Trevor Hogg scopes out the visual effects work in David Fincher’s The Killer

Images courtesy of Netflix

Above and below: The Parisian apartment window shots were captured onstage in New Orleans and inserted into a digital recreation of the actual building by Artemple-Hollywood

K eeping as much of the filmmaking process in-house as possible was the philosophy adopted by David Fincher and is the reason why visual effects, editorial and digital intermediate have been integrated into an internal pipeline that allows for a seamless flow of digital files between departments.

“We do our DI and some visual effects compositing in-house,” explains Peter Mavromates, post producer. “If the imagery doesn’t look quite right to our visual effects editor Casey Curtiss, he’ll go and consult our colourist and they’ll move the files over into the Baselight and take a look at that. There’s a lot of hands-on all the way around.”

Savage VFX was responsible for doing the gunshot enhancements

Michael Fassbender portrays an assassin simply known as the Killer in the latest feature film collaboration between director David Fincher and Netflix

The stage shoot combined with an exterior matte painting

900 visual effects shots were created for The Killer by Ollin VFX, Savage VFX, Ar temple-Hollywood and Wylie Co. over what was initially meant to be a period of eight months. “The reason why I’m being vague there is we were delivering for December 2022/ Januar y 2023, but then Netflix decided to release The Killer in November of 2023, and David is someone who you have to peel the project out of his hands because he wants to keep improving it,” explains Mavromates. “We ended up working for many more months because he had the time. The real satisfaction for all of us who work with him repeatedly is that when he works on stuff, it gets better. It just does.”