“For the love of Cinema.” These are the words you can see on Netflix’s newest original creation, Voir, out December 6th on the streaming platform. Produced by David Fincher (Seven, Gone Girl, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and David Prior (The Empty Man), Voir is a collection of 6 visual essays that celebrate movies. Told by 6 writers, film critics, essayists, each episode focuses on our relationship to movies and on our love for the art of filmmaking. I had the opportunity to talk with writer and actor Drew McWeeny, who wrote the third episode of Voir, ‘But I don’t like him‘, which focuses on unlikeable characters in movies. Drew McWeeny takes as an example his favorite movie, Lawrence of Arabia directed by David Lean and released in 1962.
You can watch the full conversation down below:
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Drew McWeeny explained that he almost missed out on David Fincher’s emails and calls after he thought someone was pranking him and was using a very weird, full of movie references email address (and yes, I really need to know what were these references now…):
“He emailed me in the middle of the night. I didn’t know him, we hadn’t spoken before (…) and the email just said “Hi, this is David Fincher. Call me.”
He ignored the email. David Fincher emailed him again the next day, but Drew didn’t want to believe it.:
“And it’s the third day when he actually called me and said ‘Hi, this is David Fincher, what’s your problem?!’ And I went ‘Oh my god! Hi, how are you?”
Drew McWeeney declared that creating Voir started with David Fincher having “the vaguest notion that he wanted to celebrate movies”.
But when Drew McWeeney decided to make his episode of Voir centered on unlikeable characters, it was because he felt that a conversation needed to be had:
“I think ‘likeability’ has become this weird, weird buzzword, we hang a lot of other issues about movies on it. When people don’t like a movie, they immediately go to ‘I didn’t like the character’. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And all I wanted to do is reframe that conversation”. (…) Art is not about endorsement.”
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