Why Brad Pitt’s shadow hangs over The Killer
Existential questions and clothing details link David Fincher’s thriller to Bullet Train.
A hitman begins to question the merits of his mission… This is the argument of dozens of films in the history of cinema. But if we add that the hitman in question wears a bob, so the number of films that this pitch evokes is reduced drastically. There are still two in recent memory: Bullet Train And The Killer.
The first is an action blockbuster directed by David Leitch, released in summer 2022, in which Brad Pitt plays a professional assassin named Ladybug, who thinks he is the victim of bad karma and intends to renounce violence – he refuses to take a gun with him on the high-speed train where his new mission takes place. The second is a Netflix thriller by David Fincher, in which Michael Fassbender plays a high-flying gunslinger who turns on his employers and also distances himself from violence – not without killing a bunch of people in the process .
Stylistically, the two films are the polar opposites of each other (a very colorful tarantinade on one side, an icy and precise thriller on the other) but they come together thematically via their main characters, who both pose questions about their profession and their place in the world, questions that they express in a rather comical mixture of philosophical ruminations, psychoanalytic introspection and maxims seeming to come from a personal development manual. Surprisingly, these two men whose true identity we do not know, Ladybug and the Killer, also share a taste for wearing a bucket hat.
“You’re encroaching on our land!”said David Fincher to his friend Brad Pitt when the actor explained to him what headgear he planned to wear in Bullet Train (as told by the filmmaker in an interview with New York Times). We know that the two men, who have shot three films together, are very close, and we imagine that they regularly update each other on the projects they are working on. Fincher was therefore hallucinated when he realized that Pitt was developing a look for Ladybug similar to that of his Killer – the director of Seven undoubtedly intended to have the exclusivity of this look “dorky” (cheesy), designed to go against the cliché of the well-dressed international assassin. The idea was to impose a new type of hitman, undermined like “a German tourista sort of invisible and all-purpose man who “would have bought clothes between getting off the plane and the car rental agency”.
The sartorial and “existential” parallels between the two characters are all the more remarkable than in the original script of Bullet Trainas David Leitch explained to First Last year, Coccinelle was not characterized like this at all:
“Originally, I imagined the character of Ladybug as a fairly standard killer. What interested me was to take the “physicality” from Brad Pitt towards a form of action inherited from Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan. But he came up with a lot of proposals, starting with this idea of a character who believes himself to be cursed, unlucky, who is in therapy and who only speaks with personal development formulas. He also imagined the look of the character: the bucket hat, the glasses… He wanted Coccinelle to really be an outsider, to wear this somewhat low-end outfit. It was brilliant, because it offered the possibility of a narrative arc for his character, not just emotionally but also physically.”
It was therefore Pitt who, starting from a blank sheet of paper, truly invented the personality and look of Coccinelle. And thus found himself on Fincher’s playground. Chance ? Coincidence? Twist of fate? Conspiracy fashion ? Let’s not forget that Brad Pitt, via his production company Plan B, was associated in 2008 with the development of The Killer – at the time, there was talk that Fincher would direct the adaptation of Matz and Jacamon’s comic book for Paramount. With a certain Brad Pitt in the lead…”But Brad found it too nihilistic.”explained Fincher to Rolling Stone. “Too nihilistic”, This is also the kind of objection that Coccinelle, an idealistic and anything but cynical character, could make.
So what ? Did Brad Pitt use The Killer to fuel his ideas on Bullet Train ? Did he design Ladybug as a way to communicate with the character who obsessed his friend Fincher at the same time? Or just to play a good joke on his friend by grilling him for being polite (the production of Bullet Train started a year before that of The Killer) ? Fincher’s Killer evokes many killers in cinema history (the Samurai of Melville, The gunslinger by Michael Winner…) but we can also see in him and Coccinelle a sort of yin and yang, two mirrored characters, inverted. What makes sense coming from people who made Fight Club together, a double film and mirrored characters, where films infiltrate other films via subliminal and pirated images. It makes even more sense when we remember that David Leitch, the director of Bullet Trainwas Brad Pitt’s stunt double on Fight Club… A theoretical dizziness is about to seize us. Let’s stop there before we start working on the hat. Or bob, in this case.
