A little more about Mank (sorry). A number of critics and cinephiles seem to be taking this movie as a virtual adaptation of Pauline Kael's controversial and partially discredited essay Raising Kane and treating Fincher as if he were championing her perspective. So I want... >

...to share a little detail from the transcript of my Q&A with him. Fincher was actually not all that happy with his father's first draft in 1991. He called it "limited in scope...a WGA screed [about] a great writer obliterated from memory by this showboating megalomaniac." >

Fincher was about to direct his first movie. And here, in his own words, was his thinking at the time:

And here's a little more from Fincher about how their spirited discussions, and the script, evolved after that.

I shared this because I think it's odd that the movie is being talked about reductively by some as an attack on Welles, a perspective that doesn't really represent its director's thinking. Okay, done now.