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Sometimes, when I’m alone, I stare at the screen and shout curses at the screenwriting gods, “What gives? Why only take from me in 2023? Where are the returns?” They responded to me saying, “Sorry, but here I have been a little preoccupied. Out here, I had an entire writer’s strike, followed by an actor’s strike and then, everything went paid-walled for me due to COVID. So, I have not exactly been at my peak. But I understand how frustrated you are. So here, as a token of my appreciation, I will give you The Killer, my giant apology.”
Now for me, this creates a lot of stress. Fincher developed a detachment with my anxiety when I watched that movie he made a few years ago. Kind of him gave me some serious therapy vibes, and I know for a fact that Mank will used to bore future therapists.
So in that case, what if David Fincher stopped caring about making the audience happy altogether? Or what if he sat down one day, put his phone away and decided, “You know what? Let me read 1078 of the reviews praising my movies.” Then, right after turn on one of his flicks, a narrative that happens to wander about a house?
This project had and still has next to no promotion which leaves me utterly utterly dumbfounded. I thought this film had little to no marketing for the re-teaming of Finccher and Walker, but somehow seems to have included ads for every inch of Marvel’s underwhelming achievements. I suppose I will just blame Netflix for that. Obvioulsy they still have no idea what a marketing campaign really is.
That is actually contrary to what I was thinking, along with the many other inabilities Displaying with no expectations made the movie a whole lot better. In reality, I believed it was about a serial killer simply based on the name. If David Fincher is directing and Andrew Walker is writing a movie called The Killer, surely it’s about a serial killer, right? Wrong. Instead, it is about a hitman and I would go out on a limb and say it is the best hitman film I have seen in about a decade.
The film opens with the main character, “The Killer,” sitting in a Paris apartment overlooking a building occupied by a wealthy businessman. Over the next 20 minutes, we witness The Killer’s elaborate preparations before each kill. They involve simple but key steps; be patient, wait for the right moment, and listen to music, and oh, strike when the moment arrives.
But there’s one thing The Killer fails to do. He mistakenly shoots the wrong person. Because this had never happened to him before, he was petrified of what to do next. One thing he did know was that whatever the solution was, it was better to figure it out while running. And that’s exactly what he does.
Next stop: Brazil. The Killer is on his way to his wife’s house, only to find out that she has been attacked. Luckily, she survived and is currently in the hospital. But The Killer knows the truth; they came looking for him and made an attempt to hurt his family in order to send him a clear message. From his wife, The Killer finds out whatever little information she has about the people who attacked them, and he begins to unleash fury in the form of brutal, vicious, and personal murders.
His journey takes him all over the world. First, he must confront the man who put out the hit, his boss. After that, he has to locate the cab driver that took his wife’s assailants to his home. Then, he must track down the two criminals as well – the steroid rage beast and the woman with the hair like ‘a q-tip’. Each of these sequences is a movie in itself. Every one of them supercharged with a different kinds of intensity. Because the killer is filled with rage and sorrow and wants to eliminate anyone who threatens to harm his wife again.
Now, what about that frame that I mentioned? A framing device is one way in which one chooses to tell the story. One of the most popular framing techniques is real-time. It simply means you put your setting in the present. Since movies are chronologically two hours, you have created a frame marker by which your story will take place in two hours time.
Today’s framing device is a little more sophisticated. I call it the vignette framing device. This is a device that Quentin Tarantino made popular. Instead of making a single long movie, you make a series of short ones that tell one story. These shorts can be as long or as short as you want them to be. The reason it works so well is that it divides your story into more digestible pieces. Rather than a long, two hour movie, you start out with six, twenty minute movies, like this one. And then within each of those twenty minute vignettes, you tell a more comprehensive story that has starters, middles and ends.
How this works with Andrew Kevin Walker is that he isolates each vignette to a different city. So then, with each city, there is a new story. It is just like getting six movies for one.
I found it interesting how Walker’s approach within these vignettes was unique. Each minute segment follows a specific guideline. It begins with a goal, which is usually an assassination. After that, he builds towards the moment. This is a crucial aspect of elevating any narrative that you wish to convey. You want to put the goal in place first and then build towards it. The build up part is the most effective when suspense is employed.
This is something Walker does in the first sequence itself. The hitman is sitting in an apartment across from his target’s location. So, we know what the goal for our hitman is. But imagine if he just shot his target. A whole second later and boom! You have wasted all of the suspense. When you look at the frame and imagine the moment being drawn out, and if you’re like Walker, and can expertly utilize suspense, you can make that time 15, even 20 minutes.
As you narrow the goal to the vignette itself, you can create suspense within the sequence itself. Now consider a heist. Let’s say that the same character that we are following is trying to rob a bank. If the robbing of the bank takes place in the last third, then there is a tremendous amount of expectation that the reader is being asked to invest in, without giving them much in turn. You can only go so long before a reader becomes frustrared with never getting a reward, and as, I’ve said, if you are using the vignette framing device, that problem vanishes, because you are able to provide that reward much sooner.
Finally, let’s note that when you are working with the vignette system, you need to have changed them up a little. If all vignettes consist of a main character sitting in one building and waiting to shoot his target, sitting in a building at the opposite site of the street, we are all going to get bored. Simply set new goals and set up new situations that get these stories told.
(Spoilers follow) In one segment, The Killer tracks down the cab driver who picked up the attackers. The Killer gets inside the cab and, after they start driving, reveals himself as the passenger. Now you have this segment where he talks to the driver and tries to get some information from him.
Later, there is a segment where one of the passengers who attacked his wife has been located. She is currently having dinner, and he simply walks in and sits right across from her. This whole segment is the buildup to him going through with the act of killing her. But unlike the other scenes, this one’s different because the setting is public, and he is with someone who knows full well that he intends to kill her.
David Fincher signing onto your script must be one of the best feelings a screenwriter can have and that’s one of the realizations this movie gave me. His wonderful direction improves the quality of any script and transforms it a hundred times over. While observing the film, I listened closely to certain parts of the dialogue and thought how powerful a line would feel if it was spoke in some other movie by another mediocre director. In a David Fincher project, the line feels brilliant just because he instantaneously captures you and every single moment feels real, regardless of what’s happening.
Take this for a second, one of the hardest things to accomplish as a screenplay writer is writing a fight scene that works well on paper. Every fight sequence plays out the same. I imagine the fight scene created for this particular script was no different. But the way Fincher directed it was amazing. It reminded me of a much darker and more artsy rendition of that Terminator fight with the T-1000 during their first battle at the mall. It had that same gravitas. Every throw seemed to move the frame. Every punch that was thrown felt like there was a bomb going off. And my TV doesn’t even have good sound! This is some of the best choreography and cinematography I have ever witnessed, and I go so far to say this fight scene beats that of any fight in any of the four John Wick films. It simply struck me harder than any of the scenes in John Wick did. It felt that real.
Let us return to the subject of screenwriting. One thing that Walker did particularly well here was make you wonder how every vignette would end. Remember that if you pet up to a moment for a very long time, and that moment goes down in exactly the way we are expecting, we will be dissatisfied. And what Walker does is clever. In that opening sequence, after 20 minutes of our killer painstakingly detailing his perfected system of executing a kill, he actually misses.
Why is this so crucial? Not only is it a surprise that creates dramatic impact in the moment, but it now means that in every vignette going forward we’re going to be unsure what will happen. In his head, it is clear that he has a job to do, but because the writer has established that he can fail, we know that’s a possibility too. And when you have that dichotomy trapped in the reader’s head, your suspense is fantastic because we truly don’t know what is going to happen at the end of the sequence.
I spent my entire weekend thinking about my article for Thursday. Later, I realized that one of the reasons screenwriting dropped off is that writers are not spending as much time on their scripts as they did before.
Think back; every movie you watched had to pass through the hands of many individuals with some level of skepticism. At every stage of the script, there was an immense amount of doubt. The script was then put through a rigorous patented procedure of fixing the problems and came back much stronger. Only once the script addressed the majority of these concerns, was it allowed to get the thumbs up and get made.
Now, the scrips are so much in demand that all these need for a product makes everything go beyond boundaries. It seems as though streamers are eager for anything even remotely valuable. Because of this, scripts aren’t being put under scrutiny like they should be. This is precisely why we keep getting these third-draft movies. And trust me when I say, they feel like third drafts.
After much thought, it certainly comes across as a whole new screenplay is presented before us this time around. It is clear enough to suggest to us that someone invested quite a lot of effort for it. There feels a certain depth and life to the screenplay which arrives after a good amount of pushback has been made, only for it to come forward better. I can only imagine how much this could change things.
What piques my interest is how The Vignette Approach bares the most similitude to The Sequence Approach. The Sequence Approach differs in the divisions that you make. Instead of one big story, you tell eight different mini-stories. The Varnette Approach, on the other hand, focuses less on interweaving all of the different storylines. It’s consequently simpler to do, because with the Sequence Approach there is the additional trick of making it not resemble a Sequence Approach. You don’t have to disguise the fact that your script is a collection of pieces known as vignettes, meaning the focus can be purely on making each piece good instead of holding it all together in a coherent way.
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