‘Mank’ Star Ferdinand Kingsley on David Fincher, Old Hollywood, and Shakespeare
Credit: Netflix
“Your imagination is a muscle and your brain has all sorts of expansion capacity.”
MANK, the latest film from acclaimed director David Fincher drops today on Netflix, and we sat down with star Ferdinand Kingsley to discuss. The film follows the story of Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) in the Golden Age of Hollywood as he pens the screenplay for Orson Welles’ highly-acclaimed film, CITIZEN KANE, all while maneuvering through his alcoholism and conflicting ideas with people around him.
Kingsley plays Irving Thalberg, one of the co-founders of MGM Studios at the staggering age of just twenty-six. Thalberg tragically passed away from a congenial heart disease ten years later, but during his career he helped produce upwards of four hundred films. He was known for being a very hands-on producer, and would often help guide the types of lenses, cameras, and lighting to be used during the shoots. He also pioneered several modern production techniques, such as test screenings, story meetings during the pre-production phase, and picture re-shoots.
When asked how he selected which aspects of his life to focus on when preparing for the film, Kingsley said, “The bit of the iceberg under the sea is all the work that you that you do in terms of finding out who he is, you know? What he wants, what he ate for breakfast, you know, like, that's all the bit you do on your own time. And that's all in there, and then you got to trust that it's in there, trust yourself and relax. And for me, I just wanted to work out the things that were to boil it down to really important things for him which were that he had unshakable faith in his beliefs, and that no one's going to knock him off that, and crucially for me, which is only really alluded to, but the thought that any week could be his last--that was what I wanted to take into it all the time. And then my relationship with Mank. David [Fincher] and I were trying to find a line to think about—[we] just kept kept thinking, like, why does he bother with Mank? Why do I bother with you? And there’s all sorts of answers, and one of them is--if you can if you can get half an hour's work out of him before he's drunk by 11am, then that half hour might be genius.”
Kingsley had his formal training in the theatre and has spent a lot of time studying and performing the works of William Shakespeare. Plays such as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, or Henry V are considered by many to be valuable works that can strengthen the abilities of the actor. To perform Shakespeare, an actor must develop a rich understanding of the material and use that knowledge as a resource. How, then, does this type of training translate to working on a Fincher set?
Credit: Netflix
Credit: Netflix
“Whatever you do, whatever other work you do, can only be improved by getting your brain around text like Shakespeare,” Kingsley says. “Getting your head around that complexity of thought, and length of thought, and length of text makes you more able to tackle everything . . . the stamina you get from working on text like that is invaluable for a set like Fincher’s because so much of working with him is about minuscule changes, minuscule adjustments over and over and over again.” Fincher, who is famous for doing dozens of takes, had one scene in MANK that he shot approximately seventy-five times, accordingly to Kingsley. He continues, “I think the discipline you get from working with those great texts is perfect for a job like working with Fincher because you're ready to pace yourself and to sort of look a few acts ahead in the day, rather than just do your best and turn your brain off.”