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We already know that for David Fincher directing is more than drawing neat little pictures and showing them to the camera man. Directing means painting a picture with a walkie-talkie and a crew of 80 people holding the brush. Directing means total control over everything the audience sees and hears for two hours; forging their experience of the story. And this requires the filmmaker's attention to the whole and to detail in every department and along every step of the process.
"There are a lot of people, who don't understand what staging is. It's the most important thing directors do, and not a lot of people realize that. Not a lot of people know why they like Steven Spielberg. They don't know the difference between having their eye directed, and having coverage edited for them. But the truth is," Fincher continues, "film is too expensive to teach. You can't teach how to make Hollywood movies. What you can do is make people look at the language of cinema. Why do we need a close-up? I got a master, I got an over, I got close-up – what's the best, what's the most effective way to move people who are watching it, who don't know what this person is or don't know what the circumstances are; how do I engage them? And you can do that anywhere. You don't have to go to London, you don't have to go to Pinewood, you don't have to go to SC. Creativity happens on the fringe. It does. It's too bad. But you can get there. Start in the fringe, meet those people, write your scripts.
I always wanted to give a lecture at filmschools. You go in and you see all these fresh faces, and you say: 'You! Stand up, tell me your story. Tell me what your film is going to be about.' And they start, and you go: 'Shut up and sit the fuck down!' And if they do, you go: 'You're not ready.' Because the film business is filled with shut-up and sit-the-fuck-down. You got to be able to tell your story in spite of sit-down and shut-the-fuck-up. If you are going to let something like that derail you, what hope do you have against transportation department? What hope do you have against development executives?"
To me, that is the essential Fincher: Trust yourself, trust your perspective on your story. Fincher has no qualms to admit there are commercials he has done for the paycheck. Nowadays, however, he signs on only if there is a high enough concept, something in it he wants to do – and he's ready to walk away if there's not.
"I am nothing if I am not honest to people," Fincher says. "We are meeting with commercial clients here and I will say, 'Here's what I am going to do, and I am not joking, and I am not teasing, I am not just backing you off to be incendiary. This is what I know how to do, this is what I want to do with this. And if you don't want to do it, don't hire me."
It's true for his commercial work, yet you can easily see this is true for his films as well. Zodiac was a passion project. Fight Club, as Fincher says, was 'the giant movie studio version of a movie that should never be made by a movie studio'. And as for Se7en, producer Arnold Kopelson thought Fincher took 'a perfectly good genre movie and turned it into a foreign film'.
"I know that I am true to the things I am interested in," Fincher says. "I like stories to unfold in certain kinds of ways, and I don't like shorthand, and I don't like to be told who's evil. I don't want to know who the villain is, I don't want to know who the hero is. If it happens over time that's great. You know the thing is, with Robert McKee and these people, who go, let's distill it down. The thing is: Let's not distill storytelling down. That's what makes it so interesting. I'm telling you, I'm reading Se7en, and about thirty pages in I'm going, 'What the fuck? The old cop, the young cop...' I throw it across the room and call my agent, I go, 'Why would you send me this shit?' He goes, 'No, no, no, no! Read through to the end.' So I read it, ...and all of a sudden John Doe gives himself up. And I know there's f—ing twenty pages left. But I'm going: 'How do you...? You can't do this here! This can't be done.' That was fun! To be in that place; to be sitting in the theater and going: 'He's covered in blood, he walks into the police station? That's crazy! This movie could be starting, it could certainly start over, but it could be going for another two hours. Where are we in this?' That was Andy's [Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker's] creation. It's not the seven deadly sins; that's easy. It was that! And all of a sudden, once you realize there's the head in the box, you go, 'Oh my God, this is not going to be one of those movies. It's a totally different thing.' It's like, now this guy has to deal with evil. He's no longer dealing with plot devices – he's dealing with pure evil."
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens December 21.
