'Mank' Trailer: David Fincher Returns and Heads to 1930s Hollywood

David Fincher is back with his first feature film since 2014’s Gone Girl, and that’s cause for celebration. Mank is a 1930s Hollywood story about Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane – although director Orson Welles later tried to take most of the credit, and various different accounts of what really happened have muddied the waters a bit. Gary Oldman plays Mankiewicz, leading a cast that includes Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Tom Burke, and more. Watch the Mank trailer below.

Mank Trailer

While David Fincher has kept busy with projects like Mindhunter, there’s something extra exhilarating about him returning to feature films for the first time in six years. And Mank is bound to be a very personal project for Fincher since his father Jack Fincher penned the screenplay. In Mank, “1930s Hollywood is re-evaluated through the eyes of scathing social critic and alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he races to finish the screenplay of Citizen Kane for Orson Welles.”

Gary Oldman stars as Mankiewicz, with Tom Burkeplaying Orson Welles, Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, Lily Collins as Rita Alexander, Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayer, Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, Tom Pelphrey as Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Tuppence Middleton as Sara Mankiewicz, Joseph Cross as Charles Lederer, Craig Robert Young as Charlie Chaplin, Sebastian Faure as Clark Gable, Michelle Twarowska as Joan Crawford, Scarlet Cummings as Bette Davis, Natalie Denise Sperl as Greta Garbo, Trevor Wooldridge as Darryl F. Zanuck, Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg, and Toby Leonard Moore as David O. Selznick.

Fincher has been hoping to make this movie since at least 1997, with The Fincher Analyst reporting that at the time, Fincher wanted his Seven actor Kevin Spacey as Mankiewicz and Panic Room‘s Jodie Foster as Marion Davies. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But Fincher never gave up on the idea, and now he’s finally made it. In a 2009 interview, Fincher said the budget is what derailed the project back in the ’90s:

“It was too expensive. Because if you’re going to make a Hollywood insider movie—it’s nothing to do with Hollywood really, it’s Hollywood in the late thirties, early forties—you’ve got to make it really cheaply. We had a chance to make the movie for, like, $13 million, back in 1998 and, um, [guiltily] I wanted to make it in black and white. [Laughs] And that fucked up all those home video and video sellthrough and cable deals. I haven’t read it in a while. I probably should.”

Thankfully, Netflix has been willing to throw money at acclaimed directors to make long-gestating movies happen. They did with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and now they’ve done it with Fincher and Mank.

Mank will open in select theaters in November before arriving on Netflix on December 4.

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