How do we dramatize for the audience this dawning awareness of somebody who is self-immolating?
That seemed like a ripe area of the garden to plant in."
“The pages are pre the draft,” the director says.
Credit: Netflix
you could see the story was very different.
It was a more complicated thing."
“Ninety percent of night scenes in that era were shot day-for-night,” he says.
Netflix
“We embraced that, reimagining the processes of the day with newer technologies.”
That included using LED screens in place of the once popular technique of rear projection.
“We have reference photos of San Simeon,” he notes.
Netflix
They shot at the Huntington Gardens, another California landmark, as well as a private home in Pasadena.
Aptly, it’s a Hollywood-ized version of San Simeon more than an exact replica.
“People come here and eat crudites and talk world finances and politics and look at the zebra.”
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“There’s matte paintings all over the place.
We were changing everything constantly.
If it would allow us to at least insinuate San Simeon, we did it.”
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“I just said, ‘Look, you guys are going to meander.
We’re going to give you a route to walk.
Your gin bottle is never far away,'” he recounts.
“Marion was, sweet, funny and sexy,” Fincher adds.
Mean tweets, ’40s-style
Marion recites a long passage from Sinclair’s invective against her and Hearst.
“She’s meant to have committed this to memory,” Fincher says.
“I said to her, ‘It’s not Shakespeare.
Squint as hard as you want; you could be trying to remember this word.’
[Memorizing it] says you found [it] particularly hurtful.
She was not morbidly self-involved.”
“For anything to truly be beautiful, there has to be a little bit of sadness underneath it.
“The scene exists as some of the most blatant and painful backfilling of what’s really going on.
“But data is not a reason for a scene.
That is the worst reason for a scene.
So what we wanted to do was support this idea of his platonic affairs.
But it’s not that they’re falling in love; they’re falling in friendship.”
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