Michael Fassbender Never Blinked While on Camera in David Fincher's THE KILLER

One of my most anticipated upcoming films is David Fincher’s assassin thriller The Killer. As you know, Fincher is a very meticulous and detail-oriented director, and it turns out the film’s star, Michael Fassbender, took things to another level with his performance because apparently he never blinked while he was performing in front of the camera.

This interesting little detail to look out for while watching the film comes from the film’s cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt during a recent interview with Empire Magazine. Messerschmidt previously worked with Fincher on projects such as Mindhunter and Mank.

Messerschmidt called Fassbender “the perfect actor for David,” and mentioned “how the focus puller highlighted something remarkable: the actor didn’t blink on camera for the entire shoot.”

Fincher didn’t want the actor to blink, and the director added, “Michael’s eyes betray a lot. He can hold a lot of conflicting things in his mind and his eyes allow you access to it.”

When talking about working with Fincher on the film, Messerschmidt said: “I believe that you have to be impossible to deal with to be any good at this — you have to be completely uncompromising, to the absolute limit, or you’ll never make anything good, and that’s scary. I see these masters of their craft, fighting for every inch.”

Fincher then talked about what it was like working with Fassbender, saying: “He’s like Daniel Craig in that way, saying, ‘I can do it better.’ Tell him to stop one third of an inch shorter and he can fine-tune that technical stuff, while on top of that, he’s got really good ideas about behavior… He has this gift as an actor, but clamped on top of it is this incredible discipline about how he subdivides his next move.”

As for why Fincher wanted to make this movie, he said: “I thought the character’s nihilism was interesting because it was tied to his self-loathing. Then I started thinking about this inner monologue. He has this whole thing he tells himself, which is a way of demeaning his prey so he can feel better about ostensibly being a serial killer for hire. I thought that could be interesting to navigate.”

The story for the movie is an adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s graphic novel series, and the synopsis reads: “After a fateful near miss, an assassin battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal.”

In the story: “A man solitary and cold, methodical and unencumbered by scruples or regrets, the killer waits in the shadows, watching for his next target. And yet the longer he waits, the more he thinks he's losing his mind, if not his cool. A brutal, bloody and stylish noir story of a professional assassin lost in a world without a moral compass, this is a case study of a man alone, armed to the teeth and slowly losing his mind.”

Based on the French graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and adapted by Fincher’s “Fight Club” screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, “The Killer” stars Fassbender as an assassin who finds himself unraveling after a job gone wrong. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Arliss Howard and Sophie Charlotte. The film, backed by Netflix, world premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Fincher told Empire that he was attracted to the film due to the character’s personality, which is cold and methodical.

Netflix will release The Killer in select theaters on October 27th. The film will begin streaming on November 10th.