A wild bit of Sheila trivia is that if you've read Simulacra & Simulation then you've read her work because she's the one who translated it into English.

[Normally this is where I’d write that I edited this for clarity but honestly? Wasn’t all that edited! Like Eric Ripert, the goods were so good, we could serve this shit raw! Also FOSTERTALK house style is just ‘ital everything’ so sorry if that was confusing but whatever.]

ALSO:

• Here’s that Jerry Seinfeld profile Jonah referenced. And here’s Jonah’s profile of Justin Timberlake that started it all. Another banger: His Drake profile: “High Times at the YOLO Estate.” LOL. Goddamn. What a title.

• Oh, and very important, in case you missed it: Jonah’s substack, Blackbird Spyplane, is one of the few I pay for, and one of the few I would suggest anyone do the same. Jonah has interviewed — for his motherfucking Substack! — Lorde, Andre 3000, Nathan Fielder, Rashida Jones, and (yes) Jerry Seinfeld. But you’re not even there for the celebrity interviews, is the thing. You’re there for the UNBEATABLE RECON. Vaya con Spyplane.

• Follow Jonah on The Twitter.

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Hey -

So! You, Person Who’s Been Here Before: Sorry I’ve been away! This all got very big and it happened very quickly and without getting too much into this right now let’s just say it freaked me the fuck out so in order to do my best to curve the Observation Effect trap of playing to the audience and becoming an organ grinding Substack monkey who compromises the “artistic integrity” of what *gestures widely* all this is, I, uh, took a breather. [Also, if you honestly expected FOSTERTALK to arrive at any kind of regular cadence, you’re out of your goddamn mind or just a piss-poor context reader. Look, this thing’s gonna show up when it wants to. It’s like: You can’t just go to Iceland expecting to see the Northern Lights. They gotta come to you. Just let FOSTERTALK do its things, arrive in your astral periphery. Nirodha, you know? You get it.]

And while I know you’ve already heard this, but for the new people here: Thank you for coming by! Hello. In those last 178 words you’ve obviously picked up on this, but for those in the very back: I’ve truly got no idea what the hell I’m doing, this is all very new and “in beta” or whatever. Thank you for your patience while the FOSTERTALK editorial team gets our shit together. In the mean time, you might want to catch up on the last one if you really wanna know what’s happening here.

Good news, however: You just read the very first interview of FOSTERTALK. You didn’t pay a thing. I couldn’t be more psyched, it couldn’t be more fitting, and I hope you enjoyed it. All we want is your feedback. More PRESS CLIPS soon. More Other Stuff soon. In the mean time: Take it easy on yourself.

And of course: Thanks for your continued support of FOSTERTALK. Stay warm. As ever, - F.