Ben Affleck and Gary Oldman open up on working with filmmaker David Fincher

Ben Affleck, Delroy Lindo, Gary Oldman, John David Washington, Sacha Baron Cohen and Steven Yeun were recently a part of The Hollywood Reporter’s Actors Roundtable. Through the 81 minutes long virtual conversation, Affleck and Oldman opened up on their experiences of working with director David Fincher. Cohen, on the other hand, talked about filming scenes with Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence. Read along and find out what they had to share.

Ben Affleck and Gary Oldman on working with David Fincher

Gary Oldman, who recently got nominated for an Academy Award for playing Herman J. Mankiewicz in the David Fincher's Mank. The director is known for making his actors perform a scene as many as a hundred times and has also taken over a week just to wrap up one particular scene.

However, Gary Oldman conveyed that the countless takes are a part of the job and he is ready to do those. He said, “All directors have different ways of working. If I’m committed to a project, I want to serve the character, the story and the director. And if they want to do 10 takes or they want to do 60, I'm on the clock, from this time to this time. And I'm there to serve in that sense”. The actor doesn’t seem to be having a problem with Fincher’s need for perfection, as he said, “David, first of all, is watching everything. He’s sort of like a conductor of an orchestra. Maybe you’re in five or six takes, and he’s not really focusing on you yet”.

He expressed how he has also worked with bigger productions who only gave him one or two takes, before moving on to another scene, but Fincher chooses to do them till he has the best results. Gary said, “I think he just wants you to get to a point where he’s worn you out, and then you find that second wind like a runner — you get that stitch, and you’ve got to go through the pain barrier … and come away feeling that you’ve really examined the scene. So much of the time you turn to another cast member and go, 'Did we get that? I don’t think we got the scene’”.

Up next is Ben Affleck, who shared his experience of working with David Fincher on the 2014 project Gone Girl. He said, “I can imagine it being very frustrating if you were working with somebody who you thought had no idea what they wanted”. Further adding, “Like Gary said, I’d rather be shooting the scene than sitting in my trailer. I don’t want to sit there and watch people light or move equipment. He does very few setups. And it really is a pleasure to get to keep playing the scene. ... You do it so much that you actually forget that you’re ever going to move on”. 

Sacha Baron Cohen on shooting with Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence

Further on Sacha Baron Cohen shared his experience on working with Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence and said, “There’s one time to get it right with Rudy Giuliani or Mike Pence”. He shared that Borat’s appearance at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference might have been for a hot minute but took almost 11 hours of prep. He shared, “Getting up at one in the morning, driving to a hotel, having a prosthetics team turn me into Donald Trump, then smuggling into CPAC and getting past Secret Service, ending up hiding in the bathroom for four hours. Eventually, Mike Pence comes on, and you’ve got one go, you do your speech, you improvise a bit, and then you’re surrounded by Secret Service and you have to avoid being thrown in jail.”

Promo Image Source: Ben Affleck, Gary Oldman and Sacha Baron Cohen's Instagram