Fincher on Fincher — How David Fincher Directs a Movie [The Director’s Chair]

cinema is an inherently risky and imperfect and emotional [Music] medium i've killed for you who else can say that a group of people are sitting in the dark and they've given you access to their brains through their eyes and their ears for two hours two and a half hours that's a big responsibility you know and you have to be thoughtful about it like john doe is morally repellent as he is he's got a point we see a deadly sin on every street corner in every home and we tolerate it we tolerate it because it's common it's it's trivial we tolerate it morning noon and night and you're given a very very finite amount of patience that the audience has for you to get those ideas across and thrill people with what your intention is grand budapest [Music] i love this like being the actual interviewer i feel so much more in control this is a real role reversal from having to just you know basically just be the fincher [ __ ] go over and over again god damn it once again good once again once again once again great once again jesse slide an inch to your right 23 first print was that english really [Music] i went to a summer program for filmmaking when i was just out of high school and i saw enough to know that film school was not for me i was surrounded by a lot of people who didn't want to pull cable or push dollies everybody wanted to be a director everybody wanted to be an actor and i was kind of like i really want to be a good grip i want to be a good focus puller i was much more interested in in kind of the tactile three i am very cameron action come on come on i worked on a return of the jedi the the chicken walkers the tanks i was one of those kids who was really committed to the idea of being on sets and watching how went down i want to know what every [ __ ] in the room does so that when somebody says to me we can't do that it's like oh yeah well fisher 11 will do that the drop down plate if you just do you know i never want to be the guy who was victimized by other people's laziness you know the dominoes were starting to kind of fall for me about coverage and over the shoulder shots and how you knit you know a scene together i i think my job is to create an environment i don't think of it as so much about camera placement until after you've done a rehearsal and you've decided what people are going to do and then you go well where's the moment here and where's where's where do we have to be and are we over the shoulder are we including a piece of the person or are we just in seeing what they see you know how subjective is it excuse me yeah i just want you to be careful when you put down that uh monk brood belgian wheat beer i'm trying to tell a story where two people meet for the first time it's a it's a cute party but i want them to be even i want it to be a 50 50. no one's bigger than anybody else in the frame [Music] the parties down to like three beast lights and bottle of [ __ ] it might attract some desperate characters i mean the amish room's pretty good but you need to see a man seduce a woman or a lot or vice versa let's see who's your type is that him ironic hipster's so self-aware he makes everything a joke i prefer men who are funny not funny [Music] hey i'm an award-winning scrimshander b i'm a moderately influential warlord and who are you i'm the guy to save you from all this awesomeness so you go through all the things you you're you're defining a psychology for it you're defining a plan for how you're going to execute it this was found behind the same refrigerator there are seven deadly sins captain gluttony greed sloth wrath pride lust and envy seven hold on that's not even my death you can expect five more of these roll the tape get the tape the camera is going to trap them in amber for all time and we're not going to save this in coverage i'm going to get a good master maybe three that are very different and then i'm gonna go into coverage and i may get one to three really great overs that are really interesting and then i'll bring back and do do singles you sound like you're in a great deal of pain my head aches let's meet and talk but i want to cut the scene the way i want to cut the scene i want to cut the scene the way the story mandates [Music] [Music] and nope once again play the last one back bane how many ticks was that i'm sure i have to ask you about the takes you famously have a lot of takes you spend 250 000 on a set you're going to bring a 150 000 crew in you're going to bring actors in from all over the world you're going to put them up in hotels they're going to come there and the idea is to get them out as soon as possible good once again and faster on the faster faster good once again [Music] left right left wherever we're gonna go my philosophy is who shot seven takes okay now let's start you know are you done because you know i know you won the oscar last night in the tub and you figured out what this is going to be but now i want to get beyond muscle memory i want you to know exactly where to sit in that chair i want you to be really comfortable because it's your home and so you come in you throw your coat on the couch when you've done that 15 times it starts to look like you live there because the facebook is cool if we start installing pop-ups for me well i was not going to be mountain dew but at some point and i'm talking as the business end of the company we don't even know what it is yet we don't know what it is then he comes over and proximity and the honesty with which he's saying if there's ever anything wrong you can tell me i'm the guy that wants to help this is our thing that makes you uncomfortable and then he asks you the thing that now i need to check just to make sure you're not leaving anything out take that and go no okay i'm not yeah no i told you before i'm telling you now now is there anything that you need to tell me no it took me a while to get comfortable with the idea of saying another one and and i want you to think about this i don't know what you think about this i don't want you you know because again so so often you're pressed up against the glass going please don't take this the wrong way i need you to come out and i need you to try we're going to try one more we're gonna go through all that so that you can get to a place where you go yeah i've tried this i've tried that no really it's over here and and everyone can feel good about where this is what we're trying to tighten the famous like fincher uh you know relentless number of takes relentless number holden right so you can call me ed it's so funny because the scene with ed kemper is a perfect example i think of the multiple takes because we did that scene over two days can i get you something you want a sandwich no i'm okay well what kind of saying would you like i'm i'm good you want an egg salad sandwich i'm i'm fine there's a potential for a lot of comedy built into this sort of wide-eyed innocent agent across the table from this giant person what's more of a research thing research just a series of interviews talking about what well i don't know your behavior why are you so tense and that line where i say or he says why are you so tense and i say i'm not tense previously in the previous takes i've been doing all this like schtick if i'm not tense and like doing all this stuff and david was like what if you do nothing you're tense right now no i'm not tense i'll be honest i don't get many visitors it's changed the whole sort of energy of that moment it created something more realistic it took away like the actory comedic shtick that i was doing and it feels really honest and we found that after a bunch of takes and it can be a debilitating thing for you know mark ruffalo made a joke about once you know that i was shooting it takes 17 or something he really thought he had nailed it and i walked right past him and went to somebody way deep in the background and told them to move three feet to their left once again here we go you can talk about that as being perfectionism or you can just say look it is your responsibility to edit out those things that people are going to see that take their eye off the ball [Music] you don't want to overshoot it and then end up there you know what i'm saying yeah so we have to correct if i understand your the the tilt for the previous keyframe yep and action and puff [ __ ] we're a little soft go a little deeper with focus you're wrangling a circus that has to over the course of a hundred plus days you need everybody to peak at the same time we follow her we stay on her marco grabs fast we [Music] dolly grip has to pee camera operator has to peek actors have to peek in the over the shoulder you know you may have the most wonderful actor in the world and you're just seeing past their ears and if they're doing this it's incredibly distracting now there's no room for air on this you're too low and you're too far over you need to be up a little bit you need to be back a little bit and so to me you know directing is not so much what you want to see on the day it's about limiting all the stuff that you don't want to see little garrett you're going to put the helmet here back in here this cable should be dressed in here to look like somebody who's yeah and it probably should come from over in here how's that for focus okay good back to one here we go okay listening to music earbuds pulling your wires smoking and thinking evil [Music] you know you can safely say that anything that you can get with a film camera you can emulate with a digital camera if you're willing to give it enough time and do enough delving into it [Music] if you're able to you know really look at an image and be able to describe what it is that you love about it you can emulate anything green is a color that really really disappeared in about the 19 like mid 1980s because a lot of uh telecinis and a lot of televisions a lot of displays uh sony is one of the greater offenders of this but there's a lot of pink that was sort of injected into making people look healthy and happy and so displays and you can see it on you know when you open your macbook your laptop you'll see that there's a lot of extra pink and magenta in the in the lower ends and um i hate that i i think it sucks and i think that the idea of like pink healthy happy people is fraudulent and needs to be destroyed all right come together let yourselves cry oh god why are you doing this it's cheaper than a movie in this free coffee why do you do it i don't know when people think you're dying and they really really listen to you instead of just instead of just waiting for their turn to speak yeah yeah yellow is really what happens when you rate a digital camera at 4 000 kelvin and then shoot between 200 and 3200 kelvin practical sources and you do get that kind of exacerbated yellow and i just didn't feel like when you correct it out people's especially blonde women's hair tends to look kind of grayish and their faces then go into this sort of ruddy pink thing so i'm i i don't have a i don't have a love for green as much as i have a hatred for pink it's called a panic room we're trying to make strangers feel something at the same time oh my god old sydney didn't miss a trick did he open it please and with kids like he's apparently got no wonder he wanted a place to hide please open the door if you talk to a production designer and they're good they're not talking to you about oh my god you have any idea how many people it's going to take to come in here and you know how many we got to lay all the subfloor we got to do this you know we got how much pain it's going to take they're not talking to you about that they're talking to you about the feeling they're talking about the thing that you want to evoke they're talking to you about well i don't think that benjamin at this point in his life should be living upstairs i think he should be living downstairs and i think the reason why is because he has to be living with the help so you have those kinds of discussions you know when you're talking to trent rezner and atticus ross you're not talking about use this synthesizer or this drum machine or whatever you're talking about i need a feeling happening here i want spa music i want that kind of i want your version because he can't do anything like anybody else he's gonna make it trent rezner [Music] kind of good i want your version of the kind of music that they play when you get a massage you know it's always supposed to be this music that kind of calms you and lets you know everything's going to be okay give that to trent resner and atticus ross and see what they come back with [Music] and you end up with something that makes you go you know it sounds like it just sounds like the hair standing up in the back of your neck but it still has this idea behind it because the idea is the important thing make yourself to home mr mankiewicz or shall i call you herman no please call me back herman mangowitz new york playwright and drama critic turned humble screenwriter mr hurst you're a filmmaker with such command of sort of every facet of how how you build a movie tell me what you did technically for this movie to sort of like recreate you know the feeling of the movies of that era it was very much the the view of hollywood as the mgm dream factory this is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory what he bought still belongs to the man who sold it that's the real magic of the movies and don't let anybody tell you different in this style that was very 30s and 40s and it really required an arm's length in order to appreciate it so with that in mind i just always felt the movie should be made in black and white i always felt that the movie should have some of those trappings of of what cinema was like back then so we were using solutions of the period for specific problems like dave49 he doesn't own mgm any more than sam goldwyn they just run it for the money boys back east except you can't be as deeply cynical as you pretend to be and make this movie i refuse to accept anymore your like fake vision of the world viewed by this jaundiced eye you've revealed i think to the world that you actually have a tremendous affection for humanity with this movie oh man can you have a serious only about something funny do you think about your movies in terms of well i made this so now i'm gonna make that or i finally got to make my dad's movie or you know how do you view your career as a sort of body of work or do you at all i don't i've always felt like things come together for a reason and it's best not to overthink that stuff but together i saw you with the box what was in the box because i envy your normal life put the gun down baby it seems that envy is myself oh what's in the box conventions you know if i thought about a filmography at all good god why would i have done so many serial killing movies that's self-evident years ago [Music] you met me at a very strange time in my life mark there are a lot of people who are going to stand between you and what it is that you want to do kids who say well you know how am i going to make my movie unless i can you know get hollywood to pay for it it's like get an ipad like go make your movie you know you can write on it you can email that script around to your friends you can get them all to show up the same place you can film with it you can edit with it there's no excuse well that my friend is the magic of the movies hold up oscar mate thanks file i'm doing a lot of television and i hope to do some really off-putting and interesting stuff [Music]

Channel: StudioBinder

Views: 94,188

Rating: 4.9857569 out of 5

Keywords: David fincher, david fincher interview, fincher, david fincher director, interview with david fincher, david fincher directing, david fincher style, david fincher movies, david fincher cinematography, david fincher films, david fincher shots, david fincher filmography, david fincher film study, david fincher lighting, david fincher analysis, david fincher supercut, directing advice, david fincher biography, david fincher essay, how david fincher became a filmmaker

Id: dljfMoCXnSk

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/studiobinder]

David Fincher is a director’s director. His reputation for having complete control over his work is well-known but many directors have had similar power. So, what makes his approach to film directing so captivating? In this David Fincher video essay, we’ll let the man speak for himself. Through a collection of interviews from throughout his career, Fincher guides us through some of the strongest characteristics of his directing style.

[u/rentonlives]

That was great. Totally expecting the typical blowhard essay but you did it right. Bravo.