David Fincher on ‘Se7en’ 4K Restoration, Post-‘Alien 3’ Redemption and Casting Ned Beatty as John Doe
David Fincher bristles at being labeled a perfectionist.
He makes an unconvincing case in the shadow of his filmography, which includes “Fight Club,” “Zodiac” and “The Social Network” among several other films marked by a meticulous and unerring technical precision. But Fincher’s objections ring especially hollow when it comes in the midst of an explanation — involving corrections to emulsion caused by the device that perforated the original celluloid — why a new 4K version of “Se7en” took a year to complete. Yet even if one were inclined to describe his approach merely as a “passionate attention to detail,” that attention has nevertheless resulted in some of the most unforgettable cinematic images of the last 30 years — and now, one of the most beautiful restorations produced in the high-definition era.
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Perhaps ironically, “Se7en,” the film that marked his Hollywood breakthrough, was by his description inspired by “movies with dirt under their fingernails.” Following its premiere at the 2024 TCM Film Festival, the upgraded transfer will be released in theaters (including IMAX) Jan. 3, to be followed on 4K UHD Jan. 7. Fincher recently spoke with Variety about the film, describing his approach to the project after the critical and commercial underperformance of his debut feature, “Alien 3;” revealing details about key casting and creative choices in bringing to life the story of a serial killer inspired by the seven deadly sins; and reflecting on its legacy as a film that both inspired countless imitators and defined his reputation — be it as a perfectionist or just a filmmaker who learned to ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
You’ve characterized the process of directing “Alien 3” as an exercise in making other people’s mistakes. When you started working on “Se7en,” to what extent did you see it as an opportunity to make your own?
I look at it this way. On “Alien 3,” I stopped after that movie looking for permission and I would much rather ask for forgiveness. So that became my edict. And “Se7en,” on the page, could have gone a lot of different ways. But I felt like I read this movie, I knew what this movie looked like, I knew what the stakes were. And I had an extremely willing partner in [New Line President of Production] Mike De Luca. Mike De Luca had his own issues at this time, but he did not have a fear of taking risks, and if you could articulate the risk, he’s a fan of movies and he’s a fan of taking it right to the edge. And so we talked ad nauseum about the kinds of movies that I loved, and where the Venn diagram overlapped with what he was doing. We talked about “Klute,” we didn’t talk about “Silence of the Lambs,” strangely enough, but we talked about “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” a little bit…. we were talking about movies with dirt under their fingernails. And not that he gave us permission, but he was excited by that stuff.
But [producer] Phyllis Carlyle was not only risk averse, I think she thought the movie in the end when she finally saw it was disgusting. So it was pretty clear who were the people that were on the side of doing something that was this sort of sinister — and there were enough.
I’m fascinated by the idea that you had considered Ned Beatty as John Doe. How far down the road, even before he turned you down maybe, did you get with him as that character?
I’m pretty sure we got word back fairly [quickly] … I think he had it for the weekend. He may have called Saturday morning. “No, thank you.” The person I was kind of most interested in at that time was Christopher Guest. This is how wide a net we were casting. It’s a strange alchemy. It’s like, “I know that this guy worked great across Brad. Will he work great opposing Morgan?” I try to be the person who is looking less at the physiognomy and less at who says “police chief.” That’s the thing I loved about Tyler Perry in “Gone Girl.” The part was kind of written for Alec Baldwin in “Malice.” And I was like, I feel like I’ve seen that. What if we get somebody who can sit down next to somebody on the couch and go, “No, no, no, tell me what your greatest fears are.” That would be an interesting idea for Tanner Bolt [Perry’s character in “Gone Girl”]. And then other things avail themselves and the cast comes together. But that’s such an interesting playground.
One of my favorite moments in the movie is when R. Lee Ermey picks up the phone in the police station and says, “this isn’t even my desk.”
It was in the script. Yeah, it’s funny. And by the way, it only gets better when you get Lee Ermey to croak it out. “This isn’t even my desk!” He’s great. But that’s [screenwriter] Andy Walker, that’s what he gives you — this weird non sequitur in the middle of a scene that you go, okay, how do I support that? Well, now when I’m casting the guy who has to play the captain, I’ve got to get somebody who can, “Oh, one last thing, can I have you say this line for me?” And you go, “That’s the fucking guy. We got to get him.” That’s one of those moments that you go, “That sounds like a workplace environment where people are under a lot of stress.”
You talked last year about the remastering process and some of the background tweaks you did on the film.
Have you seen the remastering?
Yes, I have. It looks incredible.
Were you aware of fixes?
Nothing specific jumped out at me.
Like for instance, when Brad’s sitting on the bed at the beginning when he puts on his pre-tied ties and sits next to Gwyneth. When we shot that, when you’re shooting on Eastman high-speed stock and shallow depth of field, we just put a white card out there to bounce light. That’s what they did on “Being There.” It’s one of my favorite movies and I love the way that movie looks. And on film, it’s just a blown-out window. And on DVD, it’s just a blown-out window. When you get to 4K, you’re going, that’s a card out there, isn’t it? You can actually make out things that you couldn’t see before, so we made those kinds of little changes. They’re not mandatory, but they’re optimal given the upgrade.
Other than opportunities now to repair what you perceive to be mistakes, how much do you see your films as cast in stone once they’re completed? There’s no “Greedo shot first” choices.
I believe that movies are as cyclically informed as fashion is. I mean, we go through this when handheld goes out of favor and then somebody utilizes it really well and then it’s back and then it’s proliferating on television. If you’ve seen Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” what he does with a four-by-three frame is the kind of stuff that I wished I had the imagination to apply to make, but I just don’t think that way. So I look at this stuff, and I think it comes and it goes. Would I ever take shotguns out of people’s hands in “E.T.” and replace them with flashlights or radios? No. But more power to whoever wants to make that decision. I just feel like you need to be true. I was trying to be true to a Wednesday afternoon with Beverly Wood at Deluxe Labs on Western when we saw the first CCE check print and said, “That’s what the movie should look like. Everything else matches this.” I was just trying to go back to that.
Now, Eastman Kodak has spent a lot of money convincing people that if you store exposed cut negative in hermetically sealed environment, you can make prints ad infinitum. But then you have the Universal fire and you go, this is more than just “throw more pixels at it.” The reason it took a year [to restore “Seven”] is we are ostensibly from our 8K scan remaking the negative for this movie. This will be the highest resolution archival master of this movie from this point on. Because we probably spent two to three months just getting rid of cinches, just getting rid of light bits of emulsion, just trying to deal with the perforations. [The film was shot on] super 35 [film stock], so we’re edge to edge on the sides … I mean, the film perforator, when it pushes through the stock to make the holes that we use to register and move the film through the camera, causes a differentiation in the way that that emulsion can make an image. So that needs to be overcome. So there was an inordinate amount of restoration — and I’ll go further, excavation. We had to take this thing from being a collection of plastic clips and recreate it ostensibly from now on, and it’s a big task.
This film is where you first developed a reputation for this kind of perfectionism. How do you ensure that the films you make are telling meaningful stories and are not just exercises in technological exploration?
I don’t know how to guarantee that a story is meaningful for something else. “Se7en,” would I do most of it differently [now]? No. Would I do some of it differently? Yes, absolutely. I’m an entirely different person now. But also, the landscape for cinema has changed so radically in relation to stories that have this kind of violence. One of the things that I thought was so interesting about Andy’s script was, you only ever get there after the trains left the station, and so you’re piecing together what must have happened. And as they talk about, “she cut off her nose to spite her face… and did it very recently,” those ideas are so much more powerful watching people go, “ugh” and they can’t look than it is to show it. I love the way that Andy called upon the audience to fill in the picture, meet us more than halfway, especially with the violence because what we were talking about was the kind of stuff you just don’t want to show people. And so what I really liked about this was it got to inspire and incite the audience. And then we leave it to them and they fill in the blanks. I don’t know in 2024 if you could approach the film in the same way. You probably couldn’t. People would probably feel it’s a cop out, but maybe not.
I bristle at that idea of perfectionism because if you look at an image and you can see that there’s something going on on the left side of it, I’ll admit it was a big problem for me when I moved to high definition because now I could finally see all of the background actors looky-looing and counting, and you go, “Wow, what is this behavior that’s in the background?” So the more you see, the more I feel it’s my responsibility to make sure that the only thing that’s documented is the stuff that focuses your attention on what you need to walk away with.
You’ve spoken in the past about the disastrous test screenings for “Seven”. Was there a moment in the film’s release cycle when you felt vindication?
I’m sure. But quite honestly, I was out of town. I was in France when the movie opened in the States. And remember, I think we opened $13 million, so it’s not like this was “Age of Ultron.” It was that thing where we were a good three or four weeks into it before people were just saying, “This thing’s not going away — it seems to have a niche.” So, it’s a different kind of vindication. The only task I was serving with “Se7en” was, in the rearrangement of “Alien 3” to be what they thought was commercial, the movie that we had all been talking about got lost in the shuffle. And so with “Se7en,” again, I’m not asking for permission. If anything, I’m asking for forgiveness. But I’m also, I was not stupid. It’s a complicated story to tell. There’s a lot of shit that’s going on in it that you just have to be really careful about not confusing people. So I kept saying to myself, “You have to understand what the scene of every day is about and make sure that you have what you feel you need for people to understand the forward momentum of the story. And I was like, “No, you need to make it succinct. You need to make it trackable and you need to make it specific.” And that for me was my mantra.
“Se7en” elevated serial killers into their own film genre and then “Zodiac” kind of killed that genre by being one of the greatest films of its decade. How much did you look at those films as bookends to one another?
I don’t know. I do remember on multiple occasions sitting with [executives] Jeff Robinov and Lynn Harris and Marc Evans and Brad Weston and Brad Gray and saying, “This is not ‘Se7en.’ This is a different thing. We need to feel when we walk out of the movie and go try and find our car that we’ve been through a 35-year investigation.” Now, we want people to enjoy the ride. I don’t want them to endure the movie. But I do want them to endure the length of the movie and I want them to get lost in parts of it. That’s what it was about. We bought a book by a cartoonist about his personal perspective on a 35-year failed investigation into Arthur Leigh Allen. The attempt here was not to recreate the 70s or even recreate San Francisco. It was to say, you’re going to meet this guy and we’re going to see him try to poke his way into the tent and be part of something that isn’t about cartooning, and we’re going to see how this investigation takes all of them to the edge of what seems like a reasonable expectation for justice. We talked about that ad nauseum.
I remember when we showed the film to Warner Brothers and they were like, “This isn’t Se7en.” I was like, “Oh boy.” Look, I love the script to “Se7en.” There’s a pulpiness to it, and I like pulp. “Zodiac” is not that. I don’t know how much I was thinking in terms of, “well, this’ll close out the aughts.” I just felt like there’s that kind of serial killer movie, and then there’s this. And I don’t even know if “Zodiac” really is a, I mean, certainly it’s about a serial killer, but it’s really, it’s a newspaper movie at its marrow.
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