fincher speaks

I’m old enough to remember when there was only one photograph of David Fincher on the internet, and maybe one interview.  Now he’s everywhere.  Via Defamer, here’s a transcript of a talk he gave at a BFI Screening in England somewhere, where he gets surprisingly frank about lots of interesting stuff.  

My favorite bits:

 

MS: Talking of fist-fights, we’re going to skip The Game, which I think is a fantastic film, and talk about Fight Club. Clearly you were reticent to go back to Fox after your Alien 3 experience, but they supported your thing.

DF: But they were all fired, that’s the beauty of it. [audience laughs] Every time somebody comes and says, “You’ve gotta scratch our backs,” I say, “Why? You’re not going to have this job in 11 months. I wanna talk to your assistant.” [audience laughs]

On digital cinematography and his reputation for doing lots of takes:

 

DF: It’s not the camera. There are certain things that digital doesn’t do well – but it’s more about the workflow to me. It’s about the way that I’m able to make my movie. I like the idea that the first three takes, you’re just rehearsing. I like the fact that actors never have to stop in the middle and watch somebody take $1,000 worth of film out the top of a camera and put another $1,000 worth in. I like the fact that there’s no guilt, you can just delete stuff. If something’s not worth the time that it took for everyone to say it, you can just go beep and it’s gone. So I like the plastic nature of how I’m able to work in digital.

[...] And also, I hate voodoo. I hate the whole thing that you’re going to see seven out of eight takes that are out of focus, and somebody’s going to say, “But that last one’s pretty good.” And you can say, “When you’re directing your movie, you can get one out of eight takes.” No, as a way of working, I prefer having dailies in your lap, rather than waiting to see how much you hate everything you did.

MS: And in terms of takes, you are renown for doing a few.

DF: This is bullshit. Look, you’re spending $150m, unbelievable amounts of money to ship period vehicles from Illinois down to Louisiana and get them working. There are teams of people making these cars work, all this stuff. So you get there and you’re going to shoot three takes and then go home? Why? This is the whole reason we’re here – we’re here to do what’s in front of the camera.

True story.  I was once thrown onto a phone call with David Fincher because I told my new boss that I knew about feature film DI.  He has a reputation for being an asshole, which I think is somewhat unfair, the sense I got is that he just really doesn’t like having his time wasted, and probably 75% of the questions he asked me were for the purposes of determining whether or not I was wasting his time, which, in fairness, I kind of was.

Also, for the record, Christian Bale got a raw deal on the whole “recorded tirade” thing.  It’s obviously up for debate whether or not the DP was the good guy or the bad guy in that particular situation, but I bet lots of people would like to see the sound guy or assistant editor who recorded and leaked that voted off the island.  Totally unprofessional.

Normal people don’t make movies.  Normal people certainly don’t act in movies.  I can barely finish reading a magazine article, much less steer a $150 million movie through production for three years, or wake up every morning, commute to work, spend all day pretending to be a completely different human being while 80 people watch, then go home and resume my life.  You have to be crazy to even be capable of that shit, and you have to be twice as crazy to be good at it.  You want shitty on set tirades?  Spend a day with Michael Bay.

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