Gary Oldman On Playing ‘Mank’, Working With David Fincher, And Finally Answering The Controversy Of Who Really Wrote ‘Citizen Kane’ - Deadline

The result however is the same, and that is wide acclaim and instant Oscar buzz for his portrayal in David Fincher’s Mank, about the Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz who contractually wasn’t even supposed to receive credit for the job that Orson Welles, then the 25-year-old wunderkind director-star, brought him aboard to do.

As famed critic Pauline Kael definitely came down for Team Mankiewicz in her 5000-word essay “Raising Kane,” others have credited Welles for the lion’s share of praise with his later contributions in making future drafts of the screenplay really work.

But there obviously has been a lot of debate over the years regarding who deserves the credit for Citizen Kane, and there is that big showdown over credit between Welles and Mankiewicz in the movie.

It wasn’t Herman, and I don’t think it was Welles that finally came up with that title, but I was privy to, you know, this material, having the privilege of working on the production, and you get to read these things that the public doesn’t have access to.

See if he can give us some snappy lines, we need some funny lines, you know, “Give it to Herman.” So, he’d been doing this a long time and he knew that movies were running at 73 minutes, 86 minutes in this era, so to hand in a first draft of 325 pages, I mean, that’s a sort of F-you back then, and he handed that in.

It was all there, and I’m sure, I know that Welles went out to the ranch and had a few visits with him, they communicated through [producer] John Houseman.

But let’s put it this way, you know the old thing of Michelangelo saw David in the stone.

It’s a little like that?

Mank did take it, or he presented  it to arbitration and then withdrew it, this whole title/credit issue, and as you know, in the end Welles circled his name and drew an arrow.

It was Orson Welles, Herman Mankiewicz, and he just circled Mankiewicz’s name and drew an arrow, basically giving him above, top billing, but I think, yeah, it was all there.

I mean, you know, it’s really great for them both, but it was, I don’t know, maybe the industry kind of gave it to Mank for the past…just for sheer endurance and they really gave it to Welles, I think, in the other categories he was not popular.

What I personally knew about Herman Mankiewicz, I mean, you could put on a postage stamp.

I knew he was the brother of Joe, and I knew that his name was on Citizen Kane, and that he had written, I think, one of two of the Marx Brothers movies, but really apart from that, I knew very little about Herman, and so it was in some ways coming to it like it was a fictional character, and the more I found out about the man and the more I read on what he had achieved and what he had done it was quite amazing the journey of discovery.

He felt that it wasn’t literature, that compared to the novel, compared to the stage, that it was a medium that you could really dismiss, and this is also at a time where, you know, talking pictures are not that old, really.

So, when this came along, a wonderful role, the opportunity of working with David, you knew up front he was going to shoot it in sumptuous black and white, it’s an honorarium, in a way, to the old Hollywood.

You know, here’s the thing, I know people would sometimes look at it and they roll their eyes and say, “Oh my God, he does so many takes,” but it is, I think, first of all, it’s really nice to have a really big bite in the apple.

With David, like I say, you not only get a big bite of the apple, you feel at the end of the day when you walk away that you covered the scene.

You don’t feel like you’re working with someone who will settle.

At the end of the day thinking, well, we really worked that scene, and so I don’t think it’s such a bad thing, and also, you know, as an actor you work for hire.

You know, I do like to hide, but I’m hiding because it’s all my baggage and all my stuff, and so that was my problem, that wasn’t Fincher’s problem, and when he said, “No, I just want no veil between you and the audience,” it wasn’t that I resisted it, it made me a little anxious because hey, even George Smiley has those glasses, you know, at least I could hide a little behind those glasses.

It’s a thing I had to work out in my process

I don’t look anything like Herman Mankiewicz, and that never worried David