The Killer is David Fincher’s latest action/thriller movie based on the French graphic novel series of the same name. Starring Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton, the film follows an assassin who gets embroiled in an international manhunt after a hit goes wrong.

Colorist Eric Weidt

The movie, which made its premiere at the 80th annual Venice Film Festival and is available on Netflix starting November 10, featured another collaboration between cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, ASC; director David Fincher; and colorist Eric Weidt. Weidt has been working with Fincher since 2014, and the trio previously joined forces on Mank and the Mindhunter series.

A US and French citizen, freelance colorist Weidt has spent the past 15 years in Paris working with fashion photographers and filmmakers for the likes of Vogue and Pop Magazine, among others.

“I began with Fincher doing beauty work in Nuke in 2014,” Weidt says. “I showed him a reel of color work I’d done while working in fashion in Paris, and I think he figured that squared perfectly with the kind of precision he wanted to get into by grading his own projects in-house.”

LUTs
As with all his collaborations with Fincher, Weidt was involved right from preproduction, working closely with Messerschmidt on test footage and creating LUTs.

“We created the show LUTs together for shooting the different locations, which we drove home in the grade,” Weidt explains. “I started working with test footage early on, especially onstage, to process green/bluescreen material. I prepared LED wall and LED direct projection material that is used simultaneously.”

The movie is set across multiple locations, including Paris, the Dominican Republic and Chicago, which all required distinct looks.

“There’s Paris at night, with tungsten street lighting; there’s the Dominican Republic, with a misty-humid-warm look going on; and there’s this winter-white Chicago material,” explains Weidt. “And Erik wanted to try using a halation filter (Scatter) on a lot of the subtropical location material and on some snow-mist scenes. It worked wonderfully.”

The filmmakers chose the Red V-Raptor [8K W and XL] camera along with the Komodo.

The Look
Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker also reteamed with Fincher on The Killer script, which was adapted from the graphic novel by Alexis Matz Nolent. “I think Fincher is a big comic book fan,” Weidt says. “Especially in the art of framing the drawn cells to impart the beats of a story. Working in film, I think he brings that to movement as well – he’s seeking a kind of effortless visual rhythm that makes you forget that it is highly constructed.”

The look of the movie was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai. “Le Samourai is similar to The Killer,” explains Weidt. “Especially the mood and ‘grey precision,’ which is possibly what Fincher was inspired by. But nowadays we have many more tools, including HDR and cameras that practically have night vision. So, dynamically, we’re able to have something that is super-rich and subtle. David likes to push and pull colors, but he always strikes an unconscious balance. The audience feels like the story is methodical and deliberate — only going out of control at precise moments.”

Weidt recalls how they started with a “yellow-blue split in Paris, a saturated warm-chocolate shadows look in the Dominican Republic and an ice-cold northern US look,” which evolved according to the needs of each scene.

“There was an extended fight scene where black was the modus operandi,” he says. “We wanted to push for detail, all the while knowing that more darkness would make it scarier. So we needed to strike a perfect balance.”

In terms of his toolbox, Weidt has been grading on FilmLight Baselight for 7 years. “On the grading of The Killer, multipaste got used a lot because I took whole scenes and ordered them according to camera angle so that I could balance them with impunity. I also used EXR alpha channels a ton. I asked for multiple passes of some of the CG work in Paris too, so that I could make sure every element was consistent.”

Weidt says the best thing about Baselight is its “organizational prowess” and he is looking forward to using the tools in the forthcoming Baselight 6.0 release. “You can wrangle shots and scenes in no time, group grade, multi-paste, 2-3-4-6-9 up views,” he explains. “Although I did not use it on The Killer, my very favorite thing about Baselight is the new version, 6.0. You’ve got Chromogen, X Grade and myriad new features.”

Dolby Vision
The master grade for The Killer is done in PQ P3 D65 @ 1000 nits, and Weidt derived both the Rec. 709 SDR and the DCI-P3 theatrical trim passes using Dolby Vision per-shot analysis.

“This was the first time I’d done a theatrical with the Dolby Vision 48-nit transform, which came out a year or two ago and is now incorporated into Baselight,” Weidt comments. “It worked great and got me 90% of the way there. The rest is dosing each scene with the Dolby Trim and then fine-tuning per shot, if and when it’s needed.

“I did almost all of the grade on a CLED wall that simulated the 1×1000 contrast ratio I’d be getting on a projector. Once projected on Xenon bulb, I made a slight contrast increase, and we were done.”

Weidt spent a year on the grade for this project, and one of the most challenging parts was creating a realistic feel from composited material. “We used defocus a lot to drive home the right amount of depth, which can improve with subtle changes — sometimes using the alphas provided by the VFX vendors, sometimes arbitrarily.”

Weidt says he is proud of the project and his work with Fincher. “He’s told me post production is his favorite part of filmmaking. He may have been joking, but I take it seriously. I think some scenes in The Killer really sing, colorwise, and I have to say, when working with Fincher and Erik Messerschmidt, that’s not hard to achieve.”