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I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all ... I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves. - Zodiac Killer's Cipher Decoded, 1969

Questioning the Story:

Did suspect Arthur Leigh Allen really wear a watch with the Zodiac's symbol on it?

Yes. The movie shows Zodiac suspect Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch) wearing a watch that bares the killer's symbol and the brand name Zodiac. The real Arthur Leigh Allen wore an identical watch, the Zodiac Sea Wolf watch (pictured below). Robert Graysmith commented on this in an interview, "To use the symbol ... to wear that watch, and to be at the crime scenes and to know the victims ... he would have to be the Zodiac."

A Zodiac Sea Wolf watch similar to the one worn by suspect Arthur Leigh Allen.

What prompted Robert Graysmith to begin working on his Zodiac book?

"I saw it going into obscurity," Graysmith said during an MSNBC interview. "And I thought, 'Well, wait a minute. Nobody is sharing, all the different jurisdictions, all this information. They are not going to tell each other, even within departments. What if, as a private citizen, I went around and got all the information?' Well, it took a full 10 years. I put it all together." The initial print of Robert Graysmith's Zodiac book hit store shelves in 1986, and it became a national bestseller.

Did writing the Zodiac book really cost Robert Graysmith his marriage?

Yes. In the movie, we watch as Robert (Jake Gyllenhaal) becomes obsessed with his amateur Zodiac investigation, which eventually results in the destruction of his marriage to Melanie (Chloë Sevigny). In real life, the Zodiac book took Robert ten years to complete, and it cost him his marriage. When asked if he regrets his obsession with the Zodiac killer, Graysmith responded, "it affected my life in one bad way because I got divorced, but on the other hand I have the greatest kids ... As far as the personal relationship [with my children], that was not good. Zodiac was number one, that just took over." In a separate interview, Graysmith summed up his staunch devotion to the case, "In the end, it wasn't all bad. I think, had I to do it over again, I probably would do it. Probably would. But it does grip you. It takes over your life."

Jake Gyllenhaal's character is based on author Robert Graysmith, who wrote the book that inspired the David Fincher movie.

How many people did the Zodiac claim to have murdered?

In his letters, the Zodiac serial killer claimed to have murdered 37 people. However, there are only five known victims: David Faraday (17), Betty Lou Jensen (16), Darlene Ferrin (22), Cecelia Shepard (22), and Paul Stine (29). The attacks occurred as follows: David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen on December 20, 1968 along Lake Herman Road in Vallejo, Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau on July 4, 1969 in a parking lot in Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, Cecelia Shepard and Bryan Hartnell on September 27, 1969 at Lake Berryessa near Napa, and taxi driver Paul Stine on October 11, 1969 in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.

Did the two Zodiac survivors want the movie to be made?

Michael Mageau, the lone survivor of the July 4, 1969 Zodiac shooting that killed his friend Darlene Ferrin, expressed strong reservations about viewing director David Fincher's Zodiac movie. "Why would I want to see that?" Mageau said during a phone call interview. "I don't want to remember that time anymore." Darlene Ferrin, 22, and Mike Mageau, 19, were shot in the parking lot of the secluded Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, California. As portrayed in the film, the suspect exited his vehicle and walked towards their car with a flashlight pointed in their direction. He then began shooting a 9mm semi-automatic pistol at them. After firing five shots, the man turned and headed back towards his car. Michael screamed in pain, and the suspect returned and fired two more shots into each of them. Michael was hit four times, Darlene five.

The only other known survivor of the Zodiac attacks, Bryan Hartnell, was also not in favor of the movie being made. Hartnell changed his mind a little after meeting with director David Fincher. "It became pretty clear that he didn't want to do something sensational or inaccurate," Hartnell said. "He was going to recreate things just the way they happened." This included the September 1969 attack at Lake Berryessa in Napa County, California, during which the Zodiac killer hogtied Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard, 22. The Zodiac, who was disguised in a black hooded outfit, stabbed Hartnell seven times in the back, "I was positive I was going to die," said Hartnell. Cecelia Shepard passed away three days later as a result of her injuries from the Zodiac's knife. Hartnell, 57, currently lives in Redlands, Washington. During his time as an advisor on the film, he struggled emotionally with memories of the attack. He has found the movie too difficult to watch. Yet, he admits that David Fincher was the right person to tell the story. "...I knew that, sooner or later, someone was going to tell this story again," he said. "So you want to put it in the hands of someone you trust. David wants to get it right. That's all you can ask a person." Hartnell was especially impressed with David Fincher's re-creation of the attack by the lake, "He went to the same spot on the lake, on the same day it happened."

Did a woman narrowly escape the Zodiac by jumping out of his car while holding her baby?

In the movie, Kathleen Johns (Ione Skye) is driving on the highway when a man starts honking his horn and blinking his lights at her to get her to pull over. He tells her that her wheel is wobbling and that he can fix it. However, instead of tightening the lug nuts on her right rear wheel, he actually removes them. When Kathleen tries to drive away her whole wheel spins off. The man then tells her that he can give her a ride to a nearby service station. In real life, the man took her to the Richfield station at Chrisman Road, but it was closed.

According to Kathleen, the man then drove around for an hour and a half or more, passing station after station. Whenever Kathleen would tell him to pull in, he replied by saying that it was not the right one. A police report states, "She said she was very scared of this man, did want to get out, but did not tell him to stop the vehicle or let her out." When Kathleen asked the man if he always went around helping people like this, the man apparently responded as he did in the movie, "By the time I get through with them, they won't need my help." After more driving, Kathleen made her escape when the man stopped the car short of a stop sign. Holding her baby tightly, she ran across a nearby field and up an embankment where she hid in the shadows. After about five minutes, the man drove away. Kathleen was soon picked up by a passing Samaritan and taken to the local police station in Patterson. There she recognized the man from a composite sketch of the Zodiac killer on a WANTED poster. The Zodiac WANTED Poster 1 is shown above ( Version 2 is shown here). A Sheriff's Deputy found her car completely burned and still smoldering. In his July 24, 1970 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Zodiac claimed responsibility for these events, including setting fire to Kathleen's car. The July 24, 1970 Zodiac Letter is displayed below.

Over the years, Kathleen's account of her experience on the evening of Sunday, March 22, 1970 has varied. Initially, she told two separate police officers shortly after her abduction that the man simply closed the car door and drove away. Eight months later, she changed her story for a San Francisco Chronicle newspaper article written by Paul Avery. His article has the man blatantly threatening the woman and her baby, and getting out of the car with a flashlight after her escape. This is the version of Kathleen's story that has since appeared in Robert Graysmith's bestselling 1986 book Zodiac, and in director David Fincher's 2007 film (although the film doesn't recreate Kathleen's escape).

Did the Zodiac really call Melvin Belli on a KGO-TV talk show?

Yes. You can watch a video clip from the 1969 program here. The caller, who is believed to have been the Zodiac, wants to be addressed as Sam. Melvin Belli, who is portrayed by Brian Cox in the movie, was a famous personal injury lawyer. He can be viewed below next to the actor talking to the Zodiac killer in the movie. Melvin Belli's clients included celebrities like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Muhammad Ali, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Lana Turner, Tony Curtis, Mae West, and Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. Melvin Belli also appeared in numerous films and television shows, and he was perhaps best known for his 1968 role as the evil being Gorgan on the television series Star Trek.

Did a police officer really spot the Zodiac killer after the Taxi cab murder?

Yes. The officer who was inside the police car, Don Fouke, told ABC's Primetime in 2002, "When the headlights hit him I took a look at him. It was a white male and [I] continued on. He came down ... the north side of the street and turned and went up a flight of stairs into a courtyard." As revealed in the movie Zodiac, Officer Fouke didn't stop the man because the initial police bulletin reported that the suspect was black. Moments after Don Fouke passed the man, the dispatcher corrected her description of the suspect to say that it was a white male. In a letter sent to the San Francisco Chronicle approximately one month later on November 9, 1969, the Zodiac murderer confirmed that Officer Fouke had spotted him, "Hey pig! Doesn't it rile you up to have your nose rubbed in your booboos?"

Did the Zodiac murderer really mail a piece of the taxi driver's shirt to the San Francisco Chronicle?

Yes. Three days after the murder of the taxi cab driver on October 13, 1969 in Presidio Heights, the Zodiac killer mailed a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. Included in the envelope was a piece of the taxi driver's shirttail. "This is the Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver ... To prove this here is a bloodstained piece of his shirt." On the night of the murder, three young witnesses had observed the killer from a nearby window as he entered the front passenger side of the cab. The police believe that this is when the killer took the pieces of the driver's jersey. He sent two more pieces of the taxi cab driver's shirt to other newspapers.

Did the Zodiac killer really threaten to kill school children?

Yes. In his October 13, 1969 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Zodiac wrote, "School children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out." The 2007 movie's director, David Fincher, grew up in the Zodiac area of San Francisco during the time of the attacks. As a 7-year-old boy, Fincher can remember police escorting his school bus. "I know what it's like to be afraid of your neighbors," Fincher said in a USA Today interview. This same scenario of a serial killer preying on school children was brought to life in the 1971 Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry. In the film, a serial killer named Scorpio kidnaps a bus-load of school children and demands a ransom.

Did Robert Graysmith really come face-to-face with Arthur Leigh Allen at a hardware store?

Yes, but not exactly how the film portrays it. At the end of the movie Zodiac, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) comes face-to-face with his prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, inside of a hardware store where Allen works. Graysmith described the real encounter during an interview with RopeofSilicon, "...I'm following [Allen] around in an orange VW Rabbit and I park outside of Ace Hardware and obviously he's seen me from the big window and so I'm parked and he pulls alongside me so I can't get my door open and he gives me this look like you wouldn't believe." In addition to his parking lot encounter with Arthur Leigh Allen, Graysmith attempted to obtain a sample of Allen's handwriting by sending friends in to buy things at the hardware store in Vallejo. Allen worked at the Ace Hardware in Vallejo for over a decade until complications from diabetes forced him to quit prior to his death in 1992.

How can the case ever be solved if Arthur Leigh Allen died in 1992?

In 1992, the health of Robert Graysmith's prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, had begun to deteriorate. Allen quit his job at the hardware store. To earn money, he began renting the upper section of his home to a young woman, while he continued to reside in the basement. Diabetes had caused his kidneys to fail, and he had to undergo renal dialysis on a regular basis. Diabetes complications had also left Allen legally blind and with a large abscess on his foot. This made it hard for Allen to work or to leave his home. On August 26, 1992, Allen's kidneys succumbed to his disease. Brain tissue was preserved from Allen's autopsy, and it remains available for DNA testing.

How does Graysmith explain the 2002 DNA test not matching Arthur Leigh Allen?

While working in a San Francisco crime lab in 2002, Dr. Cydne Holt discovered a fingerprint on a stamp affixed to one of the Zodiac's letters. "I found a partial DNA fingerprint from a male individual who, at some time, has had contact with the stamp," Holt said. When she tested the partial DNA from the stamp against Arthur Leigh Allen's DNA profile, she discovered that Allen was not a match. This result did not convince Robert Graysmith, who believes that the letters may have been tainted by investigators who handled them over the years. Graysmith also believes that the Zodiac letters were not accurately preserved for DNA testing, given that they endured 100-degree summers in plastic envelopes for a duration of approximately 30 years. "Even in those days," Graysmith said, "if I were going to write an anonymous letter, I'm guaranteeing, especially if Zodiac wore gloves, [he] would never lick a letter." Graysmith's reasoning for this is that although there was no DNA test back then, there was a saliva test that could determine a suspect's blood type.

What is the current status of the Zodiac case?

Three Zodiac letters that were lost for 20 years surfaced in 2002 during research conducted by ABC for its Primetime news program. The letters are going to be tested for DNA, and if a DNA profile can be built, it will be compared with millions of other profiles in national databases. Detective Mathew Meredith in Vallejo, Ca believes that the DNA from the lost Zodiac letters could finally lead to some answers. "Hopefully, it will turn something up," Meredith said. "And if it doesn't, this is kinda stirring the pot, and we'll see what floats to the surface."

Are there any other likely Zodiac suspects besides Arthur Leigh Allen?

Yes. As the movie Zodiac emphasized, there were 2,500 suspects in all. What initially drew Robert Graysmith to Arthur Leigh Allen was something that a Stanford professor had told him. Dr. Lunby at Stanford said that whoever the killer is he will have offered to catch himself. When Graysmith called investigator Dave Toschi, he asked Toschi if he had ever received that type of letter. "Toschi replied, 'I only got one, I just got it!' He takes it out and it's from Arthur Leigh Allen from prison and it says, 'Sorry I wasn't your man, blah, blah, blah...'" Circumstantial evidence then began to mount against Allen. David Fincher's movie, which is based on Robert Graysmith's Zodiac books, concludes with Graysmith's belief that Arthur Leigh Allen is the man responsible. It should be noted here that other high profile Zodiac suspects have existed since 1968.

Some of these suspects are briefly focused on in David Fincher's 2007 Zodiac movie. They include former San Francisco movie projectionist Rick Marshall and others. In the movie, Robert Graysmith is alerted to handwriting similarities between Rick Marshall's movie posters that he drew and the handwriting in the Zodiac letters. You can view one of Rick Marshall's movie posters below. Marshall's association to classic films (old movies were played weekly at the Avenue Theater where he worked) could also link him to the Zodiac, whose costume at Lake Berryessa was similar to the costume worn by Dr. Zodiac in the 1933 film Charlie Chan at Treasure Island. In the movie, the killer sends messages to local police and news media. Like the real-life killer, the character also wears the symbols of the Zodiac around his neck. In addition to this classic film, the Zodiac signed one of his letters as "the Red Phantom," which was also the title of a silent film that Rick Marshall had at one time invited guests at his apartment to watch.

Did Robert Graysmith really visit the home of a man who had been friends with Zodiac suspect Rick Marshall?

Yes. In the movie, Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) visits the home of a man who supposedly knew Zodiac suspect Rick Marshall. He goes there in search of film canisters that may contain Zodiac murder footage. When Graysmith is in the man's home, he asks him about the movie posters that Rick Marshall drew. The man tells Graysmith that it wasn't Marshall who drew the movie posters, it was him. He then takes Graysmith into the basement where Graysmith hears footsteps above him, even though the man had told him they were alone. This is all true and really happened to Graysmith, even the footsteps. Some investigators who have researched the case believe that this man and Rick Marshall may have been working together.

Interview with Zodiac Survivor Bryan Hartnell

The following is a transcript of a KCRA-TV Channel 3 news report, which aired at 12 noon on Tuesday, October 7, 1969. In the segment, KCRA's Bill Harvey interviewed Zodiac survivor Bryan Hartnell at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa, California. The interview was conducted ten days after Bryan's near-fatal encounter with the Zodiac killer, or "code killer," on Saturday, September 27, 1969 at Lake Berryessa. Bryan's female companion at the lake, Cecelia Shepard, parished from her injuries. Cecelia and Bryan had dated two years prior to the attack. She had come to his school to visit some friends and the two got to talking during dinner at the school cafeteria. They decided to take a drive out to the lake. The original news segment ran for a duration of 6 min 47 seconds.

A young Pacific Union College student who survived a knife attack at Lake Berryessa a week ago Saturday, in which his girl companion was killed, is now in satisfactory condition at a Napa hospital and was able to talk about his ordeal. The police suspected Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard were victims of that so-called "code killer" believed responsible for three previous murders in the Vallejo area. Bryan talked about the events of that Saturday afternoon with KCRA's Bill Harvey. It all started while Hartnell and Cecelia were sitting and talking quietly along the shore of the lake:

Bryan Hartnell: I happened to hear some rustling behind us and I asked her to look because she was facing that direction and I was facing toward the water, and I asked her to note, you know, what was going on and she said, "Oh, there's a man walking around there," and she became concerned about it. And I said, you know, "Well, actually don't worry about it, there's a lot of people, picnickers, etc.," and, you know, if he kept coming to let me know. She kind of kept watching. I noticed she wasn't following my conversation, and she told me he was stepping behind a tree. The tree was about 30 feet behind us. And when he came out she said he's got a mask on. That was my first inkling there was anything actually wrong going on.

Bryan Hartnell recovering in the hospital after the attack.

He came, I turned around, and we were both still sitting down and he told me that just to come up slowly and hold up my hands, that he wanted our money. And I actually laughed at the moment because I told him, I said, "I've only got 75 cents in my pocket," and I said, "You're welcome to have it. But if you need help I'm sure I could give you help otherwise." I asked him what his problem was and he mentioned that he was a convict trying to get to Mexico and needed money and transportation. And I offered him assistance. I told him what I was doing in school and that if I could be of any assistance whatsoever--I offered him my phone number, anything like this, but this just wasn't what he wanted. He said he wanted money. I was real sorry, I said, "Would you like a check, I'd really like to help you if you'd be willing to accept help." He said, "Well, what I need right now is to get you tied up."

And so he had the girl tie me and, of course, she was real nervous and tied me rather loosely, and he came and he tightened the knots up. Then he tied her up. And we continued to dialogue along most of this time. He told me to get down now, and he wanted to tie my ankles to my wrists and I offered some objection because I, you know, it was one thing being, sitting out there tied up and another thing having to lay out there tied up. I didn't know when help would come. I still suspected this was still a robbery case and there was no reason for concern. I mean, I was cooperating with him. There was no reason why he would be acting otherwise.

Bryan Hartnell (Transcript Page 2): So, I finally, after he threatened me with the gun to get down, I did get down. He tied us both up separately but beside each other on our faces. He asked me to put my wrists tighter and he tied us up then. I did look around and he was messing with his gun and I got to see what the gun looked like, and he put it away and I was convinced this was the end of the episode and I just rolled over on my face again, you know, just waiting for him to leave and to muse in my mind what we were going to do next, and how we were going to get away and how I was going to untie her, etc., etc. The next thing I can remember is the knife being put in my back.

Did you, after he attacked you, he then went and attacked the girl, did you see that?

Bryan Hartnell: Well, yeh, because as soon as he started getting me, the girl, of course, I don't know what her, what she thought, but she started calling asking him to stop and almost trying to reach over and stop his blows, because of course she was tied up and she could only just move, and he kind of put her on her side, I think, and as soon as he had given me about six or seven blows, he went on to her and I looked and I saw he was stabbing her and it just really made me sick to see the fellow and there was nothing I could do. So I just turned on my face and lay real still, you know, because there was nothing I could do.

Cecelia Shepard lost her life when she and Bryan Hartnell were tied up and stabbed by the Zodiac killer.

Can you describe for us what your attacker looked like?

Bryan Hartnell: Well, when he was standing up he would kind of shift around. He acted like a very nervous person. He was of medium to short height, kind of pouchy, real casually, I don't want to say sloppily, but real casually dressed and, of course, a little dusty from the lake, and he had this black hood on that came clear down to here. Just little slits in the eyes and wearing these clip-on glasses, they were clipped into those little loops. See Robert Graysmith's Zodiac killer sketch.

You remained conscious through the entire ordeal. How long was it until help finally came?

Bryan Hartnell: Well, as soon as he got us, of course, CeCe and I prayed that whatever the Lord wished that it could be expedient and that we would be willing to do whatever He had in mind. But we also realized that half of the battle was going to have to be ours, that we were going to have to help ourselves. And, I got till I was able to untie one of her hands, but she was too weak to untie me at that time, so I scooted into a position where I could be looking out across the lake, and after calling several times, I found one position that had a little more

Bryan Hartnell (Transcript Page 3): echo to it that I thought was a little louder, and I called and several boats went by but they didn't stop. I don't know if they thought we were joking, or what. But finally, one fisherman who was going a little slow, he stopped and shut off his motor, and we cajoled and called and we did everything to try to get him to come. He sat there for about fifteen minutes, and he did finally come closer but wouldn't come to the shore. I guess he was afraid the man might still be around. And he said he'd go get help. But I assumed he was like a lot of people you read about, he just didn't want to get involved. So I decided that we were going to have to do this on our own. So I encouraged her enough to get me untied. I got one wrist loose so that I could get the rest untied. Then I untied her. She was still so weak she couldn't move.

How were you finally found?

Bryan Hartnell: Well, she was found down on the blanket still. I made it up about 300 yards, up almost to the road. It was a slow process because I kept blacking, I couldn't see. I kept blacking out and my legs kept getting weak, but I was making progress. I think I could have made it to the road, but a pickup truck was coming along one of the dirt roads. Apparently, this man had called for help and he picked me up and took me back down to the girl.
Bryan Hartnell's attacker is still at large, and a murderer. The Napa Sheriff's Office reports it is still checking out numerous leads.
Zodiac News Footage & Movie Interviews:

Watch Zodiac related video clips below and see authentic news footage from when the Zodiac killer held the San Francisco Bay Area in a perpetual state of fear. Listen to what is suspected to be the Zodiac's voice when he called KGO-TV to speak with lawyer Melvin Belli on the air. Then, view several interviews with real-life amateur investigator Robert Graysmith and the actor who portrayed him in the 2007 movie Zodiac, Jake Gyllenhaal.

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Zodiac Movie vs. Zodiac Killer True Story - Robert Graysmith

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Compare the Zodiac movie to the Zodiac killer true story. See photos of the real people behind the Zodiac story as we separate the killer's facts from the movie's fiction.

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The Facebook founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has said his feelings were hurt by Hollywood's portrayal of him in The Social Network.

In his first public Q&A session at Facebook's Californian headquarters, the 30-year-old billionaire said the 2010 film, which told the story of how he created the social network while studying at Harvard, had "made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful".

The Social Network suggested that Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, only created Facebook to attract women following a breakup. However, the tech mogul said that contrary to the film's plot he was not single at the time and had been dating his now-wife, Priscilla Chan.

"I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that movie in a while. I kind of blocked that one out," he said.

Zuckerberg said that David Fincher's film had embellished elements of the nascent Facebook because the reality of writing code was not glamorous.

"I think the reality is that writing code and then building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about, so you can imagine that a lot of this stuff they had to embellish or make up," he said.

"They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like the design of the office, but on the overarching plot ... they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful."

Zuckerberg said that he met Eisenberg and tried to be nice. "There were pretty glaring things that were just made up about the movie that made it pretty hard to take seriously."

One aspect of his life that the film makers did get right was Zuckerberg's wardrobe, including the famous grey T-shirt that Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, confirmed he wore every day.

Zuckerberg said he had many versions of the same shirt because he did not want to waste time making "silly or frivolous" decisions such as what to wear, or what to have for breakfast.

"I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything, except how to best serve this community [of Facebook users]," he said.

The Facebook boss said the company was trying to increase the number of women working in the technology sector. Its workforce is 69% male, while the figure for Apple was 70%.

There was a vicious circle to blame for the small proportion of women in technology, Zuckerberg said.

"You need to start earlier in the funnel so that girls don't self-select out of doing computer science education, but at the same time one of the big reasons why today we have this issue is that there aren't a lot of women in the field today.

"I heard one person put it: 'The reason why girls don't go into computer science is because there are no girls in computer science.' You need to break the cycle. Companies that are more diverse do better."

Facebook and Apple made headlines last month after it was revealed that both companies offer up to $20,000 (£13,000) for egg freezing for female employees. The social network also provides adoption and surrogacy assistance for both male and female workers.

Zuckerberg was also asked why Facebook users have been forced to install the Messenger app on their mobile devices. He laughed and conceded that requiring users to install another app was "a big ask" but added: "We really believe this is a better experience."

More than 10bn messages were sent every day on Facebook and that messaging apps that offered users "dedicated, focused experiences" were most popular.

"My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I'm not a cool person, and I've never really tried to be cool. Our goal isn't necessarily to make it particularly exciting to use; we want to make it useful."

Zuckerberg spent an hour answering pre-submitted questions from users from around the world as well as from those who attended the event.
Topics

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Social Network 'made up stuff that was hurtful', says Mark Zuckerberg

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The Facebook founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has said his feelings were hurt by Hollywood's portrayal of him in The Social Network. In his first public Q&A session at Facebook's Californian headquarters, the 30-year-old billionaire said the 2010 film, which told the story of how he created the social network while studying at Harvard, had "made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful".

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1999 was a watershed year for people in my generation, as it no doubt was for other generations as well. On the eve of the new millennium, we were caught in a place between excitement and apprehension.

The 21st century loomed large with promises of technological and sociological innovations, yet we were beset by decidedly 20th century baggage, like an adultery scandal in the White House or the nebulous threat of Y2K.

This potent atmosphere naturally created its fair share of zeitgeist pop culture work, but no works had more of an impact on the public that year than The Wachowski Brothers' THE MATRIX and David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB. I was only in middle school at the time, but FIGHT CLUB in particular captivated my friends and I with the palpable substance behind its visceral style.

As a kid already consumed by a runaway love for movies, FIGHT CLUB was one of the earliest instances in which I was acutely aware of a director 's distinct voice. As such, the films of director David Fincher were among the first that I sought out as a means to study film as an art form and a product of a singular creative entity.

His easily identifiable aesthetic influenced me heavily during those early days, and despite having taken cues from a much larger world of film artists as I've grown, Fincher's unique worldview still shapes my own in a fundamental way.

David Fincher was essentially the first mainstream feature director to emerge from the world of music videos. Ever the technological pioneer, David Fincher innovated several ideas about the nascent music video format that are still in use today. This spirit of innovation and a positive shooting experience on the set of 2007's ZODIAC eventually led to him becoming a key proponent of digital filmmaking before its widespread adoption.

A student of Stanley Kubrick's disciplined perfectionism and Ridley Scott's imaginative world-building, David Fincher established his own voice with a cold, clinical aesthetic that finds relevancy in our increasing dependency and complicated relationship with technology.

David Fincher was born in 1962, in Denver, Colorado. His father, Howard, worked as the bureau chief for LIFE Magazine and his mother, Claire Mae, worked in drug addition facilities as a mental health nurse.

David Fincher spent most of his formative years in northern California's Marin County (a setting he'd explore in his features THE GAME (1997) and ZODIAC), as well as the small town of Ashland, Oregon. Inspired by George Ray Hill's BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969), an 8 year-old David Fincher started to make little movies of his own using his family's 8mm film camera.

Having grown up in a time when film schools were well established, David Fincher-rather interestingly-opted against them in favor of going directly into the workforce under Korty Films and Industrial Light and Magic (where we would work on 1983's RETURN OF THE JEDI).

It was David Fincher's time at ILM specifically that would shape his fundamental understanding of and appreciation for visual effects, and his incorporation of ILM's techniques into his music videos no doubt led to his breakout as a director.

AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY: "SMOKING FETUS" (1984)

At the age of 22, David Fincher directed his very first professional work, an anti-smoking ad for the American Cancer Society called"SMOKING FETUS". Anti-smoking ads are infamous for being shocking and transgressive as a means to literally scare people out of lighting up.

"SMOKING FETUS" was the spot that undoubtedly started it all by featuring a fetus in utero, taking a long drag from a cigarette. The crude puppetry of the fetus is horrifying and nightmarish-an unholy image that delivers a brilliant whallop.

David Fincher has often been called a modern-day Kubrick because of his visual precision and notoriety for demanding obscene numbers of takes-a comparison made all the more salient when given that both men shared a thematic fascination with man's relationship (and conflict with) technology.

David Fincher's modeling of his aesthetic after Kubrick's can be seen even in his earliest of works. Shot against a black background, the fetus floating in space resembles the Star Child of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). "SMOKING FETUS" brought David Fincher to the attention of Propoganda Films, who subsequently signed him on in earnest, effectively launching his career.

RICK SPRINGFIELD: "DANCE THIS WORLD AWAY" (1984)

Due to the strength of "SMOKING FETUS", 80's rock superstar Rick Springfield enlisted David Fincher to direct his 1984 concert film, THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM. The responsibility also entailed the shooting of four pre-filmed music videos to incorporate into the live show.

"DANCE THIS WORLD AWAY" features three vignettes: a man dancing amongst the ruins of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a happy-go-lucky TV show for kids, and a ballroom filled with socialites oblivious to the nuclear missile launching from underneath the dance floor. The piece establishes several traits that David Fincher would incorporate into his mature aesthetic like stylized, theatrical lighting, an inspired use of visual effects and elaborate production design.

RICK SPRINGFIELD: "CELEBRATE YOUTH" (1984)

"CELEBRATE YOUTH" is presented in stark black and white, punctuated by bright pops of color like the red of Springfield's bandana or the indigo of a child's sneakers. This conceit further points to David Fincher's familiarity with special effects, as such a look requires the shooting of the original footage in color and isolating specific elements in post production.

The look predates a similar conceit used by Frank Miller's SIN CITY (both the 2005 film and the comic it was based upon), so it's reasonable to assume that David Fincher's video very well could have served as an influence for Miller. "CELEBRATE YOUTH" also highlights David Fincher's inspired sense of camera movement, utilizing cranes and dollies to add energy and flair to the proceeds.

RICK SPRINGFIELD: "BOP TIL YOU DROP" (1984)

"BOP TIL YOU DROP" tells David Fincher's first narrative story in the form of a slave revolt inside of a futuristic METROPOLIS-style dystopia. This is Fincher's earliest instance of world-building, using elaborate creature and set design, confident camera movements and theatrical lighting (as well as lots of special visual effects) to tell an archetypal story of revolution.

RICK SPRINGFIELD: "STATE OF THE HEART"(1984)

Rounding out David Fincher's quartet of Rick Springfield videos is "STATE OF THE HEART", which compared to the others, is relatively sedate and low-key in its execution. While the piece takes place inside of a single room, David Fincher still brings a sense of inspired production design in the form of a cool, metallic color palette. Indeed, "STATE OF THE HEART" is the first instance within Fincher's filmography of the cool, steely color palette that would later become his signature.

THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM (1984)

All of the aforementioned music videos, while capable of acting as standalone pieces, were produced for eventual incorporation into Rick Springfield's larger concert film, THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM.

With his first feature-length work, David Fincher more or less follows the established format of concert films-performance, audience cutaways, wide shots that give us the full scope of the theatrics, etc. He makes heavy use of a crane to achieve his shots, partly out of necessity since he can't exactly be on-stage, yet it still shows a remarkable degree of confidence in moving the camera on David Fincher's part.

And while it probably wasn't Fincher's idea or decision, THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM contains a pretty blatant Kubrick nod in the form of a guitarist wearing Malcolm McDowell's iconic outfit from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971).

The concert film format doesn't allow much room for David Fincher to exercise his personal artistic voice, but he does manage to add a few stylistic flourishes in the form of visual effects that were added in after the live filming.

He adds a CGI blimp hovering over the stage, as well as fireballs that erupt from various places throughout the stadium (several audience cutaways appear blatantly staged to accommodate the inclusion of these effects).

Despite being something of a time capsule for ridiculous 80's hair rock, it's a high quality romp through Springfield's discography that briskly clips along its brief 70 minute running time without ever really sagging.

Fincher's involvement with THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM wasn't going to net him any opportunities to transition into features, but it did generate a significant amount of buzz for him in the music video and commercial world, where he'd spend the better part of a decade as one of the medium's most sought-after directors.

The success of THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM (1984), director David Fincher's feature-length concert film for Rick Springfield, led to a very prolific period of music video assignments for the burgeoning auteur. In three short years, David Fincher established himself as a top music video director, held in high regard and higher demand by the biggest pop artists of the era. It was the golden age of music videos, and Fincher was the tastemaker at the forefront developing it into a legitimate art form.

THE MOTELS: "SHAME" (1985)

In his early professional career, Fincher's most visible influence is the work of brothers Ridley and Tony Scott, two feature directors who were quite en vogue at the time due to blockbuster, high-fashion work like BLADE RUNNER (1982) and THE HUNGER (1983). Tony in particular was a key aesthetic influence, with David Fincher borrowing the English director's love for theatrical lighting and the noir-ish slat shadows cast by venetian blinds.
For The Motels' "SHAME", Fincher makes heavy use of this look in his vignette of a woman stuck in a motel room who dreams of a glamorous life outside her window. Because computer-generated imagery was still in its infancy at the time, Fincher's penchant for using special effects in his music video work is limited mostly to compositing effects, like the motion billboard and the fake sky behind it.

THE MOTELS: "SHOCK" (1985)

David Fincher's second video for the Motels features lead singer Martha Davis as she's chased by an unseen presence in a dark, empty house late at night. The concept allows Fincher to create an imaginative lighting and production design scheme."SHOCK" also makes lurid use of Fincher's preferred cold color palette, while a Steadicam rig allows David Fincher to chase Martha around the house like a gliding, ominous force. This subjective POV conceit echoes a similar shot that David Fincher would incorporate into his first feature, 1992's ALIEN 3, whereby we assume the point of view of a xenomorph as it chases its victims down a tunnel. The piece also feature some low-key effects via a dramatic, stormy sky.

THE OUTFIELD: "ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD" (1986)

By 1986, David Fincher's music video aesthetics were pretty well-established: cold color palettes, theatrical lighting schemes commonly utilizing venetian blinds, and visual effects. While The Outfield's "ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD" was shot on film, David Fincher embraces the trappings of the nascent video format by incorporating tape static and a surveillance-style van.

THE OUTFIELD: "EVERY TIME YOU CRY" (1986)

David Fincher's second video for The Outfield in 1986, "EVERY TIME YOU CRY", is a concert performance piece a la THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM. Like the latter's incorporation of rudimentary visual effects, here Fincher uses the technology to replace the sky with a cosmic light show and add in a dramatic moonrise.

HOWARD HEWETT: "STAY" (1986)

In "STAY", a piece for Howard Hewett, David Fincher makes use of another of Tony Scott's aesthetic fascinations-billowing curtains. He projects impressionistic silhouettes onto said curtains, giving his cold color palette some visual punch.

JERMAINE STEWART: "WE DON'T HAVE TO TAKE OUR CLOTHES OFF" (1986)

While Jermaine Stewart's "WE DON'T HAVE TO TAKE OUR CLOTHES OFF" is a relatively conventional music video, David Fincher's direction of it is anything but. The core aesthetic conceit of the piece is the playful exploration of aspect ratio boundaries. David Fincher conceives of the black bars at the top and bottom of your screen as arbitrary lines in physical space, so when the camera moves to the side, those lines skew appropriately in proportion to your perspective. He takes the idea a step further by superimposing performance elements shot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio over the main 2.35:1 anamorphic footage, giving the effect of visuals that transcend the constraints and the edges of their frame.

You can watch the video here.

COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (1988-1990)

Throughout the 80's, David Fincher became a director in high demand thanks to his stunning music videos. As he crossed over into the world of commercials, his imaginative style and technical mastery began to command the attention of studio executives, who desired to see his visceral aesthetic to features. During the late 80's and early 90's, Fincher churned out some of his most memorable music video work and worked with some of the biggest stars around.

YM MAGAZINE "HER WORLD" (1988)

While his "SMOKING FETUS" spot for the American Cancer Society in 1984 was his first commercial, Fincher's "HER WORLD", a spot commissioned by Young Miss Magazine, kicked off his commercial directing career in earnest. The spot stars a young, pre-fame Angelina Jolie walking towards us, clutching a copy of YM Magazine as several cars painted with the words "sex, "love", "work", "family", and others zip and crash around her in a ballet of violence. Even when working in the branding-conscious world of advertising, Fincher is able to retain his trademark aesthetic (indeed, you don't hire someone like Fincher if you want a friendly, cuddly vibe). His characteristic cold color palette is accentuated by stark lighting and slick streets. An eye for stylized violence that would give 1999's FIGHT CLUB its power can be glimpsed here through the jarring collisions of the cars.

Alien 3 (1992)

The runaway success of director James Cameron's ALIENS sequel in 1986 turned the property into a major franchise for Twentieth Century Fox. Executives wanted to strike with a third ALIEN film while the iron was hot, but coming up with the right story proved tricky.

Adding to the threequel's film's development woes, a revolving door of writers and directors experienced immense frustration with a studio that was too meddlesome with its prized jewel of a franchise.

In a long search for an inexperienced, yet talented, director that they could control and micromanage, Fox settled on David Fincher-a rising star in the commercial and music video realm with a professed love for the ALIEN franchise and its founding director, Ridley Scott.

Fincher jumped at the offer to direct his first feature film, but in retrospect it was a naïve move that almost destroyed his career before it even began. His supreme confidence and bold vision clashed with the conservative executives, causing a long, miserable experience for the young director.

He eventually disowned ALIEN 3, abandoning it to flail and die at the box office. However, as Fincher has grown to become recognized as one of America's major contemporary auteurs, his debut has undergone something of a reappraisal in the film community, with fans choosing to see the good in it instead of the bad.

More than twenty years after its release, ALIEN 3's legacy to the medium is that it makes a hard case against the kind of filmmaking-by-committee that meddlesome studio executives still impose on gifted visionaries to this day.

ALIEN 3 picks up where ALIENS left off, with Lt. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Hicks (Michael Biehn), and Newt (Carrie Henn) resting in cryosleep as their ship, The Sulaco, drifts peacefully through space.

However, in their hibernating state, they are unaware of the fact that an alien facehugger has stowed away onboard their craft. Its attempts to penetrate and impregnate our heroes leads to a fire on deck and the cryosleep chambers are jettisoned away in an escape pod that crash lands on nearby on Fiorina 161, a sulfurous industrial prison planet colloquially known as Fury.

Tragically, Hicks and Newt don't survive the crash, but Ripley does when she's discovered by a group of inmates and nursed back to health. Once restored, Ripley finds herself thrust into an all-male, religious extremist culture that hasn't seen a woman in decades.

Ripley quickly toughens up to counter the sexual aggression of the inmates, but her problems multiply when its discovered that one of the alien xenomorphs has followed her to Fury 161 and is picking off the inmates one by one.

A distress signal is dispatched to a rescue ship, but Ripley and the inmates still have to contend with the xenomorph before help arrives, a task made all the more difficult by the lack of conventional weapons anywhere in the prison facility, as well as the discovery that Ripley is hosting the embryo of a new egg-laying Queen alien inside of her.

In her third performance as Ripley, Weaver yet again transforms the character via a radical evolution into a tough, resilient survivor. Her arc throughout the three films is compelling, and for all the controversies over the film's storyline, Weaver deserves a lot of credit for never phoning it in when she very easily could have.

Hers is the only familiar face in this hellish new world, save for the mutilated visage of Lance Henriksen's android Bishop (and his flesh-and-blood counterpart that appears towards the end of the film).

Among the fresh blood, so to speak, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance and Pete Postlethwaite stand out as the most compelling inmates on Fury 161. Dutton plays Dillon, a tough, righteous voice of spiritual authority that the other inmates can rally behind.

Dance plays Clemens, the sensitive, intellectual medical officer who helps Ripley acclimate to this harsh world and harbors a dark secret of his own. The late, great character actor Postlethwaite plays David, an observant prisoner with a high degree of intelligence.

David Fincher's collaborations with director of photography Jeff Cronenweth in the music video realm led to Fincher hiring his father, the legendary Jordan Cronenweth, as ALIEN 3's cinematographer. Best known for his work on Ridley Scott's seminal 1982 masterpiece, BLADE RUNNER (itself a huge influence on Fincher's aesthetic), Cronenweth was being slowly consumed by Parkinsons Disease during filming.

The earliest of ALIEN 3's several considerable production woes, Cronenweth's condition deteriorated so quickly that cinematographer Alex Thomson had to step in and replace him only two weeks into the shoot. Despite this setback, ALIEN 3 is a visual stunner that firmly established David Fincher's uncompromising style in the feature realm.

Fincher's stark, grungy aesthetic translates well into the theatrical anamorphic aspect ratio format, with the smoky, industrial production design by Norman Reynolds giving Fincher plentiful opportunities to incorporate artful silhouettes and his signature cold, desaturated color palette (only David Fincher can make a palette that deals heavily in oranges and browns feel "cold").

Fincher's emphasis on architecture and world-building manifests in a subtle, surprising way-he chooses to shoot a great deal of the film in low angle shots that look up at the characters and expose the ceiling. This creates an air of helplessness that pervades the film, like we're way over our heads and drowning in despair.

While this hopeless mood ultimately might have contributed to the film's failure at the box office, it's an inspired way for David Fincher to communicate a real, tangible world that draws us into it-most sets are built without a ceiling so a lighting grid can be easily installed overhead, but by showing the audience the existence of a ceiling, it subconsciously tells us we are in a place that exists in real life... and that the events of the film could very well happen to us.

Fincher and Thomson's camerawork in ALIEN 3 is also worth noting. Fincher has always had a firm, visionary command of camera movement, and the considerable resources of studio backing allows him to indulge in sweeping, virtuoso moves that bring a fresh, terrifying energy to the film.

A particular highlight is a tunnel sequence towards the end of the film, where the xenomorph chases the inmates through a huge, twisting labyrinth. David Fincher uses a steadicam that assumes the POV of the Xenomorph as it rages through the tunnels, twisting and spinning at seemingly impossible angles to communicate the alien's terrifying agility and speed.

The industrial, foreboding nature of Fincher's visuals are echoed in composer Elliot Goldenthal's atmospheric score. Instead of using traditional symphonic arrangements, Goldenthal blurs the line between music and sound effects by incorporating non-instruments and electronic machinations into an atonal blend of sounds.

In many ways, this approach proves to be even scarier than a conventional orchestral sound could conjure up. To reflect the medieval, religious nature of Fury 161's inhabitants, Goldenthal also adapts haunting choral requiems that weave themselves into his tapestry of ominous sounds and tones.

ALIEN 3's infamous production disasters are well documented, hopefully as a means to ensure that the film industry as a collective learns from the production's mistakes. These woes began during the earliest stages of pre-production which saw the hiring and resigning of director Renny Harlin before Vincent Ward came onboard for a short period to realize his vision of a wooden cathedral planet populated by apocalyptic monks.

While a semblance of this conceit remains in the finished film, the script was changed radically several times before cameras started rolling, and even then the filmmakers didn't have a finished version to work from. The ramifications of this were numerous, from actors being frustrated with constantly-changing character arcs, plot inconsistencies, and even $7 million being wasted on sets that were built and never used.

The process was particularly hard on David Fincher, who was constantly fighting a losing battle against incessant studio meddling that overruled his decisions and undermined his authority. Fed up with the lack of respect his vision was being given, the young director barely hung on long enough to wrap production, and walked off entirely when it came time for editing. The fact that he ever decided to make another feature film again after that ordeal is something of a miracle.

Despite constant challenges to his control of the film, Fincher's hand is readily apparent in every frame of ALIEN 3. A science fiction film such as this is heavily reliant on special effects, a niche that David Fincher's background at ILM makes him well suited for.

Computer-generated imagery was still in its infancy in 1992, so Fincher and company had to pull off ALIEN 3's steam-punk vision of hell and the devil through a considered mix of miniatures, puppets, animatics and matte paintings. Some of the earliest CGI in film history is also seen here in the film, in the scene where the skull of the hot-lead-covered Xenomorph cracks under the sudden onset of cold water before exploding.

Fincher's fascination with technology plays well into the ALIEN universe, where the complete absence of technology-and for that matter, weapons-is used as a compelling plot device to generate suspense and amplify the hopelessness of the characters' scenario. In order to vanquish the monster, they ultimately have to resort to the oldest form of technology known to mankind: fire.

ALIEN 3 fared decently at the box office, mostly due to franchise recognition and the considerable fan base built up by the film's two predecessors, but was mercilessly savaged by critics (as was to be expected).

Long considered the worst entry in the series until Jeanne-Pierre Jeunet gave David Fincher a run for his money with 1997's ALIEN: EVOLUTION, ALIEN 3 has become something of a cult classic as Fincher's profile has risen. Fans forgave the film of its transgressions because they knew Fincher's vision had been hijacked and tampered with. They knew that somewhere out there, in the countless reels of film that were shot, David Fincher's original vision was waiting to be given shape.

In 2003, Fox attempted to make amends by creating a new edit of the film, dubbed the Assembly Cut, for release in their Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set. Fincher refused to participate in the re-edit, understandably, so Fox had to go off his notes in restoring the auteur's original vision.

The 2003 Assembly Cut differs markedly from the 1992 original, restoring entire character arcs and adding a good 50 minutes worth of footage back into the story. There's several key changes in this new cut, like Ripley being discovered on the beach instead of her escape pod, the Xenomorph bursting out of an ox (and not a dog), and the removal of the newborn alien queen bursting out of Ripley's chest as she falls to her death.

The end result is a much better version of the film, giving us greater insight to the characters and their actions. While it doesn't quite make up for the studio's stunning lack of respect for Fincher during the making of the film, it ultimately proved that their concerns that the untested young director didn't know what he was doing were completely unfounded, and were the film's ultimate undoing.

The experience of making ALIEN 3 would be enough for any director to quit filmmaking forever, but thankfully this wasn't the end for David Fincher. He would go back to the music video and commercial sector to lick his wounds for a while, but his true feature breakout was just on the horizon.

COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (1992-1995)

The abject failure of ALIEN 3 was director David Fincher's first high-profile disappointment. It nearly made him swear off filmmaking altogether and he publicly even threatened as much- but when the dust settled, Fincher was able to slip back into commercial and music video directing with ease. Working once again in his comfort sphere, David Fincher churned out some of his best promotional work between the years 1992 and 1995.

NIKE: "INSTANT KARMA" (1992)

1992 saw sports gear giant Nike commission Fincher for a trio of commercials. The most well-known of these is "INSTANT KARMA", which mimics the energetic pace of music videos. David Fincher's touch is immediately evident here, with his high-contrast look that incorporates key components of his style like silhouettes and a cold color scheme.

NIKE: "BARKLEY ON BROADWAY" (1992)

Nike's "BARKELY ON BROADWAY" is shot in black and white, a curious choice for a high-profile spot like this. The central conceit of a theatrical stage show lends itself quite well to Fincher's talent for imaginative production design and lighting. Like "INSTANT KARMA", "BARKLEY ON BROADWAY" has taken on something of a cult status, especially because of Charles Barkley's cheeky persona.

NIKE: "MAGAZINE WARS" (1992)

The third spot, "MAGAZINE WARS", revolves around the conceit of sports magazine covers in a newsstand coming to life and causing a mess. The idea is heavily reliant on visual effects, which comes naturally to David Fincher. While it's a brilliant idea, it's one that's most likely inspired by a similar scene in Gus Van Sant's feature MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, which had come out only a year earlier.

NIKE: "BARKLEY OF SEVILLE" (1993)

In 1993, Fincher once again collaborated with NBA superstar Charles Barkley on another spot for Nike called "BARKLEY OF SEVILLE" that makes use of some potent old world imagery that David Fincher's prime influence Stanley Kubrick used so excellently in 1975's BARRY LYNDON (while also foreshadowing the eerie Illuminati imagery that Kubrick would depict inEYES WIDE SHUT six years later). The piece is textbook Fincher, featuring a dueling orange and blue color palette, theatrical lighting that highlights some excellent production design and casts artful silhouettes.

BUDWEISER: "GINGER OR MARIANNE" (1993)

Also in 1993, Fincher took on two spots for Budweiser beer. The first, "GINGER OR MARIANNE" features young adults playing pool and debating their preferences of old TV character crushes. The pool hall is lit in smoky, desaturated warm tones with high contrast, as per Fincher's established aesthetic.

BUDWEISER: "CLASSIC ROCK" (1993)

The second Budweiser spot, "CLASSIC ROCK", features a handful of middle-aged dudes golfing and arguing over their favorite acts. David Fincher utilizes the high contrast natural light on the scenic golf course, supplementing it with a subtle gliding camera as it follows the characters. The result is a pretty conventional, but no less well-crafted, piece of advertising.

CHANEL: "THE DIRECTOR" (1993)

Fincher's spot for Chanel, called "THE DIRECTOR", is an excellent example of his "grunge-glam" aesthetic. The piece makes evocative use of its cold, blue color palette and smoky, European urban setting, with the director's high contrast lighting bouncing off the wet streets and old-world architecture. Fincher's fondness for revealing the artifice of the shooting process is incorporated into the narrative, as his opening vignette is revealed to be the shoot for a large movie, with the titular director being shown mostly in abstract, silhouette form.

COCA-COLA: "BLADE ROLLER" (1993)

Fincher's filmography owes a lot to the work of Ridley Scott and his brother, Tony Scott. Ridley's influence in particular is deeply felt in the fundamental building blocks of David Fincher's aesthetic, and Fincher's "BLADE ROLLER" spot for Coca-Cola seems to be directly lifted from Ridley's visionary sci-fi masterpiece BLADE RUNNER (1982).

We see a dystopian city of the future, characterized by neon lights and Asian architecture, bathed in perpetual smoke and soaked through to the bone. Fincher's signature high contrast, cold look plays directly into the BLADE RUNNER style, which the young director builds upon by adding his own flourishes like artful silhouettes and a high-energy camera that screams through the cityscape."BLADE ROLLER" is one of David Fincher's most well-known commercials, and easily one of his best.

AT&T: "YOU WILL" CAMPAIGN (1993)

It's not uncommon for advertisers to create entire campaigns with multiple spots centered around a singular idea. In 1993, AT&T wanted to communicate how their technologies were going to be at the forefront of the digital revolution, which would have long-term ramifications for how we live our lives and connect with others.

To convey this message, AT&T hired Fincher-a director well known for his fascination with technology-for their "YOU WILL" campaign. The campaign is a series of seven spots that actually predict many of the things that are commonplace today, albeit in a laughably clunky, primitive form that was the 90's version of "hi-tech".

The spots show us various vignettes of people connecting with others through AT&T's theoretical future tech: GPS navigation, doctors looking at injuries over video-link, video phone calls, sending faxes over tablets, and more. Fincher's high contrast, cold palette serves him well with this campaign, further enhancing the appeal of this promising technology that aims to transform our lives.

Looking back at these spots over twenty years, it's easy to laugh at the clunky tech on display, but it's remarkable how much of it they actually got right.

MADONNA: "BAD GIRL" (1993)

David Fincher's output during this period of his career was heavily weighted with commercials, but he did make a few music videos, one of which was another collaboration with pop diva Madonna for her track "BAD GIRL".

The video incorporates some Hollywood talent in the form of Christopher Walken who plays a silent, watchful guardian angel of sorts and supporting character stalwart Jim Rebhorn, who would later appear in Fincher's THE GAME four years later.

The look of"BAD GIRL" is similar to Fincher's previous collaborations with Madonna, featuring high contrast lighting, diffused highlights and a smoky, cold color palette. The video is very cinematic, no doubt owing to a large budget afforded by the combined clout of Madonna and David Fincher (as well as Walken's goofy dancing, seen briefly towards the middle).

LEVI'S: "KEEP IT LOOSE" (1993)

The first of several spots that Fincher would take on for jeans-maker Levi's, "KEEP IT LOOSE" features the director's iconic blue color palette as a static background, with a variety of actors composited into the scene dancing wildly and expressing themselves in their hilariously baggy 90's jeans.

LEVI'S: "REASON 259: RIVETS" (1994)

1994 saw several more Levi's spots put on Fincher's plate, with "REASON 259: RIVETS" being the standout. The piece features the cold, blue high contrast look David Fincher is known for, along with a premise centering around tech-in this instance, a machine that is able to punch a single jeans rivet into someone's nose as a decorative stud. The spot as it exists online currently can't be embedded, but you can watch it here.

THE ROLLING STONES: "LOVE IS STRONG" (1994)

Fincher's video for The Rolling Stones' "LOVE IS STRONG" is shot in high contrast black and white, featuring grungy bohemian types in a smoky, urban setting.

The video shows off Fincher's natural talent for visual effects, as he composites his actors as giants against various NYC landmarks, using the dwarfed city below them as their own personal playground. It's a pretty simple concept, but extremely well-executed and staged-a credit to Fincher's meticulousness.

SE7EN (1995)

In the mid-90's, a script by newcomer Andrew Kevin Walker called SE7EN (a stylization of "seven") was making the rounds and generating excitement all over town. Readers and creative executives alike hailed its bold, original storyline and that ending.

That audacious, coup-de-grace ending that nobody saw coming. That ending that could possibly never be put into the finished film and thus had to be rewritten and castrated into oblivion for fear that its inclusion could break cinema itself. Indulgent hyperbole aside, it was the ending that cajoled a young David Fincher back into the director's seat that he had so publicly sworn off after a catastrophic experience with his debut, ALIEN 3 (1992).

While David Fincher didn't have enough clout on his own to drop mandates that the original ending would remain as written, his stars (Hollywood heavyweights) Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman did, and they used that clout to back up this untested auteur. As such, Fincher was in an enviable position to infuse this hauntingly original story-free from the baggage of franchise-with his unflinching style and uncompromising vision.

SE7EN takes place in an unnamed, crumbling metropolis of perpetual precipitation and endless blight-an oppressive environment where hope goes to die. Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a longtime member of the city's police force, is in his last week of retirement, with a young, headstrong detective named Mills (Brad Pitt) arriving in town to take his place.

On their first day together, they are called to a murder scene where an obese man has been forced to literally eat himself to death.

Initially assuming it to be another one of the city's routine murders-business as usual-, a similar scene at a lawyer's office the next day (where the victim was forced to carve up his own body and the word "greed" is painted on the floor in his blood) prompts a second look at the fat man's murder scene (where Somerset finds "gluttony" written in grease behind the fridge).

This discovery prompts the detectives to realize that they are in the midst of a killing spree perpetrated by a psychopath who carries out his murders in accordance with the seven deadly sins and leaves behind grisly scenes that taunt and challenge his pursuers. With the days passing and the bodies piling up, Somerset and Mills must race against time to deduce the killer's identity and stop him before his grand plan reaches its shocking and grisly conclusion.

Morgan Freeman is pitch perfect as the insightful, bookish Detective Somerset-a man haunted by the mistakes of his past and the city that threatens to consume him. His presence lends a great deal of gravitas and authority to the film, grounding the outlandish story developments in reason and logic and making them all the more scarier because of their realism.

Brad Pitt's performance as the hotheaded, impatient Detective Mills is interesting in that the performance itself tends to be wooden at times but we as the audience are still pulled into his swirling emotional whirlpool.

Perhaps it's only because Pitt has become such a sublimely subtle actor in the twenty years since that his forcefulness in SE7EN reads now as a younger man struggling with inherent talent but an unpolished craft. Mills' impatience and stubbornness is well set-up throughout the film-when assigned a handful of heavy philosophical books by Somerset, he opts instead to read the Cliff Notes versions.

Because he takes shortcuts and is quick to action without necessarily thinking things through, he's in a prime position to be manipulated by Spacey's John Doe and play into his twisted, murderous scheme.

Speaking of John Doe, Kevin Spacey absolutely murders it as SE7EN's creepy, calculating killer (puns!). Spacey imbues this psychopath with a degree of intelligence and brilliance that one doesn't necessarily expect in their garden-variety serial killer.

For Doe, his life's work IS his life-he has no job or relationships to speak of, only a single-minded focus to complete his grand plan and etch himself permanently into the criminal history books. As evidenced by Netflix's HOUSE OF CARDS series, Spacey is at his best under Fincher's direction, and their first collaboration together in SE7EN results in the actor's most mesmerizing performance in a career stuffed with them.

While the potency of SE7EN's story hinges on this trifecta of brilliant performers, Fincher doesn't skimp in the supporting department either. He enlists Gwyneth Paltrow (who coincidentally was dating Pitt at the time) to play Pitt's supportive, sweet wife, Tracy.

Paltrow has something of a bland reputation of an actress, but collaborating with auteurs like David Fincher, James Gray, or Paul Thomas Anderson bring out the very best in her and remind us why she's an excellent actress.

Paltrow takes what could easily be the standard non-confrontational, supporting house wife stock character and infuses it with a creeping pathos and dread- grappling with moral conflict over bringing a child into the dark, overbearing world that Fincher has created on-screen.

In another nod to director Stanly Kubrick's profound influence on Fincher, FULL METAL JACKET's (1987) fire-and-brimstone drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey shows up here as Somerset's weary precinct captain. Additionally, John C McGinley shows up against-type as a militaristically macho SWAT commander, as does Mark Boone Junior as a shady, scruffy informant to Somerset.

To accomplish his stark, pitch-black vision, Fincher enlists the eye of cinematographer Darius Khondji, who is able to translate David Fincher's signature aesthetic (high contrast lighting, cold color palette, silhouettes and deep wells of shadow) onto the 35mm film image.

The film is presented in the 2.35:1 anamorphic aspect ratio, but in watching some of the film's supplemental features (and with no other evidence to go on), I'm convinced that Fincher and Khondji didn't actually shoot anamorphic.

It appears the 2.35:1 aspect ratio was achieved via a matte in post-production, which plays into Fincher's reputation as a visual perfectionist who uses digital technology to exert control over the image down to the smallest detail. This control extends to the camera movement, which uses cranes and dollies for measured effect, echoing John Doe's precise, predetermined nature.

In fact, the only time that Fincher goes handheld is during the foot-chase sequence in Doe's apartment complex and the finale in the desert, both of which are the only moments in the film that the balance of control is tipped out of any one person's favor, leaving only chaos to determine what happens next.

While SE7EN was filmed in downtown Los Angeles, David Fincher intended for it to stand in for an unnamed East Coast city, which he successfully achieved via a mix of careful location selection and production designer Arthur Max's vision of oppressive decay.

A never-ending, torrential downpour of rain amplifies Fincher's signature grunge aesthetic, although its presence was initially less about thematics and more about creating continuity with Pitt's scenes (who had to film all of his part first before leaving to work on Terry Gilliam's 12 MONKEYS).

Howard Shore crafts an ominous score that utilizes a particular brassy sound evocative of old-school noir cinema, but its' in Fincher's source cue selection that SE7EN's music really stands out.

He uses a cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" for the opening credits, foreshadowing David Fincher's later collaborations with NIN frontman Trent Reznor on the scores for THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011).

Other standout cues include a Marvin Gaye track playing in the Mills apartment, and-in another nod to Kubrick-classical arrangements that waft through the cavernous library Somerset conducts his research in.

It's also worth highlighting SE7EN as Fincher's first collaboration with Ren Klyce, who would go on create the visceral, evocative soundscapes of Fincher's subsequent films.

Overall, SE7EN is a supreme technical achievement on all fronts- a fact realized by the studio (New Line Cinema), who then mounted an aggressive awards campaign on the film's behalf. Only Richard Francis-Bruce's crisp editing was nominated at the Academy Awards, with neither David Fincher nor his stellar cast getting a nod.

Despite the cast turning in great, truly original performances, it's apparent that Fincher's emphasis on the visuals and the technical aspects of the production came at the expense of devoting as much energy and attention to the performances as he probably should have.

The result is a visually groundbreaking film with slightly wooden performances, despite the cast's best efforts and a first-rate narrative.

An oft-mentioned aspect of SE7EN is its haunting opening credits sequence, designed by Kyle Cooper. The sequence acts as a preview of John Doe's meticulous psychosis, with jittery text trying to literally crawl away from the disturbing images that we're shown in quick, rapid succession.

Shot separately from the main shoot after the original scripted opening credits sequence was trashed, the piece both pulls us into this sick, twisted world and prepares us for what comes next. The sequence was shot by late, great cinematographer Harris Savides-who would go on to lens Fincher's THE GAME (1997) and ZODIAC (2007)-and edited by Angus Wall, who has since become one of David Fincher's key editors.

Fincher, more so than a great deal of his contemporaries, uses the opening credits of his features to set the mood and the tone of his story in a highly creative and stimulating style. His incorporation of the technique began in earnest with SE7EN, but the practice hails back to the work of Alfred Hitchchock, who pioneered the idea of opening credits as part of the storytelling and not just an arbitrary device to let the audience know who did what.

SE7EN is one of the earliest instances in Fincher's feature filmography in which his aesthetic coalesces into something immediately identifiable-no small feat for a man at bat for only the second time. The film places a subtle, yet strong emphasis on architecture-specifically, an early twentieth-century kind of civic architecture seen in noir films and old New York buildings (a mix of classical and art deco).

There's a distinct claustrophobic feeling to the city David Fincher is portraying, which is reinforced by his framing of several shots from a low angle looking up at the ceiling (implying that the walls are closing in around our characters).

Fincher's fascination with technology is also reflected in a mix of cutting-edge forensic tools and outdated computer systems that are used by the protagonists to find their man. Lastly, a strong air of nihilism marks Fincher's filmography, with the incorporation of its philosophy giving SE7EN its pitch-black resonance.

Several story elements, like the moral ambiguity of Detective Mills, the rapid decay of the city aided and abetted by uncaring bureaucrats, and the darkly attractive nature of John Doe's crimes cause a severe existential crisis for our protagonists.

SE7EN was a huge hit upon its release, and put David Fincher on the map in a way that ALIEN 3 never did (or could have done)-precisely because it was an original property in which Fincher could assert himself, free from the excessive studio needling that plagued top-dollar franchises back then (and still today).

This freedom resulted in one of the most shocking thrillers in recent memory, jolting audiences from apathy and re-energizing a fear response that had been dulled by the onslaught of uninspired slasher films during the 80's.

SE7EN, along with Fincher's other zeitgeist-y film FIGHT CLUB (1999), is frequently cited as one of the best pictures of the 90's, perfectly capturing the existential, grungy essence of the decade. Above all, SE7EN is a gift-for David Fincher, another chance to prove himself after the failure of ALIEN 3, and for us, a groundbreaking new voice in the cinematic conversation.

That, my friends, is what was in the box.

THE GAME (1997)

Director David Fincher had built up quite a career for himself in the commercial and music video realm through his association with Propaganda Films. After the breakout success of his feature SE7EN (1995), Fincher was able to leverage this newfound clout into a collaboration with Propaganda for his third feature, a suspenseful puzzle thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock called THE GAME (1997).

THE GAME's origins are interesting in and of itself, with Fincher actually being attached to direct the script by John Brancato and Michael Ferris as his return to features after his abysmal experience onALIEN 3 (1992). The sudden availability of SE7EN star Brad Pitt forced the production of that film to go first and delayed THE GAME by several years.

Ultimately, this proved to be a good thing, as SE7EN's runaway success set THE GAME up for similar success with a built-in audience hungry for the visionary director's next work.

Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a wealthy investment banker who lives by himself in a huge mansion outside of San Francisco. His solitary existence keeps him at an emotional distance to those around him, a result of some deep emotional scarring that stemmed from his father's suicide during childhood.

On a particularly fateful birthday (having reached the age his father was when he killed himself), Nick's brother Conrad (Sean Penn) shows up with an unusual present: the opportunity to participate in a live-action game, organized by an enigmatic entertainment company called Consumer Recreation Services.

Nick ventures over to the CRS offices to indulge his curiosity, but after a rigorous mental and physical evaluation, he's ultimately deemed unfit to take part in the game.

So imagine his surprise when he arrives home that night to find a clown mannequin in his driveway (placed in the same position that his father was found after jumping off the mansion's roof), and the nightly news anchor interrupts his television broadcast to address Nick personally and announce the beginning of his "Game".

Trying to ascertain just what exactly is going on, Nick follows a series of perplexing and macabre clues, eventually encountering a waitress named Christine (Deborah Kara Unger) who may or may not be a part of this Game.

As his life is manipulated to increasingly dangerous degrees, Nick loses control of his orderly lifestyle and begins to question CRS' true intentions for him-- is this really just a game, or is it an elaborate con designed to drain his considerable fortune and rub him out in the process?

With THE GAME, Fincher has constructed an intricate puzzle for the audience to solve, wisely placing the narrative firmly within Nick's perspective so that we're taken along for his wild ride. Because the story is so dependent on shocking twists and turns, subsequent re-watchings can't replicate the exhilarating experience of seeing it for the first time.

However, Fincher does a great job of peppering clues throughout that are so subtle I didn't even notice them until my fourth time around, such as Unger's character being on the periphery of the first restaurant scene without so much as a close-up or wide shot of her face to announce her presence.

Likewise, Nick's first visit to CRS contains a strange interaction wherein the receptionist appears to give an order to the Vice President of Engineering (played by recently-diseased character actor James Rebhorn)-- why would a receptionist be telling a VP what to do?

These are only two subtle clues in a story that's absolutely stuffed with them, which makes for something new to find with each re-watching.

Douglas turns in a fine performance as a cold, lizard-like Scrooge archetype. Nicolas Van Orton plays like a subdued, less flamboyant version of WALL STREET's Gordon Gekko, which works because the distant, calculating aristocrat archetype is one that Douglas can pull off better than anyone.

David Fincher's casting of Douglas also adds reinforcement to the idea of Fincher as Stanley Kubrick's heir apparent (Douglas' father, Kirk Douglas, was also a famous film star who headlined Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY (1957) and SPARTACUS (1960).

As the cold, cynical waitress Christine, Deborah Kara Unger is a great foil to Douglas' character, as well as an inspired female part that resists becoming a conventional "love interest" trope. Her ability to mask her feelings and intentions is crucial to the success of THE GAME, leaving Douglas and the audience constantly trying to figure out where her loyalties lay.

Sean Penn's role as younger brother Conrad is smaller than his usual performances, but he is no less memorable as a disheveled, mischievous agent of chaos. The late character actor James Rebhorn may have never held the spotlight in his own right, but every one of his performances was never anything less than solid, as can be seen in his performance as the disorganized, CRS VP of Engineering Jim Feingold. Rebhorn's talents get a chance to truly shine in THE GAME, becoming the human face of the ominous CRS entity and, by extension, the film's de facto antagonist.

David Fincher also throws in some small cameos in the form of fellow Propaganda director Spike Jonze as a medic towards the conclusion and SE7EN's Mark Boone Junior as a private investigator tailing Nick.

THE GAME is also Fincher's first collaboration with the late, great cinematographer Harris Savides in the feature world (they had previously shot a number of commercials together). The anamorphic 35mm film frame is awash in steely blues and teals, accentuated by high contrast lighting that signifies David Fincher's signature touch. Flashback sequences filmed on 8mm provide a dreamlike nostalgia that appropriately dances along the line of sentimentality and melancholy.

Savides is well-suited to translate Fincher's vision to screen, ably creating a push-and-pull dichotomy between the sleek polish of Nick's old money world and the slick CRS offices and the seedy grunge of the back alleyways and slums that Nick's Game takes him to.

The film is essentially about Nick's loss of control, which juxtaposes his confused flailing against deliberate, observational compositions and precise dolly movements as a way to echo CRS' forceful herding of Nick along a predetermined path.

This visual precision is highly reminiscent of Kubrick's work, and very well may be what it would have looked like if Kubrick had ever decided to make an Alfred Hitchchock thriller. Another nod to Kubrick can see in the video slideshow that Nick watches as part of his initial evaluation, which in and of itself highly resembles its infamous counterpart in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971).

SE7EN's Howard Shore returns to create the score for THE GAME, crafting an intriguing, brassy sound to reflect the propulsive mystery and peppered with a tinge of melancholy piano that hints at Nick's inability to move past his father's death.

David Fincher's stellar ear for needle drops also results in the incorporation of the White Rabbits' iconic "Somebody To Love" as a psychedelic taunting mechanism in the scene where Nick arrives at his mansion to find it's been vandalized with black light graffiti.

All of these elements are tied together by Ren Klyce's sound design into an evocative sonic landscape that draws us further into the puzzle.

Fincher's music video work often explored the boundaries of the film frame, transgressing arbitrary lines to see what was being hidden from view. Most of the time, this meant that the artifice of the production process ( crew, set facades, equipment, etc.) was made known to the viewer.

THE GAME is an appropriate avenue to explore this idea in feature form because the story concerns itself with what happens when Nick is essentially placed inside of his own movie. This plays out in the form of any close inspection of a given object or development by Nick reveals its inherent fakery and connection to filmmaking.

Christine's apartment is revealed as a fake set via various set dressing techniques Nick stumbles upon. The hail of gunfire directed at Nick and Christine by masked gunmen is comprised of harmless blanks. Nick's iconic plunge from the top of a San Francisco skyscraper is cushioned by a giant stunt airbag.

The game Nick has been thrust into is an elaborate, deliberate manipulation of actors and events designed to take him on a film-like character arc and transformation.

To this effect, architecture (another of David Fincher's thematic fascinations) plays a huge role in the proceedings. Fincher's locations and sets are always architecturally impressive, and THE GAME doesn't disappoint in the classical style seen in Nick's mansion and San Francisco's financial district, as well as the sleek modernity of CRS' futuristic offices.

David Fincher often frames his subjects from a low angle in order to show the ceilings-this accomplishes the dual effect of establishing the realism of the space as well as conveying a subtle sense of claustrophobia (a sensation very important to THE GAME's tension).

Production designer Jeffrey Beecroft makes great use of lines as a way to direct your eye (especially in the CRS headquarters set). These lines subtly point Nick (and by extension, us) in the right direction to go despite the orchestrated chaos around him.

Fincher is able to find several instances within the story to indulge in other fascinations. THE GAME uses technology to striking ends in advancing the plot, like the television magically talking to Nick in his own home, or the hidden video camera lodged inside the clown mannequin's eye.

A distinct punk aesthetic runs through Fincher's filmography, with the most literal examples being found in FIGHT CLUB (1999) and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011), but even in a cold-Scrooge-turned-good tale such as THE GAME, David Fincher is able to incorporate elements of punk culture in a natural way (the aforementioned mansion break-in and black light graffiti vandalism sequence).

And finally, Fincher's approach to the story is informed by a nihilistic sensibility, in that Nick is inherently a cynical, selfish person, along with the prominent theme of suicide and the ultimate revelation of the film's events as orchestrated manipulations and inherently false.

THE GAME was a modest hit upon its release, bolstered by a compelling story and strong performances that were, in this author's opinion, much better than those seen in SE7EN. By achieving a balance between engrossing performances and superb technical mastery, Fincher shows off huge growth as a director with THE GAME.

Ultimately, the film itself was somewhat lost in the sea of late 90's releases, and for the longest time it languished on a bare-bones catalog DVD with a neglected transfer. Thankfully, THE GAME has undergone something of a cultural reappraisal with the release of The Criterion Collection's outstanding Blu Ray transfer.

Now, THE GAME is often referenced among film circles in the same breath as his best work, and is fondly remembered as one of the best films of the 1990's (alongside SE7EN and FIGHT CLUB). For David Fincher, THE GAME cemented his reputation as a great director with hard edge and reliable commercial appeal.

FIGHT CLUB (1999)

1999's FIGHT CLUB was the first David Fincher film I ever saw, and it became a watershed moment for me in that it was absolutely unlike any movie I had ever seen. Granted, I was only in middle school at the time and hadn't quite discovered the world of film at large beyond what was available in the multiplex.

FIGHT CLUB was one of the earliest experiences that turned me on to the idea of a director having a distinct style, a stamp he could punch onto the film that claimed it as his own. My own experience with FIGHT CLUB was easily dwarfed by the larger reaction to the film, which has since become something of an anthem for Generation X-a bottling up of the 90's zeitgeist that fermented into a potent countercultural brew.

Coming off the modest success of 1997's THE GAME, director David Fincher was in the process of looking for a follow-up project when he was sent "Fight Club", a novel by the groundbreaking author (and Portland son) Chuck Palahniuk.

A self-avowed non-reader, David Fincher nonetheless blazed through the novel, and by the time he had put the book down he knew it was going to be his next project. There was just one problem-the book had been optioned and was in development at Twentieth Century Fox, his sworn enemies.

Their incessant meddling and subterfuge during the production of Fincher's ALIEN 3(1992) made for a miserable shooting experience, ultimately ruined the film, and nearly caused Fincher to swear off feature filmmaking forever.

This time, however, he would be ready. He was now a director in high demand, having gained significant clout from the success of SE7EN (1995), and he used said clout to successfully pitch his vision of FIGHT CLUB to Laura Ziskin and the other executives at Fox.

The studio had learned the error of its ways and was eager to mend relations with the maverick director, so they allowed him a huge amount of leeway in realizing his vision. Armed with the luxury of not having to bend to the whims of nervous studio executives, David Fincher was able to fashion a pitch-black comedy about masculinity in crisis and the battle between modern commercialism and our primal, animalistic natures.

The novel takes place in Wilmington, Delaware (home to the headquarters of several major credit card companies), but Fincher sets his adaptation in an unnamed city, mostly because of legal clearance reasons (which would have been a nightmare considering how much FIGHT CLUB disparages major corporations and institutions).

Our protagonist is the unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton), an insomniac office drone obsessed with Swedish furniture and support groups for serious, terminal diseases he doesn't have. He finds in these support groups an emotional release and a cure for his insomnia, achieving a stasis that props him up while pushing down the nagging feeling that he's wasting his life away.

His world is up-ended by the arrival of the acidic Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow support group freeloader that confounds his perceived progress at all turns.

Constant travel because of his job as a recall analyst for a major car manufacturer provides some relief, and it is on one particular flight home that he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), whose effortless cool is unlike anything the Narrator has found in his so-called "single-serving" flight companions. Upon returning home, he finds his apartment has blown up due to mysterious circumstances. With nowhere else to turn, the Narrator calls up Tyler on a whim, who offers him a place at his ramshackle squatter mansion on the industrial fringes of town.

As the two men bond, they discover a cathartic release from an unexpected source: fighting. They channel this release into the founding of an underground brawling organization called Fight Club, where similarly culturally disenfranchised men can get together and unleash their primal side in bareknuckle grappling matches.

Soon, the duo's entire outlook on life and masculinity changes, with the Narrator in particular taking charge of his own destiny and liberating himself from his perceived shackles at work.

In Fight Club, they have tapped into something very primal within the male psyche-a psyche subdued in the wake of rampant commercialism, feminism, and political correctness, just itching to be unleashed.

Fight Club grows larger than Tyler or The Narrator had ever hoped or expected, with satellite chapters popping up in other cities and the purpose of the secretive club evolving to include acts of domestic terrorism and anarchy.

When The Narrator finds himself losing control of the monster that they've created, he comes into mortal conflict with Tyler, who has gone off the deep end in his attempts to fundamentally and radically change the world.

Norton brings a droll, dry sense of humor to his performance as the Narrator, a medicated and sedate man who must "wake up". In what is one of his most memorable roles, Norton ably projects the perverse, profoundly morbid thoughts of his character with sardonic wit and a sickly physicality. This frail, scrawny physicality is all the more remarkable considering Norton had just come off the production of Tony Kaye's AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998), where made him bulk up with a considerable amount of muscle.

In his second collaboration with David Fincher after their successful team-up in SE7EN, Brad Pitt also turns in a career highlight performance as Tyler Durden, a soap salesman and anarchist with a weaponized masculinity and radical, seductive worldview that he is fully committed to living out.

His character's name and persona have entered our pop culture lexicon as the personification of the unleashed, masculine id and the grungy, counter-commercial mentalities that defined the 1990's.

Helena Bonham Carter counters the overbearing masculinity of David Fincher's vision while oddly complementing it as Marla Singer, the very definition of a hot mess. Marla is a cold, cynical woman dressed up in black, Goth affectations.

Her aggressive feminine presence is an appropriate counterbalance to Tyler Durden's roaring machismo, as well as serves to highlight the film's homoerotic undertones. Meat Loaf, a popular musician in his own right, plays Bob-a huge, blubbering mess with "bitch tits" and a cuddly demeanor, while Jared Leto bleaches his hair to the point of anonymity in his role as a prominent acolyte of Durden's (and thorn in the side of The Narrator).

To achieve FIGHT CLUB's oppressively grungy look, David Fincher enlists the eye of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, the son of legendary DP Jordan Cronenweth (who had previously worked with Fincher on ALIEN 3). The younger Cronenweth would go on to lens several of Fincher's later works due to the strength of their first collaboration on FIGHT CLUB.

The film is shot on Super 35mm and presented in the 2.40:1 aspect ratio, but it wasn't shot anamorphic-it was instead shot with spherical lenses in order to help convey the gritty tone Fincher intended. Indeed, FIGHT CLUB is easily David Fincher's grungiest work to date-the image is coated in a thick layer of grime and sludge that's representative of the toxic philosophies espoused by its antihero subjects.

The foundation of FIGHT CLUB's distinct look is built with Fincher's aesthetic signature: high contrast lighting (with lots of practical lights incorporated into the framing), and a cold, sickly green/teal color tint. David Fincher and Cronenweth further expanded on this by employing a combination of contrast-stretching, underexposing, and re-silvering during the printing process in order to achieve a dirty, decaying look.

The production of FIGHT CLUB also generated some of the earliest public reports of Fincher's proclivity for shooting obscene numbers of takes-a technique also employed by David Fincher's cinematic forebear, Stanley Kubrick.

Both men employed the technique as a way to exert control over their actors' performances and wear them down to a place of naturalistic "non-acting". While this earns the ire of many a performer, it also earn as much respect for a director willing to sit through the tedium of dozens upon dozens of takes in order to really mold a performance in the editing room.

In a career full of visually dynamic films, FIGHT CLUB is easily the most volatile and kinetic of them all. Fincher employs a number of visual tricks to help convey a sense of surrealist reality: speed-ramping, playing with the scale of objects (i.e, presenting the contents of a garbage can as if we were flying through the Grand Canyon), and Norton's Narrator breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly (a technique he'd later use to infamous effect in Netflix's HOUSE OF CARDS series).

Production designer Alex McDowell supplements David Fincher's grimy vision with imaginative, dungeon-like sets in which to house this unleashed sense of masculinity, all while countering the sterile, color-less environments of the Narrator's office and apartment.

Interestingly enough, the Narrator's apartment is based almost exactly off of Fincher's first apartment in (soul-suckingly bland) Westwood, an apartment he claims that he had always wanted to blow up.

THE GAME's James Haygood returns to sew all these elements together into a breathtaking edit with manic pacing and psychotic energy, creating something of an apex of the particular sort of music-video-style editing that emerged in 90's feature films.

FIGHT CLUB might just be the farthest thing (commercially-speaking) from a conventional Hollywood film, so it stands to reason that a conventional Hollywood score would be ill-fitting at best, and disastrously incompatible at worst. This mean that Howard Shore, who had scored David Fincher's previous two features, had to go.

Really, ANY conventional film composer had to go in favor of something entirely new. In his selection of electronic trip-hop duo The Dust Brothers, Fincher received a groundbreaking score, comprised almost entirely of drum loops and "found" sounds. I have almost every note from that score memorized-I used to listen to the soundtrack CD almost every day during high school as I did my homework.

And then, of course, there's The Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?": a rock song that will live in infamy because of its inclusion inFIGHT CLUB's face-melting finale. Sound and picture are now inextricably linked in our collective consciousness- I defy you to find someone whose perception of that particular song has not been forever colored by the image of skyscrapers imploding on themselves and toppling to the ground.

The music of FIGHT CLUB is further heightened by the contributions of David Fincher's regular sound designer Ren Klyce, who was awarded with an Oscar nomination for his work on the film.

A main reason that Fincher responded so strongly to his initial reading of Palahniuk's novel is that it possessed several themes that David Fincher was fascinated by and liked to explore in his films.

On a philosophical level, the story contains strong ties to nihilism with Tyler Durden's enthusiastic rejection and destruction of institutions and value systems, and the subsequent de-humanization that stems from Fight Club's evolved mission objective (which extrapolates nihilistic virtues to their extreme).

The novel's overarching screed against commercialism also appealed to Fincher, who gleefully recognized the inherent irony in a director of commercials making a film about consumerism as the ultimate evil. David Fincher plays up this irony throughout the film by including lots of blatant product placement (there's apparently a Starbucks cup present in every single scene).

This countercultural cry against commercialism and corporate appeasement is inherently punk, which is yet another aesthetic that Fincher has made potent use of throughout his career.

With FIGHT CLUB, David Fincher also finds ample opportunity to indulge in his own personal fascinations. His background at ILM and subsequent familiarity with visual effects results in an approach that relies heavily on cutting-edge FX.

This can be seen in the strangest sex sequence in cinematic history, which borrows the "bullet-time" photography technique from THE MATRIX (1999) to turn Pitt and Carter into enormous copulating monuments that blend and morph into one single mass of biology.

The idea of stitching numerous still photographs to convey movement (where the traditional use of a motion picture camera would have been impractical or impossible) also allows Fincher to rocket through time and space, such as in the scene where we scream from the top of a skyscraper down to find a van packed with explosives in the basement garage.

Architecture also plays in important role, with Durden's decrepit (yet organic) house on Paper Street resembling the grand old Victorian houses in LA's Angelino Heights juxtaposed against the faceless, monolithic city skyscrapers that are destroyed in the film's climax.

Here, as in his earlier features, David Fincher tends to frame his subjects from a low angle looking up-this is done as a way to establish the realism of his sets and locations while imbuing the subjects themselves with an exaggerated sense of power and authority.

FIGHT CLUB also contains Fincher's most well-known opening credits sequence: a dizzying roller-coaster ride through the Narrator's brain.

Beginning with the firing of impulses in the fear center, the camera pulls back at breakneck speed, with our scale changing organically until we emerge from a pore on Norton's sweat-slicked forehead and slide down the polished nickel of the gun barrel lodged in his mouth. It's an incredibly arresting way to start a film, and prepares us for the wild ride ahead.

Finally, FIGHT CLUB allows David Fincher to really play with the boundaries of his frame and reveal the inherent artifice of the film's making. This conceit is best illustrated in two scenes. The first is the "cigarette burns" projection-room scene where the Narrator reveals Tyler's fondness for splicing single frames of hardcore pornography into children's films by explaining the projection process to the audience in layman's terms.

This scene is present in the novel, but Fincher's approach of it is further informed by his own experience working as a movie projectionist at the age of 16, where he had a co-worker who collected random snippets of a given film's most lurid moments into a secret envelope.

The second scene in question is Tyler's infamous "you are not your fucking khakis" monologue to camera, whereby his intensity causes the film he is recorded onto to literally wobble and expose the film strip's sprocket holes. The effect is that of the film literally disintegrating before our eyes-the story has gone off the rails and now we're helpless to do anything but just go along for the ride.

David Fincher's terrible experience with the studio on ALIEN 3 directly contributed to FIGHT CLUB being as groundbreaking and shocking as it was. When studio executives (most notably Laura Ziskin) inevitably bristled at the sight of David Fincher's bold, uncompromising vision in all its glory, their attempts to tone it down were blown up in their faces by a director who had already been burned by their tactics once before and was one step ahead of their game.

A great example of this is Ziskin asking David Fincher to change a controversial line (Marla Singer telling Tyler Durden that she wants to have his abortion), which David Fincher responded to by agreeing to change the line under the condition that it couldn't be changed any further after that. Ziskin quickly agreed, because how could anything be worse than that?

Imagine her outrage, then, when Fincher came back with Marla's line changed to "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school" and she couldn't do anything to change it back. Once David Fincher knew how to play his meddlesome executives to his benefit, he became truly unstoppable.

FIGHT CLUB made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and its worldwide theatrical run was met with polarized reviews and box office disappointment. Quite simply, audiences were not ready for Fincher's abrasive vision.

However, it was one of the first films to benefit from the DVD home video format, where it spread like wildfire amongst eager young cinephiles until it became a bona fide cult hit. It probably couldn't have been any other way- FIGHT CLUB was made to re-watch over and over again, to pore over all the little details and easter eggs that David Fincher and company peppered throughout to clue us into the true nature of Tyler Durden's existence.

FIGHT CLUB's release also had real-world implications in the formation of actual underground fight clubs all across the country. In mining the dramatic potential of a fictional masculinity crisis, FIGHT CLUB tapped into a very real one that was fueled by a noxious brew of feminism, political correct-ness, the new millennium, metrosexuality and frat-boy culture (a subgroup that glorified the carnage and violence while ironically failing to recognize the film's very palpable homoerotic undertones and thus assuming them into their own lifestyle).

Fifteen years removed from FIGHT CLUB's release, the film stands as the apex of the cynical pop culture mentality of the 1990's, as well as a defining thesis statement for a cutting-edge filmmaker with razor-sharp relevancy

If you want more inside info on the making of Fight Club, take a listen to the IFH Interview with FC screenwriter Jim Uhls.

PANIC ROOM (2000)

The expansive, sprawling nature of FIGHT CLUB's story meant that director David Fincher spent a great deal of the film's production in a van traveling to and from the film's four hundred locations. Naturally, he wished to downscale his efforts with his next project and find a story that took place in a single location.

He found it in a screenplay by David Koepp called PANIC ROOM, inspired by true stories of small, impenetrable fortresses that New York City's wealthy elite were building for themselves inside their homes. Because the story lent itself so well to an overtly Hitchockian style of execution and form, David Fincher approached PANIC ROOM (2002) as an exercise in pure genre, refusing to "elevate" the material with the infusion of potent allegory and subtextual thematics like he had done with FIGHT CLUB or SE7EN (1995).

The film is expertly constructed in a way that only Fincher could have envisioned, with top-notch filmmaking on par with any of his best work. However, PANIC ROOMwas somewhat lost in the noise of 2002's other releases, and thus doesn't enjoy the same cherished status of David Fincher's higher-profile work (despite the argument that it should).

Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is a recently divorced single mom, looking for a new home in Manhattan for her and her young daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart). They are shown a beautiful, expansive brownstone complete with cathedral ceilings, original crown molding, and a panic room-a hidden concrete room outfitted with survival and communications tech and designed as a refuge in the event of a home invasion.

Despite Meg's misgivings that the property is simply too much house for the two of them, she buys it anyway. As Meg and Sarah sleep during their first night in the house, three burglars-Junior (Jared Leto), Burnham (Forest Whitaker), and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) break inside.

Meg and Sarah are awakened by the commotion, and instinctually barricade themselves in the panic room. Any assurance of safety soon vanishes when Meg realizes that she never hooked up the panic room's dedicated phone line, along with the revelation that what the burglars are after-millions of dollars in US bonds-is hidden in a floor safe underneath their feet.

What ensues is a suspenseful, contained thriller that would make Hitchcock green with envy as Meg and Sarah fend off this trio of unpredictable male intruders who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

Jodie Foster is compelling as lead heroine Meg Altman, a fiercely maternal woman whose initial mild-mannered-ness gives way to a resourceful, cunning bravery. Interestingly, Foster replaced original actress Nicole Kidman, who had to leave the production due to the aggravation of an earlier injury (she still has a voice cameo as Meg's ex-husband's new girlfriend).

Despite the short notice, Foster exhibited enormous dedication to the role by giving up her chair on the Cannes Film Festival Jury as well as working through the pregnancy of her second child. Kristen Stewart, who was only eleven at the time of filming, turns in a great performance as Sarah, Meg's punk-y daughter with a cynical attitude and intelligence beyond her years.

Stewart provides a nice balance to Meg's refined femininity with a rough, tomboyish and androgynous quality (something which Foster had herself at Stewart's age). In making the character of Sarah a diabetic, Stewart is able to become an active participant in the suspense and engage us on a personal, visceral level.

The three burglars prove just as compelling as our female protagonists due to a complex combination of values and virtues that causes conflict between them. The most accessible of the three is Forest Whitaker as Burnam, a professional builder of panic rooms and a sensitive, honorable man who projects a warm, authoritative presence.

This complex physicality is essential to the success of the role, and Fincher's choice of Whitaker, who he previously knew not as an actor but as a fellow director at Propaganda Films, is an inspired one. Burnham is compelled not by greed but by obligation to his family, meaning that while he's misguided in his attempts to right his wrongs, he's not beyond saving.

His antithesis is Raoul, a mysterious, volatile man who quickly asserts himself as the group's dangerous wild card. Raoul is played by Dwight Yoakam, a country singer turned actor who injects a great deal of menace to the proceedings.

Jared Leto, who previously appeared in David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB in a small role, benefits from the expanded screen presence that the character of Junior affords him. Junior is the self-designated leader of the operation, but he quickly finds control of the situation slipping from his grasp as the night unfolds.

Leto finds an inspired angle into what would otherwise be the stock hotheaded, impatient villain archetype by turning Junior into a trust-fund kid who's ill-advised attempts at giving himself some edge (take those atrocious dreadlocks, for instance) only lead to the hardened criminals he's trying to impress taking him less seriously.

PANIC ROOM, like all of Fincher's pre-ZODIAC (2007) feature work, was filmed in the Super 35mm film format. While shot open-matte in the full-frame Academy aspect ratio, the finished film is presented on the widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio so that David Fincher had total freedom to compose the frame as he saw fit. He did it this way, as opposed to shooting in the anamorphic aspect ratio, because he apparently hates the limited lens choices and shallow depth of field that plagues the anamorphic process.

Fincher hired Darius Khondji, who had previously shot SE7EN, but Khondji left the production two weeks into the shoot due to creative differences with David Fincher's meticulously planned and extensively pre-visualized approach (which stifled any on-set spontaneity). Cinematography duties were then passed on to Conrad W. Hall (not to be confused with his father, the legendary Conrad Hall who shot ROAD TO PERDITION (2002) and COOL HAND LUKE (1967)).

Hall Junior proves adept at replicating Fincher's signature aesthetic via a high-contrast lighting scheme and a cold color palette whereby traditionally warm incandescent bulbs glow a pale yellow and the harsh fluorescents of the panic room take on a blue/teal cast. Fincher's mise-en-scene is dotted with practical lights, creating an underexposed, moody image that is bolstered by a "no light" approach-meaning that David Fincher and Hall sought as much darkness as they could get away with, primarily using the extremely soft light afforded by kino-flo rigs.

A highlight of PANIC ROOM's look is a constant, fluid, and precise camera that glides and floats through the house, as if unfettered by the limitations of human operation. This technique is achieved through the combination of the Technocrane and CGI that stitches multiple shots into one, seamless move.

The best example of this in the film is the virtuoso long take that occurs as the burglars break into the house. We first see them arrive, and swoop through the house as they try various entry points, all the while taking the time to show us Meg and Sarah asleep and unaware of the impending danger.

This shot would have been impossible to achieve before the rise of digital effects, a revolution that Fincher helped usher in due to his familiarity with the process from his days at ILM.

Because of his natural grasp on digital filmmaking tech, he is able to turn this incredibly complicated shot into a "thesis" money shot that condenses his entire visual approach to the film into a single moment while effortlessly establishing the geography of the house and orienting us for what's to come.

As I mentioned before, the extensive location shoots and setups required by FIGHT CLUB resulted in Fincher desiring a singular, contained scenario for his next project. In developing PANIC ROOM, he realized he wanted to create the entire house as a studio set (a la Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW (1954) so that he could exert complete control.

Toward that end, he hired SE7EN's production designer, Arthur Max, to construct the full-featured house inside a large soundstage as one continuous structure whose walls could be flown out to accommodate a camera gliding through the set.

Max's work here is nothing less than masterful, as nary a seam of the complicated construction exposes itself throughout the entire film. The same could be said of the fluid edit by Fincher's regular editor James Haygood, working in collaboration with Angus Wall.

Wall had previously edited bits and pieces of David Fincher's commercial work, as well as the opening credits to SE7EN, but PANIC ROOM is Wall's first feature editing job for David Fincher, and his success here has to led to continued employment in Fincher's later features.

After a brief hiatus taken during the production of FIGHT CLUB, composer Howard Shore returns to David Fincher's fold with a brassy, old-school score that oozes intrigue and foreboding.

During this time, Shore was consumed with scoring duties for Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, so PANIC ROOM was an assignment taken on precisely because of its low musical demands.

As it turns out, Shore's work in PANIC ROOM is generally regarded as some of his best and most brooding. The score is complemented by a superb sound mix by David Fincher's regular sound designer, Ren Klyce.

When done right, genre is a potent conduit for complex ideas and allegory with real-world implications. PANIC ROOM is essentially about two women fending off three male home invaders, but it is also about much more: the surveillance state, income equality, the switching of the parent-child dynamic.... the list goes on.

A visionary director like David Fincher is able to take a seemingly generic home invasion thriller and turn it into an exploration of themes and ideas. For instance, PANIC ROOMaffords Fincher the opportunity to indulge in his love for architecture, letting him essentially design and build an entire house from scratch.

The type of architecture that the house employs is also telling, adopting the handsome wood and crown molding of traditional brownstone houses found on the East Coast.

Architecture also serves an important narrative purpose, with the story incorporating building guts like air vents and telephone lines as dramatic hinging points that obstruct our heroes' progress and build suspense.

Again, David Fincher employs low angle compositions to reveal the set ceiling in a bid to communicate the location's "real-ness" as well as instill a sense of claustrophobia.

Fincher's fascination with tech is woven directly into the storyline, which allows him to explore the dramatic potential of a concrete room with a laser-activated door and surveillance cameras/monitors.

The twist, however, is that despite all this cutting-edge technology (circa 2002, provided), both the protagonists and the antagonists have to resort to lo-fi means to advance their cause. Another aesthetic conceit that David Fincher had been playing with during this period is the idea of micro-sized objects sized up to a macro scale.

In FIGHT CLUB, this could be seen with the shot of the camera pulling back out of a trashcan, its contents seemingly as large as planets.

Fincher echoes this conceit in PANIC ROOM via zooming in on crumbling concrete until it's as big as a mountain, diving through the gas hose as the burglars pump propane gas into the panic room, and jumping inside the glass enclosure of a flashlight to see a close up of the bulb spark on and off.

David Fincher ties this visual idea in with another signature of his films-imaginative opening credits sequences. With PANIC ROOM, he places his collaborators' names against the steel and glass canyons of New York City, as if the letters themselves were as big as skyscrapers and had always been a part of their respective structures.

As interesting of an idea it is, I'm not sure the large scope that these credits imply fully gels with a movie that's so self-contained and insular. And finally, the punk/nihilistic flair that hangs over David Fincher's filmography has a small presence in Kristen Stewart's androgynous punk stylings, as well as the appearance of The Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious on one of her t-shirts.

Fincher's desire to exert total control of the shoot via meticulous set-building and extensive computer pre-visualization ended up working against him, making for a long, strenuous shoot bogged down by technical difficulties and slow advancement.

However, the effort was worth it-PANIC ROOM became a box office hit upon its release, receiving generally positive reviews. As a lean, mean thriller, PANIC ROOM is incredibly exhilarating and well-made; perhaps even one of the best home invasion films ever made.

More importantly, PANIC ROOM would be the last feature that David Fincher ever shot on celluloid film (as of this writing). The 2000's would bring the swift rise of digital filmmaking, a technology that Fincher-as a noted perfectionist and control-freak-would swiftly embrace.

PANIC ROOM closes the book on the first phase of David Fincher's feature career (marked by gritty, subversive fare shot on film), heralding the arrival of a new phase that would solidify Fincher's legacy amongst our most prestigious filmmakers

COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (2002-2007)

After the release of director David Fincher's fifth feature, PANIC ROOM (2002), he took a five-year hiatus from feature work. However, this doesn't mean he was lounging poolside with margaritas for half a decade.

He was hard at work in other arenas: prepping a sprawling film adaptation of the infamous San Francisco Zodiac murders during the 70's, as well as taking on select commercial and music video work. During this five-year period, David Fincher created some of his highest profile (and most controversial) short-form work.

Fincher's 2002 spot for Adidas, called "MECHANICAL LEGS" is a great little bit of advertising done in the classic David Fincher visual style: high contrast lighting, steely color palette and a constantly-moving camera.

The entire piece is a digital creation, featuring a pair of disembodied robot legs exhibiting superhuman agility and speed as they test out a new pair of Adidas sneakers. Fincher's flair for visual effects and dynamic compositions really makes the spot effective and, more importantly, memorable.

COCA-COLA: "THE ARQUETTES" (2003)

I remember this particular ad, Coca-Cola's "THE ARQUETTES" when it came out, as it received a lot of airplay based on the popularity of the titular couple following Courtney's successful run on FRIENDS as well as their combined appearances in Wes Craven's SCREAM films.

Of course, I had no idea David Fincher was behind the spot when I first saw it, but having grown accustomed to his aesthetic, I can easily spot it now. It's evident in the desaturated warm tones that favor slightly colder yellows instead of typical oranges, as well as the high contrast lighting. The spot's tagline, "True Love", is poetically tragic now after the couple's divorce in 2011.

XELEBRI: "BEAUTY FOR SALE" (2004)

In 2004, Fincher was commissioned by Xelebri to realize a stunning concept in the spot for "BEAUTY FOR SALE". The piece takes place in a futuristic world, filled with the imaginative production design and world-building Fincher is known for, and bolstered by the visually arresting conceit of normal people wearing supermodel bodies as costumes (achieved through clever CGI and other visual effects). A cold color palette and high contrast lighting wraps everything up into a neat little David Fincher package.

HEINEKEN: "BEER RUN" (2005)

Fincher's spot for Heineken called "BEER RUN" is also a commercial that I remember quite well from its initial run, primarily due to the fact that it was a big, lavish Super Bowl ad. The piece stars Fincher's regular feature collaborator Brad Pitt as himself, adventurously trekking out into the urban night for a case of Heineken while avoiding the hordes of paparazzi.

Visually, a green/yellow color cast is applied over the image which accentuates the high contrast lighting and evokes not only the color branding of Heineken itself, but David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (1999). Dynamic camera movement and the inclusion of The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" over the soundtrack further point to Fincher's confident vision.

NINE INCH NAILS: "ONLY" (2005)

Fincher's only music video during this period was created for Nine Inch Nails' single "ONLY". Fincher had already been associated with NIN frontman Trent Reznor due to the inclusion of a remix of Reznor's "Closer" in the opening credits toSE7EN (1995), but this is the first instance of the two men working together directly. This is notable because Reznor would go on to become a regular composer for David Fincher, beginning with 2010's THE SOCIAL NETWORK and continuing to the present day.

Interestingly, the video is presented in the square 4:3 aspect ratio, but the look is classic Fincher: high contrast lighting, a steely/sterile grey color palette and a constantly-moving camera that gives the simple concept a dose of electric energy.

The concept serves Fincher's fascination for tech, with a Mac laptop acting as the centerpiece to this 21st century orchestra. CGI is used to inspired effect in incorporating sound waves on the surface of coffee, as well as conveying Reznor's face and performance via those needle-art slabs that were popular during the era.

MOTOROLA: "PEBL" (2006)

In 2006, David Fincher reteamed with his cinematographer on THE GAME (1997), the late Harris Savides, to shoot a commercial for Motorola called "PEBL". The spot tracks the long, slow erosion of a rock until it becomes so smooth that is adopts the form factor of Motorola's Pebl mobile phone.

Fincher uses CGI in the form of meteors, craters, and weather to portray eons of time in only sixty seconds. This spot was filmed with digital cameras, and is credited with giving Fincher and Savides to adopt the format for the production of their next feature collaboration, 2007's ZODIAC.

ORVILLE REDENBACHERS: "REANIMATED" (2007)

A commercial recently started airing that digitally recreates the late Audrey Hepburn, and understandably caused a lot of furor. There's a huge ethical debate about using CGI advancements to bring long-dead celebrities back to life, a debate that more or less began in 2007 when David Fincher and Orville Redenbachers had the audacity to bring Orville himself back from the dead to hawk some popcorn.

I understand advancing the technology so that it can be used for necessary purposes (i.e, finishing the performance of an actor who died during production like Paul Walker), but the final effect is never truly convincing. It's mildly upsetting at best, and pants-shitting horrifying at worst.

Here, Fincher's familiarity with effects works against him, with his excitement at bringing dear old Orville back from the dead perhaps blinding him to the resulting "uncanny valley" effect. "REANIMATED"is easily one of Fincher's most controversial videos, and for good reason.

LEXUS: "POLLEN" (2007)

Another spot that's heavily-reliant on CGI, Lexus' "POLLEN" is set inside of a greenhouse that was created entirely in the digital realm. Here, David Fincher is able to exact total control over his image and dial in a high contrast, steely color palette that highlights the car's streamlined design.

The main takeaway from this period of Fincher's career is his experimentation with digital cameras and acquisition would result in his overall confidence in the format and its future. Once he shot the majority of ZODIAC on digital, his film days were basically over.

His early adoption transformed him into the poster boy for the cinematic potential of the nascent digital format on a large, blockbuster scale.

ZODIAC (2007)

I've written before in my essays on Paul Thomas Anderson and The Coen Brothers about how 2007 was a watershed year in modern cinema. That specific year saw the release of three films that are widely considered to be the best films of the decade, the apex of efforts by specialty studio shingles like Paramount Vantage and Warner Independent.

Mid-level divisions like these flourished during the Aughts, with studios putting up considerable financial backing into artistic efforts by bold voices in an attempt to capture the lucrative windfall that came with awards season prestige.

It was a great time to be a cinephile, but it was also ultimately an unsustainable bubble-a bubble that would violently pop the following year when these shingles shuttered their doors and studios turned their attention to blockbuster properties and mega-franchises (ugh) like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As an eager student in film school, 2007 was a very formative year for me personally. It was the year that Anderson's THERE WILL Be BLOOD and The Coens' NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN were released, but those films are not the focus of this article. This particular essay concerns the third film in the trifecta, David Fincher's masterful ZODIAC.

When the film was released, I was already a David Fincher acolyte and had been awaiting his return to the big screen five years after PANIC ROOM. As I took in my first screening of ZODIAC on that warm, Boston spring afternoon, I became acutely aware that I was watching a contender for the best film of the decade.

ZODIAC's journey to the screen was a long, arduous one-much like the real-life investigation itself. The breakthrough came when writer James Vanderbilt based his take off of Robert Graysmith's book of the same name.

From Graysmith's template, Vanderbilt fashioned a huge tome of a screenplay that was then sent to director David Fincher-helmer of the serial-killer-genre-defining SE7EN (1995)-basically out of respect.

Fully expecting Fincher to pass, Vanderbilt and the project's producers were quite surprised to learn of the director's interest and connection to the material- but Fincher himself wasn't surprised in the least. He remembered his childhood in the Bay Area, where Zodiac's unfolding reign of terror was the subject of adults' hushed whispers and his own captivated imagination.

In an oblique way, ZODIAC is an autobiographical and sentimental film for David Fincher-a paean to an older, more idyllic San Francisco whose innocence was shattered by the Zodiac murders and ultimately lost to the negative economic byproducts of rampant gentrification.

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ZODIAC spans three decades of San Francisco history, beginning in 1969 and ending in 1991. The focusing prism of this portrait is the sense of paranoia and panic that enveloped the city during the reign of terror perpetrated by a mysterious serial killer known only as The Zodiac. Simply murdering people at random is a scary enough prospect to shake any city to its foundations, but Zodiac's command of the media via chilling correspondence sent to newspaper editors and TV stations allowed him to disseminate his message and strike mortal fear into the heart of the entire state of California.

At the San Francisco Chronicle, crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) takes up the Zodiac beat and finds an unlikely ally and partner in plucky cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose familiarity with pictorial language and messages aids in the endeavor to decode the Zodiac's cryptic hieroglyphics.

Meanwhile, Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) is breathlessly canvassing the populace and questioning hundreds upon hundreds of suspects in an effort to crack the Zodiac case, only to find frustration and confusion at every turn.

As the months turn to years, Zodiac's body count continues to rise-until one day, it stops entirely. Time passes, nobody hears from the Zodiac for several years and the city moves on (including the increasingly alcoholic Avery).

That is, with the exception of Graysmith and Toschi, whose nagging obsession continues to consume them whole. With each passing year, their prospects of solving the case drastically decreases, which only amplifies their urgency in bringing The Zodiac to justice before he slips away entirely.

What sets ZODIAC apart from other serial-killer thrillers of its ilk is its dogged attention to detail. Fincher and Vanderbilt built their story using only the facts-eyewitness testimony, authentic police documentation and forensics evidence.

For instance, the film doesn't depict any murder sequence in which there weren't any survivors to provide accurate details about what went down. Another differentiating aspect about the film is the passage of time as a major theme, conveyed not only via on-screen "x months/years later" subtitles but also with inspired vignettes like a changing cityscape and music radio montages over a black screen.

ZODIAC's focus lies in the maddening contradiction of factual accounts that stymied real-life investigators and led to missed clues and dead-end leads. The true identity of The Zodiac was never solved, and the film goes to painstaking lengths to show us exactly why that was the outcome.

ZODIAC attempts to deconstruct the larger-than-life myth of its namesake, but it also can't help exaggerating him in our own cultural consciousness as the serial killer who got away-a modern boogeyman like Jason or Freddy that transcends the constraints of time and could pop up again at any time to resume his bloody campaign.

ZODIAC centers itself around a triptych of leads in Gyllenhaal, Downey and Ruffalo. The author of the film's source text, Robert Graysmith, is depicted by Gyllenhaal as a goody-two-shoes boy scout and single father who throws himself into a downward spiral of obsession.

His sweet-natured pluckiness is the antithesis of the hard-boiled, cynical detective archetype we've come to expect from these types of films. Downey, per usual, steals every scene he's in as the flamboyant, acid-witted Paul Avery. Ruffalo more than holds his own as the detail-oriented police inspector in a bowtie, David Toschi (whose actions during the Zodiac case inspired the character of Dirty Harry).

These three unconventional leads ooze period authenticity and help to immerse the audience into the story for the entirety of its marathon three hour running time.

By this point, Fincher had built up such an esteemed reputation for himself that he could probably cast any actor he desired. With ZODIAC's supporting cast, Fincher has assembled a, unexpected and truly eclectic mix of fine character actors. John Carroll Lynch plays Arthur Lee Allen, the prime suspect in Toschi and Graysmith's investigation.

Lynch assumes an inherently creepy demeanor that, at the same time, is not overtly threatening. Lynch understands that he has a huge obligation in playing Allen responsibly, since the storyline effectively convicts him as the Zodiac killer posthumously (when it may very well be not true at all).

When the Zodiac killer is seen on-screen, you'll notice that it's not Lynch playing the role. David Fincher wisely uses a different actor for each on-screen Zodiac appearance as a way to further cloud the killer's true identity and abstain from implicating Allen further than the storyline already does. Additionally, this echoes actual survivor testimonies, which were riddle with conflicting and mismatching appearance descriptions.

Indie queen Chloe Sevigny plays the nerdy, meek character of Melanie. As the years pass in the film, she becomes Graysmith's second wife and grows increasingly alienated by his obsession. She possesses a quiet strength that's never overbearing and never indulgent.

Brian Cox plays San Francisco television personality Melvin Belli as something of a dandy and honored member of the literati. His depiction of a well-known local celebrity oozes confidence and gravitas. Elias Koteas plays Sergeant Mulanax, an embattled Vallejo police chief, while Dermot Mulroney plays Toschi's own chief, Captain Marty Lee.

PT Anderson company regular Phillip Baker Hall appears as Sherwood Morrill, an esteemed handwriting analyst whose expertise is thrown into question as he succumbs to an escalating alcohol problem. Comedian Adam Goldberg appears in a small role as Duffy Jennings, Avery's sarcastic replacement at The Chronicle, and eagle-eyed Fincher fanatics will also spot the presence of Zach Grenier, who played Edward Norton's boss in FIGHT CLUB (1999).

ZODIAC is a very important film within Fincher's filmography in that it marks a drastic shift in his style, ushering in a second act of creative reinvigoration fueled by the rise of digital filmmaking cameras and tools that could match celluloid pixel for crystal.

Fincher's early adoption became a tastemaker's vote of confidence in a fledgling technology and substantially bolstered the rate of adoption by other filmmakers.

Having shot several of his previous commercials on digital with THE GAME's cinematographer Harris Savides, David Fincher was confident enough that digital cameras could meet the rigorous demands of his vision for ZODIAC and subsequently enlisted Savides' experience as insurance towards that end.

Shooting on the Thomson Viper Filmstream camera in 1080p and presenting in the 2.40:1 aspect ratio, Fincher is able to successfully replicate his signature aesthetic while substantially building on it with the new tools afforded to him by digital.

Because of digital's extraordinary low-light sensitivity, Fincher and Savides confidently underexpose their image with high contrast, shadowy lighting-many times using just the available practical lights, which resulted in moody, cavernous interior sequences and bright, idyllic exteriors. Fincher also is able to create something of a mundane, workaday look that stays within his established color space of yellow warm tones and blue/teal cold casts.

The procedural, methodical nature of the story is echoed in the observational, objective camera movement and editing. David Fincher's dolly and technocrane work is deliberate and precise, as is every cut by Angus Wall in his first solo editing gig for Fincher having co-edited several of his previous features.

Wall's work was certainly cut out for him, judging by Fincher's well-documented insistence on doing as many takes as required in order to get the performance he wanted (it's not uncommon in a David Fincher film for the number of takes to reach into the 50's or 60's).

To my eyes, ZODIAC is quite simply one of the most realistic and authentic-looking period films I've ever seen, owing credit to Donald Graham Burt's meticulous production design. Burt and Fincher aren't after a stylized, exaggerated vintage look like PT Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997), but rather a lived-in, well-worn, and low-key aesthetic.

Absolutely nothing feels out of place or time. Fincher's borderline-obsessive attention to historical detail extended as far as flying in trees via helicopter in one instance to make the Lake Berryessa locale look just as it did at the time.

Practical solutions like this were augmented by clever, well-hidden CGI and digital matte paintings that never call attention to themselves. Funnily enough for a film so predicated upon its historical authenticity, David Fincher also acknowledges a surprising amount of artistic license taken with the film's story- compiling composites of characters and re-imagining real-life events in a bid for a streamlined, clean narrative.

In developing the film, Fincher initially didn't want to use a traditional score, instead preferring to incorporate a rich tapestry of popular period songs, radio commercials, and other audio recordings.

Toward that end, he used several different styles of music to reflect the changing decades, such as jazz, R&B and psychedelic folk rock like Donavan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man", which takes on a pitch-black foreboding feel when it plays over the film's brilliantly-staged opening murder sequence.

Once the film was well into its editing, Fincher's regular sound designer Ren Klyce suggested that the film could really use some score during key moments.

David Fincher agreed, and reached out to David Shire-the composer of Alan J. Pakula's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976), a film that served as ZODIAC's tonal influence.

Shire's score is spare, utilizing mainly piano chords to create a brooding suite of cues that echoes the oblique danger and consuming obsession that the story deals in.

The story of ZODIAC is perfectly suited to Fincher's particular thematic fascinations. Architecture plays a big role, with Fincher depicting San Francisco as a city in transition. He shows cranes on the skyline, holes in the ground waiting to be filled, and most famously, an impressionistic timelapse of the TransAmerica tower's construction.

This approach extends to his interiors, specifically the Chronicle offices, which slowly transform over the years from a beige bullpen of clacking typewriters and cathedral ceilings to a brighter workspace with low-slung tile ceilings and fluorescent light fixtures (as seen in the well-composed low angle shots that pepper the film).

Nihilism- another key recurring theme throughout David Fincher's work- pervades the storyline and the actions of its characters. Because they're unable to solve the mystery and tie things up with a neat Hollywood ending, they either fall into an existential crisis about all their wasted efforts, or they simply lose interest and move on.

Fincher's exploration of film's inherent artifice is present here in very meta stylings: film canisters and their contents become promising leads and clues, and the characters get to watch movies about themselves on the screen (Fincher makes a big show of Toschi attending the Dirty Harry premiere). ZODIAC's unique tone and subtext is perfectly indicative of David Fincher's sensibilities as an artist, and frankly, it's impossible to imagine this story as made by someone else.

ZODIAC bowed at the Cannes Film Festival to great views, its praise echoed by a cabal of prominent critics stateside. They hailed it as a masterpiece and Fincher's first truly mature work as a filmmaker-the implication being that the maverick director was ready to join the Oscar pantheon of Great Filmmakers.

The critics' high praise hasn't eroded since either; it consistently ranks as one of the best films of the decade, if certainly not the most underrated. I wish the same could be said of the box office take of its original theatrical run, which was so poor that it only made back its budget when worldwide grosses were accounted for.

Thankfully, the release of Fincher's director's cut on home video managed to bring the film a great deal of respect and attention. As a reflection of David Fincher's strict adherence to facts and eyewitness testimony in making the case for Arthur Lee Allen as the Zodiac, the long-dormant case was actually re-opened by Bay Area authorities for further investigation. When the pieces are put all together, the evidence clearly points to ZODIAC as Fincher's grandest achievement yet.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (2008)

With some films, there's an intense connection that you can't fully explain. It resonates deep inside of you, in that cloud of unconsciousness. At the risk of sounding a little hippy-dippy, director David Fincher's THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (2008) is one such film for me. It feels like a life that I've already lived before, despite the fact that I've never been to the South and I was born too late in the twentieth century to remember most of it.

Yet, there's something about the film's eroded-paint interiors in particular that reminds me of a distinct time in my life, a time when I was re-discovering my hometown of Portland, Oregon with new eyes during summer breaks from college.

I only realized it after my most recent viewing, but the film also sublimely foreshadows major developments in my own life: The treasured tugboat upon which Benjamin Button spends a great deal of his early adult years is named The Chelsea (coincidentally the name of my fiancée), and the love of his life is an elegant dancer (again, the soon-to-be Mrs.).

I can't make it through the film without tearing up a little bit (or a lot), especially during the last montage where David Fincher shows us the smiling faces from Button's life as Button himself opines in voiceover about how relationships are life's biggest treasure. The scene utterly slays me. Every. Single. Time.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is based off the F. Scott Fitzgerald book of the same name, published in 1922. A film adaptation had been in development since the 1970's, associated with a wide variety of big-time Hollywood names like Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Jack Nicholson.

Due to the storyline of a man aging in reverse, which would require 5 different actors playing Button at various stages of his life, the idea never picked up much steam. A leading role split up between five men wouldn't appeal to any one movie star, and the studio couldn't justify the required budget with unknowns. After a while, most executives considered it to simply be one of those great screenplays that never got made.

By the early 2000's, executives began to realize that CGI technology had caught up with the demand for a single actor to portray Button throughout the ages. They brought FORREST GUMP scribe Eric Roth aboard to try his hand at a new draft, but the project really began generating momentum when Fincher, fresh off his success with 2002's PANIC ROOM, became involved.

Working with Spielberg's producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall (in addition to his own regular producer, Cean Chaffin), he developed the film simultaneously with his 2007 feature ZODIAC, which ended up going before cameras first. David Fincher's creative steerage was instrumental in securing the participation of Brad Pitt, and with the decision to forsake the novel's original Baltimore setting in favor of New Orleans and its generous post-Katrina tax incentives, the project was finally given the greenlight after decades of development.

Within Fincher's filmography, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is just that-a curious case. It's his most honored film, and certainly his most emotionally resonant and powerful. However, the film is not well-liked amongst the film community at large, let alone his devoted fanbase. It is commonly accused of maudlin sentiments, which at the time of its release were at odds with a cynical American mentality wrought by terrorism and an unpopular war abroad.

However, as the long march of time strips the film of the context of its release, its fundamental integrity increasingly reveals itself. Like its sister project ZODIAC, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON makes a strong case for one of the best films of its decade.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is bookended with a framing narrative that concerns an elderly woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett) lying on her deathbed in a hospital while Hurricane Katrina approaches. She implores her daughter to read her a series of journal entries she's saved in a box, all of them written by a mysterious man known only as Benjamin Button.

His story begins on the eve of World War 1's end in New Orleans, where a baby is born with quite the defect: severely wrinkled skin and a frail condition that's consistent with an old man at the end of his life.

The baby's mother dies during labor, and the father, wealthy button manufacturer Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng), flees with the baby in horror, abandoning him on the back steps of a nursing home. The home's caretaker, a fiercely maternal soul named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) discovers the baby and takes him in as her own, giving him the name of Benjamin.

The child confounds all expectations as he continues growing up into an elderly-looking little boy, appearing better and healthier every day. Benjamin (Brad Pitt) fits right in with the residents of the creaky old nursing home, and they become something of an extended family around him. One day, Benjamin meets a precocious little girl named Daisy, who sense just how different he is, and they begin a lifelong friendship.

As the years give way to decades, Benjamin continues to age in reverse, becoming more youthful and virile as he sets out into the world on a grand adventure that places him against the backdrop of the 20th's century historical moments.

He becomes a master sailor, battles Nazi submarines in open waters, and even experiences a secret love affair with an old married woman (Tilda Swinton) in Russia. When Benjamin returns home from his adventures, he finds Daisy has grown into a beautiful young woman as well as a successful ballet dancer in New York.

Their attraction towards each other alternates erratically, never overlapping until Daisy's career is cut short after getting hit by a taxi in Paris. Middle age sets in, and as Daisy becomes acutely aware of her mortality, she and Benjamin finally give in to each other and start a grand romance.

When Daisy announces she's pregnant, Benjamin becomes withdrawn emotionally-he's reluctant about becoming a father because as the child grows, he'll only get younger still and, as he puts it, "(she) can't raise the both of us".

As Benjamin's singularly unique life plays out, the film reveals itself to ultimately be about the heartbreak of age and time. It plays like a melancholic yearning for youth, while at the same praises the experience of life and living it to the fullest with the time you have.

Brad Pitt's third collaboration with David Fincher is also his most sophisticated. As Benjamin Button, Pitt needs to be able to convey a complex life through all its various stages and differing attitudes. The main through-line of Pitt's performance is that of a curious innocent, who soaks in everything around him with wide-eyed glee because he was never supposed to live long enough to see it anyway. The majority of Pitt's performance is augmented by CGI, but his characterization is consistent and his physicality is believable across the spectrum of age. Simply put, Pitt's performance is a career-best that takes advantage of his off-kilter leading man sensibilities.

Blanchett's Daisy is an inspired counterpart as a complex character who is both tender and cold, idealistic and practical. Like Pitt, Blanchett must convey the full spectrum of womanhood with her performance, and does so entirely convincingly (with a little help from CGI "youth-inizing" techniques and conventional makeup prosthetics).

Tilda Swinton plays Liz Abbott, Benjamin's mistress and lover during his short residency in a grand, old Russian hotel. Swinton, like Blanchett, is capable of playing a wide variety of age ranges, and here performs beautifully as an older, sophisticated and worldly woman who introduces Benjamin to the world of caviar and secret love affairs.

As Benjamin's adopted mother Queenie, Taraji P. Henson is a revelation. She projects a strong, resilient dignity that allows her to essentially run the show at the old folks home Benjamin lives in. Mahershala Ali, better known for his role in Fincher'sHOUSE OF CARDS series, works for the first with the director here as Tizzy, Queenie's lover and a distinguished, mild-mannered father figure to Benjamin.

Jason Flemyng plays Benjamin's real father, Thomas Button, as a man besieged by melancholy over how his life has turned out. He's a rich man, but all of the money in the world couldn't have prevented his current situation, so he keeps Benjamin at an emotional distance until its time to pass his legacy and wealth on.

And last but not least, Elias Koteas- in his second consecutive performance for Fincher following ZODIAC-plays Monsieur Gateau, a blind clockmaker. Consumed by grief after losing his son to the Great War, Gateau constructs a clock that hangs in the New Orleans train station and runs backwards-thus paralleling Benjamin Button's own life.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON furthers David Fincher's foray into the digital realm. Working with a new visual collaborator in cinematographer Claudio Miranda, Fincher once again utilizes the Viper Filmstream camera to establish an all-digital workflow. Indeed, not a single frame of the film was ever printed to film before the striking of release prints.

Acquisition, editing and mastering was done entirely with bits and pixels- ones and zeroes. Presented in David Fincher's preferred 2.40:1 widescreen aspect ratio, the film is easily the director's warmest-looking picture to date. The frame is tinged with a slight layer of sepia, while the warm tones veer towards the yellow part of the color spectrum and a cold blue/teal cast defines the current-day Katrina sequences.

The incorporation of practical lights into the frame creates a high contrast lighting scheme while making for moody, intimate interiors that evoke the old world feel of New Orleans.
Fincher's color palette deals mainly in earth tones, which makes the presence of red (see Daisy's dress during their first romantic date) all the more striking when it finally appears.

Red in general seldom makes an appearance in David Fincher's work (except for blood, of course), a phenomenon that can be chalked up to Fincher's self-avowed aversion to the color as it appears on film due to its distracting nature. However, with Daisy's dress in particular, the costume designers were able to convince Fincher that the distraction served a legitimate story purpose.
For a director well known for his dynamic sense of camera movement, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is a surprisingly sedate affair.

While certain key moments are punctuated with dolly or Technocrane movements, for the most part David Fincher is content to let the frame stay static and allow the performances to take center stage. This approach is bolstered by returning production designer Donald Graham Burt's exceptional period reconstructions (themselves augmented with CGI and digital matte paintings).

Fincher's regular editor Angus Wall stitches everything together in a deliberate, meaningful fashion that eschews flash in favor of truth and emotion. Kirk Baxter joins Wall, and would go on to become part of Fincher's core editing team himself.

For the film's music, David Fincher collaborates with Alexandre Desplat, who creates an elegiac, nostalgic score that sounds lush and romantic. Desplat's work stands in stark contrast to the moody, foreboding scores that Howard Shore or David Shire created for Fincher's earlier films.

Fincher supplements Desplat's whimsical suite of cues with several historical needledrops that fill out the period: southern ragtime, R&B crooner hits like The Platters' "My Prayer", and even The Beatles' "Twist And Shout". Above all of these, the incorporation of Scott Joplin's Bethena waltz stands out as the most powerful and cutting of cues (in my mind, at least). The song is as Old Time Dixie as it comes, but it's a nostalgic little tune that resonates with me on a very strange level.

I can't hear it without tearing up a little, and I can't figure out why besides the obvious beauty of the song. The best way I can describe it as if it's some remnant from a previous life that only my unconscious soul recognizes-which is an odd thing to say coming from a guy who doesn't believe in reincarnation.

For a lot of people, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON doesn't feel like a David Fincher film, mainly because of its overall optimistic and sentimental tone that stands at stark odds with the rest of his emotionally cold, nihilistic filmography. However, the film is right in line with the trajectory of Fincher's other thematic explorations.

While the passage of time is a key theme specific to the film's story, it builds upon the foundation that Fincher established in ZODIAC (a story that also took place over the course of several decades). The old world New Orleans setting allows for lots of Victorian/classical architecture in the form of ornate southern mansions and municipal buildings that, as the years tick by, give way to a distinct midcentury modern feel (see the duplex where Benjamin and Daisy's daughter is born).

And finally, despite being shot on digital, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON plays with the artificial constructs of the film medium. Flashback sequences, like the blind clockmaker scenes and a man getting struck by lightning seven times are treated to look like old silent pictures from the Edison era-jittery frames, contrast fluctuations, and heavy scratches, etc.

These filters, applied in post-production, serve to differentiate the flashbacks from the sumptuously-shot main story, but they also clue in to a curious phenomenon that has risen out of the industry's quick shift into digital filmmaking: the treating of digital footage to look like film, which is akin to a vegetarian trying to make a soy patty taste just like the chicken he refuses to eat in the first place.

To my memory, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is one of the earliest instances of applying filmic artifacts onto a digitally "pure" image, along with Robert Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR in 2006.

It's a commonly held tenet that age softens even the hardest of personalities. The production of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON saw David Fincher enter middle age and come to grips with his own mortality after the death of his father. As such, the film stands as a testament of an artist looking back on life and softening his edge without sacrificing who he is.

The film's release in 2008 was met with modest commercial success and polarized reviews, with some deriding it as aFORREST GUMP knockoff while an equally vocal contingent hailed it as a technical triumph and a masterpiece of storytelling.

Fincher had his first real brush with the Oscars after the film's release, with his direction receiving a nomination in addition to a nomination for Best Picture amongst a slew of actual Oscar wins for its groundbreaking visual effects work in seamlessly mapping a CG face onto a live-action body performance.

The cherry on top of the film's success was its induction into the hallowed Criterion Collection, which-while met with scorn by Criterion fanboys for its perceived maudlin mawkishness- earned Fincher his place in the pantheon of important auteurs. It is an admittedly easy film to dismiss for cynical reasons, but THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON holds many treasures for those who choose to embrace it.

Like its unique protagonist, the film will persist through the ages precisely because of its poignant insights into the meaning of our fragile, fleeting existence on this earth.

COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (2008-2010)

The release of 2008's THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON found director David Fincher without a follow-up project immediately in the pipeline. His search for new material would eventually lead him to Aaron Sorkin and 2010's masterful THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but due to the fact that the story wasn't nearly as development-intensive as his previous film, Fincher was able to squeeze in a few commercials. His most notable work from this brief period consisted of multiple spots done for Nike and Apple, both giants in their respective fields.

NIKE: "SPEED CHAIN" (2008)

One of several spots that Fincher created for Nike in 2008, "SPEED CHAIN" is simply masterful in concept and execution. It depicts the evolution of speed, starting with a snake coming out of the water, morphing into a man, a leopard, a car, and finally a speeding bullet train. The piece is presented in David Fincher's preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, as well as his signature cold color palette and dynamic camera movements that are augmented by CGI.

NIKE: "FATE: LEAVE NOTHING" (2008)

"FATE: LEAVE NOTHING" is yet another exceptional piece of advertising, set to a trip-hop remix of Ennio Morricone's score for THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1966) as two young boys grow and develop essential football skills like agility and strength. It all culminates in a key confrontation between the two on the field as they collide with explosive force. Alongside the ever-present visual signatures, the piece is indicative of a major fascination of Fincher's from this period in his career-the passage of time.

NIKE: "OLYMPICS FILMSTRIP" (2008)

Fincher's third spot for Nike, "OLYMPICS FILMSTRIP" is heavy on the post-production, framing Olympians in film frames as the strips themselves run and twist through the frame. Shot by THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON's cinematographer Claudio Miranda in David Fincher's characteristic steely color palette, the piece also falls in nicely with Fincher's continued exploration of the film frame's boundaries and the mechanics of film itself as an artificial imaging medium.

STAND UP 2 CANCER: "PSA" (2008)

Stand Up 2 Cancer's "PSA" spot features several vignettes in which celebrities (and scores of regular people too) stand up and face the camera-an admittedly literal concept. Several of Fincher's previous feature collaborators make an appearance here: Tilda Swinton, Morgan Freeman, Elle Fanning, and Jodie Foster. Others, like Susan Sarandon, Keanu Reeves, Casey Affleck, and Tobey Maguire also pop up.

SOFTBANK: "INTERNET MACHINE" (2008)

David Fincher's "INTERNET MACHINE" is a spot for a foreign cell phone company that, to my knowledge, never aired stateside. It's a strange piece, and so dark that we almost can't see what's going on at all. Cast in a heavy, David Fincher-esque green color tint, Brad Pitt walks down the street and casually talking on his phone- all while CGI cars are blown away by apocalyptic winds behind him.

APPLE: "IPHONE 3G" (2009)

In 2009, Fincher did two spots for Apple's iPhone line of products. The first, "IPHONE 3G" teases the secrecy that usually surrounds the release of a new iPhone by depicting the complicated security process of accessing the prototype stored within Apple's laboratories.

The sleek, high contrast and steely look is characteristic of Fincher, but fits in quite sublimely with Apple's own branding. The colorless set is full of various security tech and looks like something out of a Stanley Kubrick movie, which is fitting for a director whose work is profoundly influenced by him.

APPLE: "BREAK IN" (2009)

"BREAK IN" advertises the imminent release of the 3G's successor, the iPhone 3GS. This spot echoes the look of "IPHONE 3G" with a similar steely color palette and Kubrick-style set piece, but this time around David Fincher has a little more fun with the storyline and technology on display.

LEXUS: "CUSTOM CAR" (2009)

"CUSTOM CAR", done for Lexus, is simple in concept and execution, featuring Fincher's steely, cold, urban aesthetic and fascination with mankind's relationship to technology-seen here via the convenience of custom car settings that help identify ownership in the absence of visual differentiation.

The piece isn't available to embed as far as I can tell.

NIKE: "TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION" (2009)

Fincher's 2009 spot for Nike, "TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION" is incredibly artful in its high contrast, black and white approach. It might be one of the most expressionistic depictions of football I've ever seen.

David Fincher's characteristic use of CGI as a storytelling tool (not just for visual flash) can be seen at the end, where the football player/protagonist retires to the locker room and exhibits a lizard-like skin pattern of scales.

NIKE: "GAMEBREAKERS" (2010)

"GAMEBREAKERS" is all computer-generated, and as such it hasn't aged as well. It looks more like an old videogame, but perhaps that was the intent. Fincher once again works with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who shot live-action face elements that were then mapped onto CG bodies. The idea is similar to the tech employed for THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, but reversed and applied to a dynamic action sequence.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)

Facebook is easily the biggest, most transformative development of the early twenty-first century. It completely revolutionized how we communicate with each other, how we keep in touch with old friends and family, and even how we use the Internet on a fundamental level. It single-handedly ushered in the era of "Web 2.0" that experts spent most of the 90's predicting and theorizing about.

The fact that Facebook was born in the dorm room of some Harvard kid meant we had entered a brave, new digital age. We were now in a world that benefitted the young and the savvy, the likes of who didn't wait to "pay their dues" or obtain a blessing from the old guard before going about casually changing the world.

At the end of the day, however, Facebook is a tool. A product. A collection of ones and zeroes organized just so and projected onto our monitors. So, when it was announced that THE WEST WING creator Aaron Sorkin had written a screenplay based off "The Accidental Billionaires", Ben Mezrich's book on Facebook's turbulent founding, the question on everyone's minds (as well as the film's own marketing materials) was: "how could they ever make a movie out of Facebook?"

As Mezrich's book revealed (and Sorkin's screenplay built upon), the inside story of Facebook's genesis was fraught with a level of drama, intrigue, and betrayal normally reserved for Shakespeare.

Sorkin's script, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, was a high-profile project from day one. It attracted the efforts of top producers like Scott Rudin, in addition to well-known personalities like Kevin Spacey, who signed on to executive produce the film. Directing duties were eventually handed to David Fincher-- the right decision, given that literally nobody else could've made this film as masterfully as he has done here.

When THE SOCIAL NETWORK debuted in October of 2010, it enjoyed very healthy box office receipts, mostly due to the name recognition of Facebook as well as a collective curiosity about its eccentric founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Others-like me-simply came to worship at the altar of David Fincher, subject matter be damned.

Because life is unfair, THE SOCIAL NETWORK came close to Oscar glory but was ultimately robbed by some movie about a cussing monarch or whatever that nobody will remember in ten years. There's a strong case to be made that THE SOCIAL NETWORK is the best film in Fincher's entire body of work, but that's a hard case to argue considering the strength of the rest of his filmography.

One thing is for certain: we hadn't even completed the first year of the Teens before David Fincher had given us a strong contender for the best film of the new decade. THE SOCIAL NETWORK uses Zuckerberg's deposition hearings as framing devices, allowing for the bulk to story to occur as flashback while the "present-day" sequences orient us in time and space and help keep us on the same page as the characters.

We see Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) under fire from two fronts-Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) are suing him because they believe Facebook was an original idea of theirs that Zuckerberg stole, while Zuckerberg's former best friend and Facebook CFO is suing him because he cheated him out of millions of dollars that were rightfully his. Fincher then transports us to Cambridge, Massachusetts during the mid-2000's where Zuckerberg was an undergrad at Harvard.

When his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) dumps him for being a cold, cynical little twerp, Zuckerberg goes home and creates Facemash-a website that compares randomly-generated portraits of female students. The ensuing traffic crashes Harvard's computer network and gains him a large degree of notoriety among the student body as well as disciplinary action from Harvard's board.

Word of his antics reach the Winklevoss twins (henceforth known as the Winklevii), who hire him to realize their idea of a Harvard-exclusive social networking site called Harvard Connect while dangling the vague possibility of an invitation to their prestigious Final Club in front of him like a carrot.

But in bouncing their idea off of his friend Saverin, Zuckerberg realizes he has a much better one, disregarding his commission to build Facebook with Saverin instead. The popularity of Facebook explodes around the campus, turning Zuckerberg and Saverin into local celebrities. It's not long until the site expands its user base to other Ivy League schools as well as Stanford, located right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Understandably, the Winklevii finds themselves humiliated and infuriated by Zuckerberg's deceit, and so begin building a nasty lawsuit against him.

Having left Boston for the warmer climes of Palo Alto for the summer, Zuckerberg and Saverin hustle to find more capital for their successful little business, eventually starting a partnership with Napster founder Sean Parker, who helps set them up with meetings with big-time investors as well as some primo office space.

As Facebook is launched into the stratosphere, Zuckerberg finds himself accumulating enemies faster than friends. Much is made in the film about the inherent irony of the creator behind the world's most successful social networking endeavor losing all of his friends in the process.

This idea is most potent in the major conflict between Zuckerberg and a scorned, exiled Saverin who rages back with venomous litigation after he's deceived out of hundreds of millions of dollars in potential earnings.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK would live or die on the strengths of its performances, a notion that the technically-minded Fincher recognized and applied to his strategy by putting an unusual amount of focus (for him) on the performances.

Beginning with a generous three weeks of rehearsal time prior to the shoot, and following through with consistently demanding obscene numbers of takes (the opening scene had 99 takes alone), David Fincher led his cast into delivering searing, career-best performances.

The lion's share of the attention and the film's only acting nomination at the Oscars went to Jesse Eisenberg's pitch-perfect performance as Mark Zuckerberg, or rather, the fictional version of the real-life Facebook founder that Sorkin had created. Eisenberg portrays Zuckerberg as a cold genius with sarcastic, antisocial tendencies. He is regularly absent from the present-his mind is elsewhere, preoccupied by his duties back at the office.

At the same time, he can be calculating and ruthless when he needs to be. As Eduardo Saverin-the initial investor and embattled ex-CFO of Facebook-Andrew Garfield delivers a breakout performance. Decent, passionate, and perhaps a little squirrely, Saverin is Zuckerberg's closest friend and confidant; a brother. But their relationship is a Cain and Abel story, and because of his blind trust that Zuckerberg will do the right thing and look out for him, he inevitably assumes the Abel position.

Pop icon Justin Timberlake- in a performance that legitimized his status as a capable actor- plays Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and Silicon Valley's de facto "bad boy". Timberlake easily channels a flashy, cocky, and flamboyant physicality that's at once both undeniably attractive to Zuckerberg and duplicitously sleazy to Saverin.

Fincher's casting of Timberlake is quite playful, and he doesn't pull any punches when it comes to pointing out the irony of a pop star playing a man who single-handedly transformed (some might say ruined) his industry.
Fincher's eclectic supporting players serve as rock-solid satellites that orbit around the film's three titanic leads. David Fincher's series of collaborations with the Mara clan begins here with the casting of Rooney Mara as Erica Albright, Zuckerberg's ex girlfriend. She's patient and honest, but in a no-bullshit kind of way that's not afraid to tell people off and put them in their place.

Mara's character is presented as a major driving force behind Zuckerberg's actions, with their breakup becoming the inciting event that drives him to create Facemash in the first place. Mara turns in a spectacular low-profile performance that would lead to high-profile roles in other films, not the least of which was as the lead in Fincher's next project, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011).

Rashida Jones, better known for her work on PARKS & REC, plays the admittedly thankless role of Marilyn Delpy, an insightful young lawyer in Zuckerberg's deposition. Her knack for comedy is well documented in her larger body of work, but in THE SOCIAL NETWORK she shows off a fantastic serious side that is consistently realistic.

Armie Hammer's dual performance as the Winklevoss twins was yet another of the film's many breakouts. Hammer's portrayal of the film's primary set of antagonists required the dashing young actor to not only change his physicality between Tyler and Cameron by mere degrees, but also to undergo the arduous process of motion-capturing his face for its later digital compositing onto the body of actor Josh Pence.

Pence, it should be noted, is the great hero of the piece, as he valiantly forfeited his own performance in service to Fincher's vision. And last but not least, Joseph Mazzello turns up in his highest-profile role since 1993's JURASSIC PARK as the anxious, nerdy Dustin Moskovitz- Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard and one of Facebook's founding fathers.

As I've grown older and more entrenched in Los Angeles' film community, I've found that my connections to major studio films have become increasingly personal, and my degrees of separation from the prominent directors and actors I admire decreasing exponentially. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is a personal flashpoint then, in that a lot of my friends and acquaintances are a part of the film.

I suppose this is due to the story's dependence on talent in their early twenties, as well as just being associated with the larger Los Angeles film community at the right time. For instance, my co-producer on my 2012 feature HERE BUILD YOUR HOMES, Josh Woolf, worked on the film as a production assistant and was there during the filming of the aerial title shot with Zuckerberg running across Harvard Square (a shot we'll address in detail later).

Additionally, an actor friend of mine who I shot a short film with in January 2014, Toby Meuli, plays one of the more-prominent Harvard students during the Facemash sequence. A member of my group of friends from University of Oregon makes a brief appearance during a Final Club party sequence in which he chugs from a bottle of liquor and hands it off to Andew Garfield standing behind him.

I even went to a party in Los Feliz in 2010 that was thrown by the young woman with a pixie cut who was featured prominently during the opening frat party sequence. And finally, Mike Bash-a very close friend of mine-was cast in a great scene that followed the Bill Gates seminar. He was originally the guy who didn't know that it was actually Bill Gates who was speaking. The scene was initially shot in Boston, but his role was cut when David Fincher eventually decided that he didn't like how he directed the scene.

Rather than live with what he had, David Fincher reshot the scene in LA with new actors. Naturally, Bash was pretty despondent over his exclusion from the finished product, despite my assurances that he achieved a dream that eludes the grand majority of aspiring (and successful) actors: receiving direction from David Fucking Fincher.

David Fincher's foray into digital filmmaking soldiers on in THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but this time he swaps out the Viper Filmstream camera with its maximum resolution of 1080 pixels for the glorious 4k visuals of the Red One camera.

His FIGHT CLUB cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, returns to shoot THE SOCIAL NETWORK in Fincher's preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, ultimately bagging a Cinematography Oscar nomination for his trouble. Fincher and Cronenweth convey an overall cold tone without relying on the obvious blue side of the color spectrum. Warmer shots are dialed in to a yellow hue, with a prominent green cast coating several shots.

David Fincher's visual signature is immediately apparent, once again utilizing high contrast lighting and practical lamps that make for dark, cavernous interiors. In shooting the film, Fincher and Cronenweth pursued a simple, unadorned look. Combined with the digital format's increased sensitivity to light, most lighting setups were reportedly completed in twenty minutes or less.

The camerawork is sedate and observational, containing none of the flashiness of its kindred tonal spirit, FIGHT CLUB. When the camera does move, the name of the game is precision-meaning calculated dolly moves or the motion-controlled perfection of the Technocrane. There's only one handheld shot in the entire film, when Timberlake's Parker drunkenly approaches a bedroom door at a house party to find police on the other side.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK marks production designer Donald Graham Burt's third consecutive collaboration with Fincher-and third consecutive period piece. Thankfully, reconstructing the mid-2000's isn't as arduous a process as recreating the 70's or large swaths of the twentieth century.

The major challenge on Burt's part was replicating a well-known campus like Harvard in an authentic manner when the school refused to let the production film on their grounds. Shots filmed at Johns Hopkins University, as well as various locations in Los Angeles are unified in time and space by David Fincher's editing team of Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter.

The director's adoption of digital techniques extends well into the post-production realm, with any promise of the technology's ability to make editing easier going right out the window because of Fincher's preferred shooting style.

Fincher had routinely used two cameras for each setup, effectively doubling his coverage, in addition to regularly demanding dozens upon dozens of takes until he was satisfied. At the end of it all, Wall and Baxter were left with over 268 hours of raw digital footage to sift through-a momentous task made all the more complicated by David Fincher's tendency to mix and match elements from various takes right down to individual syllables of audio to achieve the cadence of performance he desired.

The new tools that digital filmmaking affords have certainly unleashed Fincher's control-freak tendencies, but when that same obsession results in his strongest work to date and Oscar wins for his editing team, it can hardly be called a bad thing.

One of the most immediate and striking aspects of THE SOCIAL NETWORK is its unconventional musical score, written by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor in his first scoring job after a series of casual collaborations with Fincher (SE7EN's opening credits and the music video for Reznor's "ONLY").

Partnering with Atticus Ross, Reznor has managed to create an entirely electronic sound that not only evokes his own artistic aesthetic, but also complements the film's tone perfectly. Reznor's Oscar-winning suite of cues is quite spooky, incorporating a haunting droning sound that unifies all the disparate elements. It almost sounds like someone dancing upon a razor's edge.

The now-iconic main theme uses melancholy piano plunks that recall nostalgia and childhood, slowly getting softer and lost to audio buzz and droning as Zuckerberg strays from innocence. Another standout is a rearrangement of the Edvard Grieg's classical masterpiece "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" that appears during the Henley Regatta rowing sequence, which sounds as through it were filtered through the manic, electric prism of Wendy Carlos (Stanley Kubrick's composer for THE SHINING (1980).

Fincher's go-to sound guy Ren Klyce layers everything into a coherent audio mix that would net him his own Oscar nomination. Klyce and David Fincher's approach to the sonic palette of THE SOCIAL NETWORK is quite interesting, in that they don't shy away from mixing in loud music and ambience during crowded scenes like the opening tavern sequence or the midpoint nightclub sequence.

The dialogue is almost lost amongst the loud din of activity, becoming a counterintuitive strategy to invest the audience and signal to them that they'll really have to listen over the next two hours. Despite being a primarily talky film, the experience of watching THE SOCIAL NETWORK is anything but passive.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK takes all of Fincher's core thematic fascinations and bottles them up into a singular experience. The director's opening credits are always inspired, and THE SOCIAL NETWORK is no different (despite being relatively low-key).

Echoing Zuckerberg the character's composed, plodding nature, David Fincher shows us Eisenberg running robotically through the Harvard campus late at night, which not only establishes the setting well, but also introduces us to the lead character's relentless forward focus. Treating the text to disappear like it might on a computer screen and laying Reznor's haunting theme over the whole thing are additional little touches that complete the package.

The title shot in this sequence, where we see Zuckerbeg run through Harvard Square from an overhead, aerial vantage point, also shows off Fincher's inspired use of digital technology in subtle ways. The shot was achieved by placing three Red One cameras next to each other on top of a building and looking down at the action below.

This setup later allowed Fincher to stitch all three shots into one super-wide panorama of the scene that he could then pan through virtually in order to follow Zuckerberg. It's insane. It's genius.

Mankind's relationship to technology has always been a major staple of David Fincher's films, a thematic fascination influenced by his forebear Stanley Kubrick. In THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Fincher's career-exploration of this theme comes to a head as the story's main engine. The saga of Mark Zuckerberg is inherently about computers, the Internet, our complicated interactions with it, and its effect on our physical-world relationships.

Whereas Kubrick painted technology as dehumanizing and something to be feared, Fincher sees it as something to embrace-- something that distinctly enhances humanity and differentiates one person from the other. In David Fincher's work, the human element tends to coalesce around the nihilistic punk subculture.

Our protagonist is inherently nihilistic and narcissistic, willing to burn whatever bridge he needs to advance his own personal cause, despite his actions not being fueled by money or power. The story hits on Fincher's punk fascinations with Zuckerberg's rebelliousness and devil-may-care attitude, in addition to the overt imagery of antisocial computer hackers and the inclusion of The Ramones' "California Uber Alles".

Finally, Fincher's emphasis on architecture helps to evoke a sense of time and place, mixing in the old-world Harvard brownstones with the sleek modernism of the Facebook offices and deposition rooms that echoes the film's subtext of the old guard stubbornly giving way to a new order.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK is easily David Fincher's best-received film. When it was released, it scored high marks both in performance and critical reviews, going on to earn several Oscar nominations and even taking home gold statues for some of the big categories like Editing (Wall & Baxter) and Adapted Screenplay (Sorkin).

Ultimately, Fincher himself lost out on its deserved Best Director and Best Picture awards to THE KING'S SPEECH, but anybody could tell you which of the two films will be remembered in the decades to come. THE SOCIAL NETWORK again finds Fincher operating at the top of his game -a position he's held since SE7EN even though he only broke through into true prestige with 2007's ZODIAC.

It may not be an entirely accurate reflection of its true-life subject, but THE SOCIAL NETWORK is a pitch-perfect reflection of what Zuckerberg left in his wake: a society that would never be the same, fundamentally changed by a radical new prism of communication.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011)

The late 2000's was a golden era for young adult fiction in both the novel and film mediums. Just look at the runaway success of the TWILIGHT series or THE HUNGER GAMES-books or films. Doesn't matter, because they both are equally prominent within their respective mediums. Despite your personal stance on these properties (trust me, I want them gone and buried just as much as you), you can't deny their impact on pop culture.

During this time, another book series and subsequent set movie adaptations captivated an admittedly older set-Stieg Larsson's MILLENNIUM trilogy. Named after the muckracking news magazine that central character Mikael Blomvkist works for, the books (and movies) comprise three titles: "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", "The Girl Who Played With Fire", and "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest". In 2009, the first of the Swedish film adaptations came out based on "Dragon Tattoo", featuring newcomer Noomi Rapace in a star-making turn as the series' cyper-punk heroine, Lisbeth Salander.

As the Swedish film trilogy proved successful both at home and abroad, it was inevitable that the major US studios would remake the property for American audiences. The task fell to Sony Pictures, who set up THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO with super-producer Scott Rudin overseeing a screenplay by esteemed writer Steve Zaillian.

Rudin's natural choice for a director was David Fincher, who he had previously worked on the very successful THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) with. Fincher was drawn to the story of two mismatched misfits trying to solve a decades old murder, despite his misgivings that he had become the go-to guy for serial killer films after the success of SE7EN (1995) and ZODIAC (2007).

The tipping point came in Fincher's realization that he would be at the helm of one of the rarest projects in mainstream studio filmmaking: a hard R-rated franchise. As expected, David Fincher delivered a top-notch film with Oscar-caliber performances and effortless style. For whatever reason, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO didn't connect with audiences, and its lackluster box office performance probably aborted any further plans for completing the trilogy.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is structured differently than most other thrillers, in that it eschews the traditional three-act design in favor of five acts. This might be perhaps why the film floundered in the United States, where audiences have been subliminally conditioned to accept the ebb and flow of three acts as acceptable narrative form.

The film's first half tells a two-pronged story, with one thread following Mikael Blomvkist (Daniel Craig)-a disgraced journalist who has recently lost a high-profile lawsuit against wealthy industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. After taking some time off from his co-editor gig at news magazine Millennium, he is approached by Henrick Vanger (Christopher Plummer), a rival of Wennestrom's and a wealthy industrialist in his own right. Vanger brings Blomvkist to his sprawling estate in rural Hedestat under the auspices of authoring a book of his memoirs.

However, the true purpose of Blomvkist's employment is much more compelling-to try and solve the decades-old case of Henrick's granddaughter Harriet, who went missing in the 1960's and is presumed killed.

Blomvkist takes up residence in a guest cottage on the property and dutifully begins poring over the family records and taking testimony from the various relatives, some of who have shady ties to the Nazi Party in their pasts.

Meanwhile in Stockholm, a young computer expert named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) grapples with the fallout of her foster father's debilitating stroke. She's forced to meet with state bureaucrats for evaluation of her mental faculties and state of preparedness for life on her own.

Her case worker-a portly, morally-bankrupt man named Yils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen)-forces her to perform fellatio on him in exchange for rent money, his abuse eventually culminating in Salander's brutal rape.

However, he doesn't expect Salander's ruthlessness and resolve, made readily apparent when she returns the favor and rapes him right back.
Blomvkist requests the help of a research assistant, and in an ironic twist, is paired with Salander-- the very person who performed the background check on him prior to Vanger's offer of employment.

They make for an unlikely, yet inspired pairing-both professionally as well as sexually. Together, they set about cracking the case, only to discover their suspect is much closer-and much deadlier-than they could've imagined.

James Bond himself headlines David Fincher's pitch-black tale, but it's a testament to Daniel Craig's ability that we never are actually reminded of his secret agent exploits throughout the near-three-hour running time.

Craig has been able to avoid the sort of typecasting that doomed others like Mark Hamill or Pierce Brosnan before him, simply because he refuses to let his roles define him. As disgraced journalist Mikael Blomvkist, he projects a slightly disheveled appearance (despite still being an ace fucking dresser). It may not be the most memorable role of his career but he turns in a solid, faultless performance regardless.

The true spotlight goes to Rooney Mara's cold, antisocial hacker punk, Lisbeth Salander. Mara underwent a radical transformation for the role, even so far as getting real piercings, tattoos, dye jobs, even having her eyebrows bleached.

Considering her previous collaboration with David Fincher was as the squeaky-clean girl-next-door Erica Albright in THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Mara's appearance in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is gut-level arresting.

The depth of Mara's talent is evident in her unflinching confrontation with the most brutal aspects of her character arc. By giving herself over to the role entirely, she's able to take a character that was already so well-defined by Rapace in the Swedish versions and make it completely into her own. Her Best Actress nomination at the Oscars was very much deserved.

Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Robin Wright round out Fincher's compelling cast. Plummer is convincing as Henrick Vanger, depicting the retired industrialist as a good-natured yet haunted old man, as well as a bit of a dandy.

Skarsgard's Martin Vanger is the current CEO of the family business, and his distinguished-gentleman persona cleverly hides his psychopathic, murderous inclinations. Wright plays Erika Berger, Blomvkist's co-editor at Millennium and his on-again, off-again lover. Wright is by her nature an intelligent and savvy woman, as evidenced not just here but in her subsequent collaboration with Fincher in HOUSE OF CARDS as Kevin Spacey's Lady MacBeth-ian spouse.
In keeping with David Fincher's affinity for digital filmmaking technology, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO takes advantage of the Red Epic digital cameras, the next generation of the type that THE SOCIAL NETWORK was shot on.

The film is presented in Fincher's preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, but again it is not true anamorphic. Besides being a reflection of David Fincher's general distaste for the limitations of anamorphic lenses, the shooting of the image in full-frame and the later addition of a widescreen matte in postproduction is a testament to Fincher's need for control.

This method allows him to compose the frame exactly as he wants, and the Red Epic's ability to capture 5000 lines of resolution allows him an even greater degree of precision in zooming in on certain details, blowing up the image, or re-composing the shot without any loss in picture quality.

This technology also affords better image stabilization without any of the warping artifacts that plague the process.

Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth returns for his third collaboration with Fincher, having replaced original director of photography Fredrik Backar eight weeks into the shoot for reasons unknown.

Despite his initial position as a replacement DP, Cronenweth makes the picture his own, with his efforts rewarded by another Oscar nomination. David Fincher's signature aesthetic is very appropriate for the wintery subject matter, his steely color palette of blues, greens and teals evoking the stark Swedish landscape- even warmer tones are dialed back to a cold yellow in Fincher's hands.

The high contrast visuals are augmented by realistically placed practical lights that suggest cavernous interiors. Fincher's sedate camera eschews flash in favor of locked-off, strong compositions and observant, calculated dolly work. When the camera moves, it really stands out in an affecting way.

Nowhere in the film is this more evident than in the shot where Craig's Blomvkist is in the car approaching Vanger's extravagant mansion for the first time. Presented from the forward-travelling POV of the car itself, the mansion grows larger in the center of frame- the symmetrical framing conceit suggesting ominous perfection.

The fact that the camera is stabilized makes for a smooth foreboding shot that takes any sort of human element out of the equation and replaces it with a fundamentally uneasy feeling. In the commentary for the film, David Fincher cites a favorite book from childhood, Bram Stoker's "Dracula"-the sequence in which Harker approaches Dracula's Castle serving as inspiration for his approach to this particular shot.

The connection is certainly not lost on this writer. Like several key shots in Fincher's larger filmography, the Vanger Estate Approach (as I like to call it) would become a tastemaker shot that has not only been copied in his successive project HOUSE OF CARDS, but in subsequent pop culture works by other artists as well.

Production designer Donald Graham Burt returns for his fourth Fincher film, artfully creating an authentic sense of place in the Swedish locations while showing off his impeccable taste and eye for detail.

Editing team Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter are key collaborators within David Fincher's filmography, and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO would become their second consecutive Oscar win for editing under the director's eye.

Their work for THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO really utilizes the advantages that digital filmmaking has to offer in realizing David Fincher's vision and creating a tone that's moody but yet unlike conventional missing-person thrillers.

Angus and Wall establish a patient, plodding pace that draws the audience deeper into the mystery before they're even aware of it, echoing Blomvkist's own growing obsession with the case.

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and his music partner Atticus Ross reprise their scoring duties, giving the musical palette of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO an appropriately electronic and cold, wintery feeling.

Primarily achieved via a recurring motif of atonal bells and ambient soundscapes, the score is also supplemented by a throbbing, heartbeat-like percussion that echoes Salander's simmering anger as well as the encroaching danger at hand.

One of Reznor's masterstrokes is his reworking of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" for the opening credits and trailer, featuring vocals by Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O. Given a new coat of industrial electronic grunge, the rearrangement instantly conveys the tone and style of the film.

Fincher's needledrops are few and far between in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, but one sourced music track stands out because of the sheer audaciousness of its inclusion. In the scene where Skarsgard's Martin Vanger tortures Blomvkist in anticipation of butchering his prey, he fires up the basement's stereo system and plays, of all songs, Enya's Orinoco Flow.

I remember the moment getting a huge laugh in the theatre, and rightfully so-the song is just so cheesy and stereotypically Nordic that it acts as a great counterpoint to the sheer darkness of the scene's events.

The laughter instead becomes a nervous sort of chuckle, the kind we employ to hide a certain kind of fundamental unease and anxiety. Fincher's go-to sound guy Ren Klyce was nominated for another Oscar with his standout mix, taking this noxious brew of sounds and turning it into a razor-sharp sonic landscape that complements David Fincher's visuals perfectly.

On its face, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO doesn't seem like it would call for a substantial amount of computer-generated visual effects. Fincher's background in VFX results in the incorporation of a surprisingly large quantity of effects shots.

Almost every exterior shot during the Vanger sequences has some degree of digital manipulation applied to it in the way of subtle matte paintings, scenery extensions and weather elements that blend together seamlessly in conveying Fincher's moody vision and desire for total control over his visuals.

His affinity for imaginative opening title sequences continues here, in what is arguably his most imaginative effort to date. Set to the aforementioned "Immigrant Song" cover, the sequence plays like a dark nightmare version of those iconic James Bond title sequence, depicting key moments from the film in abstract, archetypical form as a thick black ooze splashes around violently. The choice to incorporate a black on black color scheme is undeniably stylish.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO sees David Fincher at the peak of his punk and technological aesthetic explorations. While not Fincher's creation, the character of Lisbeth Salander fits in quite comfortably within his larger body of work-the culmination of a long flirtation with punk culture.

She is most certainly the product of the cyberpunk mentality, which values not only rebelliousness but technological proficiency as well. Unlike other depictions of this subculture in mass media, it's easy to see that Fincher obviously respects it for what it is and aims to portray them in a realistic manner.

He builds upon the downplayed foundation he laid in THE SOCIAL NETWORK here by refusing to generate fake interfaces for Salander to use. He shows Salander actively Googling things, looking up people on Wikipedia, etc-he doesn't shy away from showing corporate logos and interfaces as they appear in real life.

While a lot of people have a problem with blatant product placement, I can respect a director who doesn't go out of his way to hide (or aggressively feature for that matter) brands and logos when depicting a realistic world. After all, we live in a world awash with corporate branding, so why pretend it doesn't exist?

David Fincher's body of work is defined by a distinctly nihilistic attitude towards story and character, even though I don't believe he's nihilistic himself. With THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO in particular, these sentiments are a prominent part of the storytelling.

These protagonists are morally flawed people who aren't afraid of doing bad things to get ahead. They're mostly atheists, and they don't care whether you like them or not. The themes of abuse that run through the narrative also reflect this overarching mentality, playing out in the form of authority figures exerting their influence and selfish desires over the women that depend on them.

We see this reflected both on the bureaucratic level with Salander's lecherous case worker, as well as on the familial level in Harriet Vanger's repeated rape and abuse at the hands of her brother and father.

Architecture plays a subtle, yet evocative role in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. One of the core themes of the story is the clash between new Sweden (Salander's weapons-grade sexual ambiguity and technical proficiency) and old Sweden (the Vanger family's moneyed lifestyle and sprawling compound).

This clash is echoed in the architecture that Fincher chooses to present. The Vanger estate consists of classical Victorian stylings and rustic cottages; compare that to the harsh lines and modern trappings Martin Vanger's minimalist cliffside residence (all clean lines and floor-to-ceiling glass), as well as the whole of Stockholm-very much the model of a modern European city. In showing us this duality of place and time, Fincher is able to draw a line that also points us directly to the narrative's major emphasis on the duality of man.

Despite THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO's impeccable pedigree and unimpeachable quality, it was a modest disappointment at the box office. It opened at a disadvantage, placing third on its debut weekend and never rising above it during the rest of its run.

There were, of course, the inevitable comparisons to the original series of film adaptations, with purists preferring them over David Fincher's "remake".

Having seen Fincher's version before I ever touched the originals, I quickly found that I couldn't get through the first few minutes of the Swedish opening installment-Fincher's execution, to me, was so much more superior in every way that it made the originals look like cheap TV movies of the week.

Unfortunately, we will probably never get to see what David Fincher would have done with the remaining two entries in the series, as the poor box office performance of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO most likely put the kibosh on further installments.

But, as I've come to discover again and again since I've started this essay series project, time has a way of revealing the true quality of a given work. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is only three years old as of this writing, but the groundswell of appreciation is already growing-hailing the film as the most underrated in Fincher's filmography and an effort on par with his best work.

HALO 4 "SCANNED" TRAILER (2012)

In 2012, the long-awaited, highly anticipated HALO 4 was released for the Xbox 360. During the buildup to the release, the game-makers enlisted director David Fincher to craft an unconventionally long commercial/teaser trailer.

Titled"SCANNED", the piece takes on the POV of Master Chief, showing us flashbacks from his life as he was selected for the Master Chief program, surgically enhanced, and let loose into the galaxy to protect Earth. The flashbacks are triumphant in nature, which only underscores the severity of the situation when we cut to the present and reveal Master Chief in captivity, facing off against what appears to be a greater threat than he's ever encountered.

"SCANNED" is a combination of live-action and all-CG elements, evoking the slick commercial work of David Fincher's earlier advertising career as well as reiterating his confident grasp on visual effects. The high contrast, cold/blue color palette is one of the piece's few Fincher signatures, in addition to the focus on the futurist technology required to make Master Chief in the first place. At two minutes long, "SCANNED" is a supersized spot and must have been incredibly expensive. Considering that both the HALO video game series and Fincher have huge fan bases between them, it's a bit surprising to see that their collaboration here wasn't hyped more than it was.
There's not a lot of growth to see on David Fincher's part here, other than the observation that his long, successful commercial career has made him the go-to director for only the highest-profile spots and campaigns.

HOUSE OF CARDS "CHAPTER 1 & 2" (2013)

Director David Fincher has long been a tastemaker when it comes to commercial American media. His two pilot episodes for Netflix's HOUSE OF CARDS, released in 2013, are simply the latest in a long string of works that have influenced how movies are made, how commercials are engineered, and how music videos have evolved.

Due to HOUSE OF CARDS' runaway success, he has played a crucial part in making the all-episodes-at-once model the indisputable future of serialized entertainment and reinforcing the notion that we're living in a new golden age of television.

HOUSE OF CARDS had originally been a successful television series in the United Kingdom, so of course it had to be re-adapted for American audiences, who presumably have no patience for British parliamentary politics.

On principle, I think this is a terrible practice that discourages us from learning about other cultures based off the assumption that we're too lazy to read subtitles. But like Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011) before it, once in a while the practice can create an inspired new spin on existing work that distinctly enhances its legacy within the collective consciousness.

HOUSE OF CARDS' origins stretch back to 2008, when David Fincher's agent approached the director with the idea while he was finishing up THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. Fincher was interested in the idea, and enlisted hisBENJAMIN BUTTON writer Eric Roth to help him executive produce and develop the series.

After shopping it around to various cable networks around town, they found an unexpected home in streaming movie delivery service Netflix, who was in the first stages of building a block of original programming in order to compete with the likes of HBO and Showtime while bolstering their customer base. Along with LILYHAMMER and the revived ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, HOUSE OF CARDS formed part of the first wave of this original programming, which took advantage of Netflix customers' binge-watching habits by releasing all episodes at once instead of parsing them out over the space of several weeks.

It was (and still is) a groundbreaking way to consume television, and despite the naysayers, the strategy worked brilliantly. Funnily enough, the reunion between Fincher and SE7EN (1995) star Kevin Spacey didn't occur out of their natural friendship, but because Netflix found in its performance statistics a substantial overlap between customers who had an affinity for David Fincher and Spacey, respectively.

As such, executives at Netflix were able to deduce and mathematically reinforce the conclusion that another collaboration between both men would generate their biggest audience. This also gave them the confidence to commit to two full seasons from the outset instead of adhering to traditional television's tired-and-true practice of producing a pilot before ordering a full series.

Admittedly, the use of metrics and numbers instead of gut instinct might be a cynical way to approach programming, but in HOUSE OF CARDS' case, the idea really paid off. Under Fincher's expert guidance, Spacey has delivered the best performance of his career and HOUSE OF CARDS has emerged as one of the best serialized dramas around, rivaling the likes of such heavyweights as MAD MEN, THE WIRE, and BREAKING BAD.

Fincher directed the first two episodes in the series, which takes place during the inauguration of fictional President Garrett Walker. Walker wouldn't even be taking the oath of office if it weren't for the substantial canvassing done by House Majority Whip Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in exchange for the coveted position of Secretary of State.

After taking office, however, Walker has a change of heart and reneges on his promise. Underwood shows grace and discipline in accepting the President Elect's decision, but immediately begins scheming how to manipulate his way to the top. He's simultaneously challenged and reinforced by his wife Claire (Robin Wright), the CEO of a prominent nonprofit and a strong-willed leader in her own right.

On the President's first day in office, Underwood targets the new nominee for Secretary of State, Michael Kern, via an education reform bill- which is revealed to be radically left-leaning and unacceptable to the public's interests.

Underwood leaks the bill to the press through Washington Herald reporter Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara), whose story on the matter lands on the Herald's front page and prompts the education reform chairman to step aside and designate Frank himself to head up the authorship of a new bill.

It isn't long until Underwood manages to unseat Kern by exploiting his handicaps via hardline questions from the press, subsequently installing a pawn of his own as the new candidate. Over the course of the first season, Underwood's machinations and orchestrations will whisk him up into the upper echelons of power and within a heartbeat of the highest office in the land.

Kevin Spacey has always been a well-respected actor, but his performance as Frank Underwood reminds us of his unparalleled level of talent. Underwood is an unconventional narrator, straddling a line between an omniscient and personal point of view.

A southern gentleman from South Carolina first, a Democrat second, and currently the House Majority Whip (a temporary position, to be sure), Underwood is a ruthlessly calculating and manipulative politician-but at the same time he's endlessly charismatic and armed with an endless supply of euphemisms and folksy proverbs.

Although Spacey and David Fincher haven't worked together on this close a scale since 1995, it seems they're able to slip right into the proceedings with a great degree of confidence and comfort.

Robin Wright, also on her second collaboration with Fincher after THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, plays Underwood's wife, Claire. Every bit as strong and calculating as her husband, the character of Claire adds a distinctly Shakespearean air to the story by channeling the insidiously supportive archetype of Lady Macbeth.

The CEO of a successful nonprofit firm, Claire pulls her weight around the Underwood household and becomes Frank's rock during difficult times. Wright does a great job of making Claire inherently likeable and relatable, despite her outwardly cold characterization.

With HOUSE OF CARDS, the Mara family has established something of a dynasty in their collaborations with Fincher. After Rooney's career-making performances in THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, older sister Kate proves every bit her equal as Zoe Barnes, a wet-around-the-ears journalist for the Washington Herald. Plucky, street smart and ambitious, Barnes is able to use her intelligence as a tool of empowerment just as well as her sex.

Corey Stoll and Mahershala Ali, as Peter Russo and Remy Denton respectively, prove to be revelations that stick out amidst the clutter of David Fincher's supporting cast. Stoll's Russo is a politician from East Pennsylvania who has problems with alcohol and drug abuse. He's severely disorganized and impulsive, despite his promising intelligence and ambition.

Ali's Denton is almost the exact opposite-super focused, disciplined, and exceedingly principled. Denton is a high-powered lawyer who serves as a great foil to Underwood's scheming. Ali's performance also benefits due having worked with Fincher on THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON.

Like all of Fincher's late-career work, HOUSE OF CARDS is shot entirely digitally, taking advantage of the Red Epic's pure, clean image to convey the series' sterile, almost-surgical tone. Instead of hiring a cinematographer he's worked with before, David Fincher enlists the eye of Eigil Bryld, who ably replicates the director's signature aesthetic.

The cold, steely color palette has been desaturated to a pallid monotone in its treatment of blues, teals, and greys. Warm tones, like practical lights that serve to create a soft, cavernous luminance in interior chambers, are dialed into the yellow side of the color spectrum.

The aesthetic deviates from Fincher's style, however, in opting for a much shallower focus-even in wide shots. Curiously, the aspect ratio seems to be fluid from format to format. When streamed on Netflix, HOUSE OF CARDS is presented in 1.85:1, but watching it on Blu Ray, the image appears to be cropped to Fincher's preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, making for an inherently more-cinematic experience.

HOUSE OF CARDS plays like an old-school potboiler/espionage thriller, featuring shadowy compositions and strategic placement of subjects in his frame that are reminiscent of classic cloak-and-dagger cinema.

The camera work is sedate, employing subtle dolly work when need be. The effect is a patient, plodding pace that echoes Underwood's unrelenting focus and forward-driven ambition. Perhaps the most effective visual motif is the inspired breaking of the fourth wall, when Spacey pulls out of the scene at hand to monologue directly to camera (which makes the audience complicit in his nefarious plot).

Spacey delivers these sidebar moments with a deliciously dry wit, enriching what might otherwise be a stale story of everyday politics and injecting it with the weight of Shakespearean drama. The foundation of this technique can be seen in 1999's FIGHT CLUB, where David Fincher had Edward Norton address the audience directly in a few select sequences. HOUSE OF CARDS fully commits to this idea, doing away with conventional voiceover entirely.

While it's been used in endless parodies since the series' release, the very fact that the technique is commonly joked about points to its fundamental power.

Another visual conceit that has been copied by other pop culture works like NONSTOP (2014) is the superimposition of text message conversations over the action, rather than cutting to an insert shot of the message displayed on the cell phone's screen.

Considering that characters have been texting each other in movies for almost ten years now, I'm frankly surprised it took us this long for the on-screen subtitle conceit to enter into the common cinematic language. It's an inspired way to dramatize pedestrian, everyday exchanges that act as the modern-day equivalent of coded messages in cloak-and-dagger stories.

Behind the camera, Fincher retains most of his regular department heads save for one new face. Donald Graham Burt returns as Production Designer, creating authentic replicas of the hallowed halls and chambers of Washington DC. Kirk Baxter, who normally edits Fincher's features with Angus Wall, goes solo in HOUSE OF CARDS and weaves everything together in a minimalist, yet effective fashion.

The ever-dependable Ren Klyce returns as Sound Designer, giving an overly-talkie drama some much-needed sonic embellishment. The only new face in the mix is Jeff Beal, who composes the series' music. Beal's theme for HOUSE OF CARDS is instantly iconic, fueled by an electronic pulse that bolsters traditional orchestral strings and horns- echoing the romantic statues of fallen heroes that dot the DC landscape with a patriotic, mournful sound.

The series doesn't rely on much in the way of needledrops, so David Fincher's inclusion of two pre-recorded tracks is worth noting. The first episode features an inaugural ball where we hear Dmiti Shostakovich's "Second Waltz", which cinephiles should recognize as the main theme to Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999).

Additionally, the second episode features Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" when Russo goes to visit a conspiracy theorist in rural Massachusetts. While not exactly the most original choice of music, it's appropriate enough.

For visionary directors like Fincher, television is tough because of the need to work within a strictly defined set of aesthetic boundaries. While this is changing and becoming a better stage for visually dynamic work every day, the basic rule of thumb is to direct the pilot in order to set the style in place and make the entire series conform around it.

In that regard, HOUSE OF CARDS as a series absolutely oozes Fincher's influence, despite 24 of the (to-date) 26 episodes being helmed by different directors. This phenomenon can be ascribed to the fact that David Fincher's episodes dovetail quite nicely with several themes and imagery he's built his career on exploring.

Take the opening titles for instance-while they are usually part and parcel with the conventional television experience, Fincher makes them his own by showing time-lapse footage of Washington DC locales, suggesting the bustling scope of his stage while further exploring the passage of time as a thematic idea- also seen in earlier work like ZODIAC (2007) or THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON.

This theme is also reflected in Fincher's depiction of DC's iconic architecture. Like he did in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, his compositions and location selections when taken as a whole suggest a clash between the old Washington and the new.

Old DC, marked by classical, colonial structures like The White House and The Lincoln Memorial, face off against the growing tide of steel and glass towers, or the modern infrastructural design of subway stations. A key takeaway of HOUSE OF CARDS is that Washington DC, a city defined by its romantic memorials to the past, is increasingly modernizing into a world city of the future.

This transition is aided by mankind's increasing dependence on- and complicated relationship with-technology; another core idea that David Fincher has grappled with throughout his career. HOUSE OF CARDS' focusing prism is communication: cell phones, text messages, the Internet, Apple computers, CNN, etc.

The series goes to great lengths to depict how information is disseminated in the digital age, with government and the media forming a complex, symbiotic relationship.

In asking the audience to root for, essentially, the bad guy, HOUSE OF CARDS echoes the strong undercurrent of nihilism that marks Fincher's stories. Underwood is less of a protagonist than he is an antihero.

Objectively, he's a bad person who's scheming to outright steal the Presidency to rule the world as he sees fit. In real life, we'd react to this sort of notion with outrage-just ask anyone who's ever irrationally obsessed over a particular birth certificate of a certain standing President. However, we can't help but root for Underwood to succeed, simply because he's just so damn attractive and charismatic (on top of actually being, you know, a fully-fleshed out, relatable person with moral shades of grey and not a stock villain archetype).

HOUSE OF CARDS' groundbreaking release was met with quite the warm reception. It was nominated for several Emmys (a big deal for a series that hadn't been broadcast first on television), and launched Netflix into HBO's orbit in terms of compelling original content.

For Fincher as a director, HOUSE OF CARDS served as a great comeback after the disappointment of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. The series, whose third season is scheduled to premiere in February 2015, is a confident, near-flawless exploration of man's lust for power and our complicated governmental structure-and wouldn't be nearly as successful without David Fincher's guiding hand. My one regret with HOUSE OF CARDS is that he didn't direct more episodes.

COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (2013-2014)

Director David Fincher barely had any time to notice the modestly-disappointing performance of 2011's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, what with the continuing development of several projects he was attached to make. It would be 3 years before he was back in cinemas with another feature, but the years between 2011-2014 were by no means a fallow period.

His sheer love for directing and for being on set couldn't keep him away for long- and so in 2013 he returned to the arena that first made his name, armed with a new commercial and a new music video.

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: "SUIT & TIE" (2013)

You couldn't go anywhere in the Summer of 2013 without hearing Justin Timberlake's "Suit & Tie" on the airwaves. As Timberlake's own bid for Michael Jackson's pop throne, the song's broad appeal couldn't be denied.

The inevitable music video for the song couldn't be trusted with just any filmmaker-it was too high-profile to go to anyone but the biggest directors in town. Most likely due to their successful collaboration in 2010's THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Timberlake chose Fincher as the director for "SUIT & TIE"-their union begetting one of the better music videos in many, many years.

Fincher's visual aesthetic proves quite adept at its translation into the world of high fashion and style. He uses black and white digital cinematography and a 2.40:1 aspect ratio to echo the polished, sleek vibe of Timberlake's song.

While a lot of his earlier music videos were shot in black and white to achieve a sense of grit, David Fincher's use of it here echoes the crispness of a black tuxedo against a white shirt.

There's a great interplay between light and dark throughout the piece, both in the broad strokes like the dramatic silhouettes he gets from his high contrast lighting setups, as well as smaller touches like Timberlake's white socks that peek out from between black pants and shoes (another homage to Michael Jackson).

Despite being primarily a for-hire vehicle for Timberlake and a selling tool for his single, "SUIT & TIE" manages to incorporate a few of Fincher's long-held thematic fascinations.

Fincher's exploration of our relationship with technology sees a brief occurrence here as Timberlake and Jay-Z utilize state of the art recording equipment in the studio, as well as employing iPads as part of the songwriting process.

David Fincher features Apple products in his work so much more prominently than other filmmakers that I'm beginning to think he has a secret product placement deal with them. Architecture also plays a subtle role in the video, seen in Timberlake's slick, modern bachelor pad as well as the Art Deco stylings and graceful arches of the stage he performs on.

One strange thing I noticed, though: the size of the stage itself doesn't match the venue it's housed in. For example, when the camera looks towards Timberlake, the stage extends pretty deep behind him like it was the Hollywood Bowl.

But when we cut to the reverse angle and see the audience, the venue is revealed to be disproportionally shallow and intimate. If you were to draw out the geography onto a blueprint, you'd realize it was a very unbalanced auditorium. Most likely, these two shots were shot in separate locations and stitched together with editing.

As his first music video in several years, "SUIT & TIE" finds Fincher working at the top of his game in familiar territory. It's easily one of his best music videos and will no doubt serve as a taste-making piece and influencer for many pop videos to come.

CALVIN KLEIN: "DOWNTOWN" (2013)

Later the same year, Fincher collaborated with his THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO star Rooney Mara in a spot for Calvin Klein perfume called "DOWNTOWN". Also shot in digital black and white, the spot finds David Fincher and Mara eschewing the punk-y grunge of their previous collaboration in favor of an edgy, glamorous look.

Mara herself is depicted as a modern day Audrey Hepburn-being adored by the press as she attends junkets and does photo shoots-but is also seen engaging in daily urban life and riding the subway (while listening to her iPod, natch). Fincher's love of architecture is seen in several setups, the most notable being a shot prominently featuring Mara framed against NYC's George Washington Bridge. The whole piece is scored to a track by Karen O, a kindred spirit of Mara's and Fincher's who provided the vocals for Trent Reznor's re-arrangement of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" for THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Overall,"DOWNTOWN" is a brilliantly executed and stylish spot that sells its product beautifully.

GAP: "DRESS NORMAL" CAMPAIGN (2014)

2014 marked director David Fincher's return to cinema screens with his domestic thriller GONE GIRL, following a three year hiatus from feature filmmaking. It also saw the infamous provocateur release a series of four commercial spots for the blandest clothing label in the business: Gap.

In a transparent bid to regain some cultural relevancy, Gap released a campaign entitled "DRESS NORMAL", a move that could be construed as the struggling brand capitalizing on their sudden popularity amongst the emergent "normcore" crowd- arguably one of the more idiotic non-trends in recent memory.

To his credit, Fincher achieves Gap's goals brilliantly, creating four effortlessly cool and stylish pieces (despite what some of the more-cynical voices in the blogosphere might say). Titled "Golf", "Stairs", "Kiss", and "Drive", all are presented in stark shades of black and white, rendered crisply onto the digital frame.

Fincher eschews a sense of modernity for a jazzy mid-century vibe, with the old-fashioned production design and cinematography coming across as a particularly well-preserved lost film from the French New Wave. Each spot pairs together a couple (or groups) of beautiful urbanites living out the prime of their youth in generic urban environs.

David Fincher's hand is most evident in the sleek, modern camerawork that belies the campaign's timeless appeal. He employs a variety of ultra-smooth dolly and technocrane movements that effortlessly glide across his vignettes while hiding the true complexity of the moves themselves.

All in all, Fincher's "DRESS NORMAL" spots are quite effective, injecting some much-needed style and sex appeal into Gap's tired branding efforts.

GONE GIRL (2014)

Since the beginning of time, men and women have been at odds with each other. One of the grand ironies of the universe is that testosterone and estrogen act against each other despite needing to work in harmony in order to perpetuate the species.

We scoff at the term "battle of the sexes", like it's some absurdly epic war over territory or ideology, but the fact of the matter is that, no matter how hard we try to bridge the gap, men and women just aren't built to fully comprehend each other like they would a member of their own sex.

Yet despite these fundamental differences of opinion and perspective, we continue coupling up and procreating in the name of love, family, and civilization. In this light, the institution of marriage can be seen as something of an armistice, or a treaty- an agreement by two combative parties to equally reciprocate affection, protection and support.

Naturally, when this treaty is violated in a high-profile way like, say, the murder or sudden disappearance of someone at the hands of his or her spouse, we can't help but find ourselves captivated by the lurid headlines and ensuing media frenzy. Names like OJ Simpson, Robert Blake, or Scott Peterson loom large in our collective psyche as boogeymen symbolizing the ultimate marital transgression.

The treacherous world of domesticity serves as the setting of director David Fincher's tenth feature film, GONE GIRL(2014). Adapted by author Gillian Flynn from her novel of the same name, the film marks David Fincher's return to the big screen after a three year absence following the disappointing reception of 2011's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

In that time, he had refreshed his artistic energies with Netflix's razor-sharp political thriller HOUSE OF CARDS (2013), with the serial's warm reaction boosting his stock amongst the Hollywood elite.

Fincher's oeuvre trades in nihilistic protagonists with black hearts and ruthless convictions, so naturally, the churning machinations and double crosses of Flynn's book were an effortless match for his sensibilities.

Working with producers Joshua Donen, Arnon Milchan, Reese Witherspoon, as well as his own producing partner Cean Chaffin, Fincher manages to infuse a nasty undercurrent of his trademark gallows humor into GONE GIRL, making for a highly enjoyable domestic thriller that stands to be included amongst his very best work.

GONE GIRL begins like any other normal day for Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck). But this day isn't like any others- it's the fifth anniversary of his wedding to wife Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), a privileged New York socialite and the real-life inspiration for "Amazing Amy", the main character in a series of successful children's books authored by her parents.

He leaves home to check in on the bar he runs in the nearby town of North Carthage, Missouri, expressing his dread of the occasion to his twin sister Margot, who mixes drinks there. When he arrives back at the generic suburban McMansion he shares with Amy, he finds a grisly scene- overturned furniture, shattered glass, streaks of blood... and no Amy.

The police launch an investigation into Amy's whereabouts, with her status as minor literary celebrity causing a disproportionate stir in the media. He's taunted at every turn by deceitful talk show hosts and news anchors, as well as clues from Amy herself, left behind in the form of letters that are part of gift-finding game that's become their anniversary tradition.

In her absence, the clues have taken on a more much foreboding aura- channeling similar vibes and imagery from David Fincher's 1997 classic mystery THE GAME. The media's increased scrutiny on Nick's life and the history of his relationship with Amy drags his flaws as a husband out into the light, where they're subsequently used against him to raise the possibility that he just might be responsible for her disappearance. But did he kill his wife? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't... but the truth will be more surprising than anyone could've expected.

Ben Affleck headlines the film as Nick Dunne, skewering his real-life image as a handsome leading man by bringing to the fore a natural douchebag quality we've always suspected he possessed. Dunne covers up his supreme narcissism and anger issues with a thin layer of charm, finding the perfect balance between a sympathetic protagonist who is way in over his head and a slick operator who thinks he's got his game on lock.

Affleck proves inspired casting on Fincher's part, and it's nice to be reminded that besides being a great director in his own right, he's still a great performer. As Amy Dunne, Rosamund Pike conjures up one of the most terrifying villainesses in screen history.

An icy, calculating sociopath, Amy will do anything and everything necessary to carry out the perfect plot against her husband- even if the physical harm she deals out is on herself. Pike's skincrawling performance resulted in the film's only Academy Award nomination, but it's a well-deserved one that will be remembered for quite some time.

If the pairing of Affleck and Pike as GONE GIRL's leads seems a bit odd or off-center, then Fincher's supporting cast boast an even-more eclectic collection of characters. Neil Patrick Harris- Doogie Howser himself- plays Amy's college sweetheart Desi Collins.

A rich pretty boy and pseudo-stalker with bottomless reserves of inherited funds, he's so intent on dazzling Amy with his high-tech toys and spacious homes that he's completely oblivious to her machinations against him. Primarily known for his comedic roles in TV and film, NPH makes a successful bid for more serious roles with a performance that's every bit as twisted as the two leads.

Beating him in the stunt casting department, however, is maligned director Tyler Perry, whose films are often derided by critics as patronizing and shamelessly pandering despite their immense popularity amongst the African American population. The news of his involvement in GONE GIRL with met with gasps of disbelief and confusion by the blogosphere, but here's the thing- Tyler Perry is great in this movie.

He effortlessly falls into the role of Tanner bolt, a high-powered celebrity lawyer from New York, soothing Nick with his seasoned expertise and wearing expensive designer suits so comfortably they might as well be sweatpants. He's extremely convincing as a whip-smart, cunning attorney, never once hinting at the fact this is the same man who became rich and famous for wearing a fat suit under a mumu.

Emily Ratajkowski and Patrick Fugit are great as Nick's jiggly co-ed mistress Andie and the no-nonsense Officer Gilpin, respectively, but GONE GIRL's real revelation is character actress Kim Dickens.

Calling to mind a modern, more serious version of Frances McDormand's folksy homicide investigator in FARGO (1996), Dickens' Detective Boney is highly observant and sly- almost to a fault. The joy in watching Dickens' performance is seeing her internal struggle against the growing realization that none of her prior experience or expertise could ever prepare her for Amy's level of scheming.

GONE GIRL retains David Fincher's signature look, thanks to the return of his regular cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. As a team, they've built their careers out of using new filmmaking technologies to fit their needs, and GONE GIRL isn't one to break the tradition.

One of the earliest features to shoot on Red Cinema's new Dragon sensor, GONE GIRL was captured full-frame at 6k resolution and then thrown into a 2.35:1-matted 4k timeline in post-production.

This allowed Fincher and his editing partner Kirk Baxter to re-compose their frames as they saw fit with razor-precision and minimal quality degradation. This circumstance also afforded the ability to employ better camera stabilization in a bid to perfect that impossibly-smooth sense of movement that Fincher prefers.

As one of the medium's most vocal proponents of digital technology, David Fincher inherently understands the advantages of the format- an understanding that empowers him with the ability to make truly uncompromised work.

Appropriate to its subject matter, GONE GIRL is a very dark film. Fincher and Cronenweth use dark wells of shadow to convey a foreboding mood, while Fincher's signature cold color palette renders Nick's trials in bleak hues of blue, yellow, green, and grey.

Red, a color that David Fincher claims to find too distracting on film, rarely appears in GONE GIRL, save for when he specifically wants your attention on a small detail of the frame- like, say, a small blood splatter on the hood over the kitchen stove.

Despite the consistent gloom, the film does occasionally find short moments of warm, golden sunlight and deeply-saturated color. Fincher's slow, creeping camerawork leers with omniscience, placing its characters at an emotional arm's distance.

Knowing Fincher's background as a commercial director, it's not surprising to see GONE GIRL throw around nonchalant product placement for flyover-country conglomerations like Walmart, KFC and Dunkin Donuts.

Looking back over his other features, it's clear that David Fincher has never been one to shy away from the presence of well-known brands in his frame- indeed, a large chunk of his bank account is there as a direct result of his interaction with brand names and logos.

Product placement is a controversial topic amongst filmmakers, with many seeing the intrusion of commerce as an almost-pornographic sacrilege towards art, but Fincher's view seems to be that reality is simply saturated with corporate logos, branding, and advertisements, so why should a film striving for realism be any different?

In Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and his musical partner Atticus Ross, Fincher has found a kindred dark soul, and their third collaboration together after 2010's THE SOCIAL NETWORK and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO doesn't surprise in its aim to bring something entirely unexpected to the proceedings.

Working from David Fincher's brief that the music reside in the space between calm and dread, Reznor and Ross's electronic score for GONE GIRL is characterized by soothing ambient tones interrupted by a pulsing staccato that conveys the razor-sharp undercurrents of malice that Amy so effortlessly hides behind her statuesque facade.

Outside of John Williams and Steven Spielberg, it's hard to think of a composer/director partnership where each artist's aesthetic is so perfectly suited towards the other. Reznor, Ross, and Fincher have cultivated a symbiotic relationship that, together with Fincher's regular sound designer Ren Klyce and his consistently excellent and immersive soundscapes, elevates any project they undertake into a darkly sublime experience.

A nihilistic sentiment abounds in the style of GONE GIRL, falling quite effortlessly into David Fincher's larger body of work. The same attention to detail and insight into the banal side of law enforcement (paperwork, legal red-tape, etc.) that marked 2007's ZODIAC is present in GONE GIRL's almost-clinical depiction of the day-to-day process of investigating such a luridly mysterious crime.

Two of David Fincher's most consistent fascinations as a director- architecture and technology- play substantial roles in the drama, but never at the expense of story and character. The architecture that Fincher concerns himself with in GONE GIRL is the domestic structures in which we house our families, or to put it another way, the castles in which we shelter our charges.

However, as seen through the perspective of David Fincher's particularly dark and ironic sense of humor, our suburban castles instead become prisons. The neutral tones of upper-middle-class domesticity that pervade Amy and Nick's McMansion are almost oppressive in their blandness, while the structural elements on which they're painted bear no characteristics of the values of those who inhabit them.

Fincher reinforces this idea by shooting from low angles to expose the ceiling, suggesting that the walls are figuratively closing in on his characters. Likewise, Desi Collins' grandiose, rustic lakeside retreat is simply too spacious to ever feel constricting or claustrophobic, what with it's cathedral-height vaulted ceilings and oversized windows letting in an abundance of sunlight.

However, Desi has rigged his well-appointed home with an overblown array of security cameras and other surveillance, effectively trapping Amy inside if she wishes to remain under the auspices of "missing, presumed dead". And speaking of technology, David Fincher places a substantial focus on Nick's distractions with video games, cell phones, oversized televisions and robot dogs.

This "boys with toys" mentality is quite appropriate to Fincher's vision, as it is crucial to the authenticity of Amy's convictions that Nick has fallen prey to that all-too-common suburban phenomenon of men turning to the stimulation afforded by electronics and gadgets after growing tired of their wives.

The dangers of growing complacent in your marriage- whereby we distract ourselves with screens instead of with each other- is a key message in GONE GIRL, and Fincher's career-long exploration of mankind's relationship to technology makes him a particularly suitable messenger.

Thanks in part to GONE GIRL's high profile as a bestselling book as well as David Fincher's own profile as a highly skilled artist with a fervent cult following, the film was a strong success at the box office. As of this writing, it actually holds the records for Fincher's highest-grossing theatrical run in the United States.

Critical reviews were mostly positive, and while it received only one nomination for Pike's performance at the 2015 Oscars, it's generally regarded as one of the best films of the year. The tone and subject matter of GONE GIRL may not feel particularly new for Fincher (a notion that may have played into the film's lack of Oscar nominations), but this well-trodden ground provides a solid platform for David Fincher to perfect what he already does best: delivering taut, stylish thrillers with razor-sharp edges.

Now firmly into middle age (52 as of this writing), Fincher could be forgiven for what so many other artists his age do: slowing down, mellowing out, looking backwards, worrying about legacy, etc. It's pretty evident however that he has no intention of doing any of those things. While his next feature has yet to be announced, he's deep in development on several projects running the gamut from theatrical to television.

Fincher's skill set may have become more refined and sophisticated in its taste, but that doesn't mean he's gone soft on us. Indeed, he's actually grown much sharper.

He's cleaved off extraneous waste from his aesthetic, and in return he's able to focus his energies to the point of laser precision. One only needs to look at GONE GIRL's gut-churning sex/murder sequence to see that he hasn't lost his unflinching eye for the macabre and his affinity for stunning his audience out of complacency.

He may be older, yes, but in many ways, he's still that same young buck eager to shock the world with Gwyneth's head in a box.
Author THE DIRECTORS SERIES is an educational collection of video and text essays by filmmaker Cameron Beyl exploring the works of contemporary and classic film directors. Cameron Beyl is the creator of The Directors Series and an award-winning filmmaker of narrative features, shorts, and music videos. His work has screened at numerous film festivals and museums, in addition to being featured on tastemaking online media platforms like Vice Creators Project, Slate, Popular Mechanics and Indiewire.
David Fincher'S FILMOGRAPHY

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David Fincher: The Ultimate Guide to His Films & Directing Style | Indie Film Hustle®

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1999 was a watershed year for people in my generation, as it no doubt was for other generations as well. On the eve of the new millennium, we were caught in a place between excitement and apprehension. The 21st century loomed large with promises of technological and sociological innovations, yet ...

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Laray Mayfield has been an integral part of Fincher’s collaborative process since he hired her to be the casting director on Fight Club. Mayfield, who had previously worked as Fincher’s assistant before the 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, says that Fincher’s collaborative skills extend to the other side of the camera, too. “He really loves actors, and he knows a lot about actors.”

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1. Obsessive with the cinematography
2. Obsession with taking multiple takes
3. Obsession is also a theme in the films themselves- through the characters.
4. Visually he will use complementary colours to represent characters inner and outer conflicts.
5. A recurring theme in his films is the lack of closure for the audience.
6. Is very deliberate with his music choices.
7. Lonely and outcast characters.
8. Has a fascination of technology, and was a pioneer in digital film technology.
9.  Does not have a code about the accuracy of events when making biographical films.
10. Narcissistic characters

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David Fincher, in full David Leo Fincher, (born August 28, 1962, Denver, Colorado, U.S.), American music video and film director known for his stylish movies, which usually trended toward the dark and atmospheric.

Fincher was raised in San Anselmo, California, where he became interested in movies at a young age, in part because he was a neighbour of filmmaker George Lucas. Fincher was still a teenager when he became an assistant cameraman at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas's special-effects studio. In the mid-1980s Fincher began directing commercials, which quickly led to a successful career as a music video director. He made some of the most iconic music videos of the 1980s and '90s-including those for Madonna's "Express Yourself" (1989) and "Vogue" (1990), as well as Aerosmith's " Janie's Got a Gun " (1989)-which were noted for their pronounced cinematic qualities, such as elaborate sets and deft camerawork.

In 1992 Fincher made his feature-film directorial debut with . The movie had a troubled production, and it did poorly both critically and commercially. The experience soured Fincher on big-budget film franchises, and his next movie was the relatively small-scale thriller (1995), which revolves around two detectives (played by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt) searching for a serial killer (played by Kevin Spacey) who bases his murders on the seven deadly sins. The moody Se7en earned positive reviews and was a box-office success, establishing Fincher as an up-and-coming director in Hollywood circles. He then made The Game (1997), in which a financier ( Michael Douglas) gets caught up in a dangerous game of cat and mouse after receiving a mysterious birthday present from his wayward brother ( Sean Penn).

A perfectionist behind the camera, Fincher became known for his proclivity to shoot a scene numerous times-sometimes more than 50 takes even for a relatively minor shot. His demanding nature resulted in films with great visual flair, including his 1999 work, (starring Pitt and Edward Norton), which centres on a disaffected white-collar worker who establishes a series of underground fighting organizations. That film doubles as a sardonic exploration of self-identity and masculinity. A box-office disappointment in its theatrical run, Fight Club became a cult sensation on home video, where it developed a devoted following. Fincher then made (2002), the tale of a mother ( Jodie Foster) and daughter (Kristen Stewart) who fight off a harrowing home invasion.

It was five years until Fincher's next feature film, (2007), which recounted the murders of the Zodiac killer and the ultimately futile attempt to capture him. A marked departure from his previous films, Zodiac contains little of his signature dark colour palette, gloomy urban settings, and disorienting camera angles. Instead, the film is a stylish and tense procedural told in a straightforward manner that evokes the classic paranoid "whodunits" of the 1970s.

Fincher continued to broaden his range, directing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), an adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about a man (played by Pitt) who ages backward. Although it was not as widely critically acclaimed as Zodiac, the film did earn Fincher his first Academy Award nomination for best director. He then helmed The Social Network (2010), a portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's rise to power. The film was hailed by many critics as a 21st-century analogue to Citizen Kane, and Fincher won the best director Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Fincher returned to a focus on sordid crime with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), a sleek adaptation of Stieg Larsson's best-selling novel about the investigation of an unsolved murder. He then served as an executive producer of the political drama House of Cards (2013-18), an episodic series that was created for Netflix and distributed via the company's online streaming-video service. Fincher also directed the program's first two hour-long episodes and won an Emmy Award for his work on the opening episode. He then directed a big-screen adaptation of author Gillian Flynn's best-selling thriller novel (2014), about the mysterious circumstances surrounding a woman's disappearance. His next project was the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017-19), about the first criminal profilers at the FBI; Fincher directed several episodes of the show and served as executive producer. He then helmed (2020), a biopic about Herman Mankiewicz and his struggles to write the screenplay for Orson Welles's classic Citizen Kane. The movie earned critical acclaim, and Fincher received his third Oscar nomination for best director.

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David Fincher | Biography, Movies, Music Videos, & Facts

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David Fincher, in full David Leo Fincher, (born August 28, 1962, Denver, Colorado, U.S.), American music video and film director known for his stylish movies, which usually trended toward the dark and atmospheric. Fincher was raised in San Anselmo, California, where he became interested in movies at a young age, in part because he was a neighbour of filmmaker George Lucas.

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If you're familiar with David Fincher movies, you know they focus on serial killers, robbers, brawlers, and murderers alike. You might also know that he has a reputation for being an exacting, obsessively technical director.

However, dark subjects and visual meticulousness belie Fincher's overlooked secret weapon: his ability to connect with actors on a human level to draw out authentic and defining performances.

This humanity, this messy warmth, doesn't simply transcend Fincher's bleakness and robot-like technical rigor: it exists because of it.

That's the genius of David Fincher films.

1.1 Staging, Blocking and Composition in Se7en

Staging Actors and Composing Frames

One cinematic technique favored by Fincher is the wide-angle shot. He uses wide shots (also known as full shots or long shots) to display a character's environment and situation.

Wide shots literally shoot subjects from a distance, but when used in David Fincher movies, they tend to have the opposite effect: they give the audience a gut-level understanding of a character's immediate predicament.

David Fincher movie employing the wide shot in Zodiac

Far less common for Fincher are his use of close-ups. He uses close-ups sparingly to highlight what's really important.

This infrequency ramps up the intimate connection to character when he does choose to cut in.

So how come David Fincher movies use close-ups so sparsely?

David Fincher's style is characterized by purpose. For Fincher, a close-up has to be respected and used only when absolutely necessary. David Fincher films are also characterized by his meticulous shot selection.

On House of Cards, Fincher experimented with the rarely-used (up to that point) 2:1 aspect ratio. This would allow him to capture a middle ground between the intimacy of taller aspect ratios (1.85:1) and the breadth of wider aspect ratios (2.35:1). Let's take a look at the 2:1 aspect ratio and how Fincher brought it into House of Cards.

Let's examine another scene and see his purposeful precision at work.

The climax of is iconic for many reasons. The dark twist of an ending is one of the great shocks in cinema. Kevin Spacey as John Doe, Brad Pitt as Det. Mills, and Morgan Freeman as Det. Somerset all give masterclass performances.

But how is cinematography used to amplify the scene? What effect do shifts in lighting and frame sizes have?

Let's open the box and see what's inside...

Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Our analysis begins the moment Det. Somerset understands the gravity of the situation and runs back to Det. Mills and John.

This scene is all about the power that John Doe has over these men, even though he is their prisoner. One obvious way to suggest a powerful character is to shoot them from a low angle.

Our first shot is an extreme low angle on John Doe. He occupies the center of the frame and is backlit by the sun, giving him something like a halo. This is the moment the trap has been sprung, and he is at his most triumphant.

Most of John Doe's remaining shots are eye-level close-ups. His face looms in the frame as Det. Mills tries to understand what has happened. These close-ups also show us, as Det. Somerset says, "John Doe has the upper hand."

Det. Somerset has opened the box and understands the trap. His single shots are also in close-up. His understanding makes him visually equal to John Doe.

But Det. Mills is still unaware.

As the scene progresses, Det. Mills is shot in either medium or medium wide shots. That is, until he learns that his wife was pregnant when she died.

Finally, we cut to a large close-up of his broken and tortured face.

This close-up isn't meant to suggest Det. Mills has any power in the scene. It is necessary to register the shock and agony he is experiencing. We watch in great detail his emotional turmoil.

From here on, all three characters are shot in close-up.

But there is also a lot happening with how this scene is lit. The lighting, too, accents the scene in abstract but effective ways.

In short, the lighting on Det. Mills and Det. Somerset is 100% consistent and logical. The sun is always on Det. Mills back or left side. For Det. Mills, it is either in front or on his right side.

But the lighting on John Doe changes from shot to shot.

In some close-ups, John is backlit with the sun behind him. In other shots, he is lit from the left, others from the right. There are even shots of him facing the sun.

But the discrepancies don't end with the direction of the sunlight. The quality of the light also changes. In some shots, the sun hits John Doe with sharp brightness. And elsewhere it is diffused and glowing around him, especially in his last close-up right before his execution.

Why? This is a strange decision to make, especially for a perfectionist like Fincher. Is it really just a mistake?

For the sake of argument, let's assume this decision was made intentionally.

The lighting shifts are expressive, meant to suggest more than to represent. He switches from prisoner to mastermind. He is soft-spoken but deadly. He now admits that for all the righteous judgment of his victims, he, too, is a sinner.

There is a multitude of shades to John Doe's character. Det. Mills and Det. Somerset are much less complicated in their morality.

Fincher uses these oppositional lighting schemes to illustrate the divide between these characters. And we are reminded that we will never truly understand John Doe.

This is what creative decisions with cinematography and lighting can produce. Every shot, even within the same scene, is an opportunity to use light and shadow to your advantage.

For more on staging and blocking, check out StudioBinder's FREE masterclass, and the video below, offering some incredible insights on these visual storytelling techniques.

1.2 Camera Movement in Gone Girl

Moving the Camera for Character

David Fincher won't move the camera unless he has a compelling, character-based reason to do so.

Fincher matches his camera moves to the movement and behavior of the actors in the frame. As characters move, so does the camera.

This is where the idea that Fincher "locks onto performance" gets technical. Sometimes actor and camera move together in big ways; sometimes a minute, blink-and-miss-it eyebrow raise motivates a granular camera tilt.

But there are also instances when the camera moves to suggest what the character is thinking rather than doing.

Let's look at a moment from .

When Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) first meet at a party, their playful banter finally wins Amy over. We recognize this moment instantly because the camera clues us in.

Amy leans against a pillar, and Nick stands in front of her. Nick impresses her with his witticisms, and she listens. The shot begins on Amy with Nick in semi-profile.

The camera then gently pans around into an over-the-shoulder on Amy's smile. The movement accomplishes two things.

1. We get a full, direct view of Amy's face to capture this moment.

2. It brings the two characters closer together in the frame without them moving.

They haven't moved physically closer, but they have moved emotionally closer. To get this idea across, nothing more than a simple pan is needed.

This is visual storytelling at its purest.

In the shot list below, check out how Fincher sets up the audience's constant connection to Amy - a duplicitous murderer - in another scene from Gone Girl. Click below to find out how StudioBinder can help you plan your camera movements with its shot listing and storyboarding feature.

The camera moves when the character moves, and stops when she stops.

While it is unclear what David Fincher's next movie will be, he is currently doing some exciting work in television. He directed the first and last two episodes for the first season of "Mindhunter." With those first episodes, he established the visual language of the show using his distinct style.

Fincher's fingerprints are so apparent in the series, it might as well be titled "David Fincher's Mindhunter."

We used StudioBinder's shot list feature to break down a scene from " Mindhunter " that Fincher did not direct so you can spot for yourself what makes the scene "Fincher-esque."

All David Fincher films employ this movement-matching style. It results in a much tighter connection to the characters than the less-precise, looser framing styles of other directors.

By tying camera movement to human movement, Fincher fuses viewers to the humanity of his characters, inspiring the audience to empathize.

2.1 Color in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Fincher's Use of Color

David Fincher films and their use of color gives viewers a fast-track to fear, excitement, dread, joy, and the unexpected. Any emotion Fincher wants to evoke, color leads the way.

He uses monochromatic colors to communicate numbed characters in a stifling world, as with the Ikea furniture scene in . He also draws the viewer's eye to out-of-place elements and builds anticipation with discordant colors, like the orange weaponry on the torture chamber wall in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

This video breaks down how David Fincher movies use color palettes with these examples, and more:

Color is often used as an indicator. It can represent a character's emotional state or as a visual motif to connect ideas.

David Fincher's best movies use color grading quite liberally. Daytime scenes in his films will often be represented naturally. But nighttime scenes, especially interiors, are inevitably soaked in yellows and blues.

Color can also be employed as a filter for memory.

Consider this usage in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) recalls the day his grandniece disappeared. His voiceover narrates a flashback sequence of the day's events.

Flashbacks are often colored differently from the rest of the film. This is done not only to make the delineation between past and present clear.

This shift in the color palette can also suggest emotional resonance.

When the memories are positive, the colors might be over-saturated. When it is a sad flashback, a blue tint will work.

Vanger's flashback is not just sad. It is the worst day of his life.

The time is late September but otherwise a beautiful sunny day. The Vanger family has gathered at the house. Children play outside, and a festive parade bustles through town.

The irony of his grandniece's murder on such an idyllic day is visualized in the color grading. The flashback is tinted with a sickly and bitter yellow/green.

It is a sour color to represent a sour memory.

Is there a flashback in your script? What color would symbolize the emotional connection your character has with the memory?

The right color might hit the exact tonal note you're going for.

2.2 Sets and Locations in The Game

Maximize Your Locations

A character is defined by their environment. Where they live and how they live are directly related to the physical spaces they occupy.

Careful consideration of sets and locations is crucial to character development. As we know, Fincher is obsessed with the details. The color of a phone or the wallpaper in a room is always purposeful.

But let's look at how Fincher photographs these sets and locations for more than character. In The Game, Fincher frames these spaces for dramatic purposes.

Specifically, to visually represent the collapse of Nicholas Van Orton's world.

When we first meet Van Orton (Michael Douglas), his world is defined by large, open and opulent spaces.

The grand staircase with high ceilings and large windows. A living room so large, it extends beyond the frame. An exterior shot of his mansion that dwarves him.

His office is presented with a low angle and a slow push forward that marks the massive space. The conference room with panoramic views of San Francisco. And, again, ceilings so high that an extreme wide shot is still unable to contain.

The primary function of these spaces is to establish Van Orton's wealth and privilege. The wide frames give them a grandeur that would be missing if we covered the same rooms with many shots.

The secondary, and more interesting, function is to give Van Orton a starting point for the journey he is about to take. The Game will strip away everything he has, both his wealth and his privilege.

The excessive spaces like his home and office will be reduced dramatically. Throughout the film, he will be trapped into tighter and tighter spaces whether it's a stalled elevator, a back alley dumpster, or the back of a taxi cab sinking in the Bay.

Van Orton's world shrinks from a cavernous mansion to the inside of a coffin in an underground crypt.

The narrative is structured to break his character down systematically. And the way the sets and locations are designed and photographed aids this progression.

Without the wide frames of Van Orton's life of privilege, the tension and catharsis of his transformation would be minimized.

You've chosen the locations for your next film. The next step is to consider how to maximize the impact of those spaces. What would close-ups provide for character development? What would wide angles suggest about the theme?

Fincher doesn't let those questions go unanswered and neither should you.

3.1 Editing for Character in The Social Network

Montage for Character Development

A montage is a great tool for compressing time and moving the narrative right along. It can also be used to make connections between seemingly disparate elements.

David Fincher films have many great montage sequences. In Zodiac, the amount of time and energy spent on the case needs to be shown in montage. In Se7en, we see Mills and Somerset working independently because of their inability to work together.

In The Social Network, we have a montage that masterfully accomplishes many things at once.

Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) has just been dumped, and he enacts revenge the only way he knows how. During a late-night, drunken hacking and coding session, he creates a website. The site ranks his female classmates against each other using their college profile images.

Meanwhile, a massive frat party at the exclusive Phoenix Club is going down. The montage oscillates between Mark, alone in his dorm room, and the party. The pairing of these two subplots becomes highly symbolic.

Mark is antisocial and has difficulty with romantic relationships. We saw this in the very first scene as Erica (Rooney Mara) dumps him. The Phoenix Club party, then, becomes representative of everything Mark is not...

...and everything he wants to be.

There are no lead characters in the Phoenix Club scenes. No major plot points are given. There's no apparent narrative reason to include it.

So why is it there?

Mark is on a vengeful tear. All his frustrations are pouring out of him. Not just about Erica but his social status and his feelings of inadequacy.

The party is presented in fragments: slow-motion images of girls playing strip poker and dancing on table tops. This is not a stylistic or gratuitous sequence because it is tied directly to our protagonist's imagination.

The party is in Mark's head.

Watch the montage here:

Zuckerberg vs. Party Montage

This montage is pure character development. Intercutting the party with Mark's misogyny and immaturity, the connection becomes clear.

Everything we see in the party is every reason why Mark feels compelled to create FaceMash.

You can see how flat this sequence would be if we did not intercut. If we first watched Mark coding and then showed only the party, the purpose is lost.

The juxtaposition in editing is what makes this sequence so effective. We understand Mark on an emotional level that would be very difficult to achieve otherwise.

In your next film, consider how you can use a montage like this for purposes other than compressing time.

3.2 Editing for Suspense in Panic Room

Slow Motion and Suspense

Editing presents an opportunity to manipulate time. With film, time can be collapsed, expanded, reversed, or chopped up in a million ways.

A suspense scene is constructed to delay whatever the outcome may be. Will they live or die? Will the car crash or not? The longer these questions go unanswered, the higher the suspense.

Of David Fincher's thrillers, is the purest. It is a simple conceit anchored by a home invasion. It lacks the nuanced commentary on the dark side of human behavior that his other films achieve but...

It's pure cinematic candy.

One scene stands out in particular for its editing. It is an epic presentation of a simple task: retrieving a cellphone.

Meg (Jodie Foster) and her daughter (Kristen Stewart) are safe in their panic room. While the intruders argue downstairs, Meg seizes this opportunity to get her cell phone outside in the bedroom.

You can imagine the consequences of this decision. So far, Meg and Sarah are mostly safe in the panic room...mostly.

Getting the cellphone might mean life or death. That's how vital this risky operation is.

And the presentation of the scene is explicitly designed to maximize this point. Using extreme slow motion and abstract sound design, the suspense reaches its tipping point.

Watch the scene here:

Watch the scene from Panic Room

The scene starts with Meg opening the panic room door. She races to her bedside, reaching behind the overturned mattress for the phone. It's not there.

The men continue their dispute on the stairs, completely unaware that their window of opportunity is wide open.

Meg then looks under the bed and sees the phone. She reaches but it is inches out of her reach. She stretches further and inadvertently knocks over a lamp. When it crashes to the floor and the bulb bursts, the intruders finally realize what's happening.

They begin to run back upstairs just as Meg grabs the phone and sprints back to the panic room. She gets in, and the door shuts behind her not two seconds before they would have reached her.

At normal speed, this action would have taken no more than 15-20 seconds. Instead, the slow motion stretches this out to one minute and forty-two seconds.

That's painfully slow. It's like a nightmare when you're being chased but can't seem to outrun your pursuer.

The slow motion might be enough to crank up the suspense by itself, but we're not done yet. The images move at a snail's pace, but the editing is insanely fast.

In the 102 seconds of the scene, there are 61 different shots. This means that the average shot length is 1.67 seconds.

The effect of super slow shots edited at this breakneck pace is pure suspense. It takes a simple action that could have been a minor moment in the film and expands it to epic dimensions.

With no dialogue, a subtle but brooding sound design, slow motion, and rapid cutting, we have an intense scene. This is David Fincher proving his mastery over the medium.

Here's a challenge for your next film: take a simple action with dire consequences and stretch it out as much as possible. But keep in mind that there is always a breaking point--that point in which you stretched too far.

After a certain point, you will lose the audience. Find that point and dial it back just a hair.

4.1 Emphatic Sound Design in Fight Club

Storytelling with Sound

Fight Club is David Fincher's most stylized movie to date. Whether you enjoy this maximalist approach or not, the experience of Fight Club is one-of-a-kind.

Every element in the filmmaking process seems to be firing on all cylinders. Cinematography. Editing. Production Design. Music. Performance. Costume. Color. Writing. Special Effects.

Each of these elements is worthy of analysis, but let's take a closer look at just one.

Sound design.

How does David Fincher push his sound design, and what effect does it have on the audience?

In the very first scene, we are dropped into a moment that immediately raises many questions.

The Narrator (Edward Norton) has a gun in his mouth, held by a man we will later meet (Tyler Durden). The Narrator is strapped to a chair in an unfinished floor of a downtown skyscraper.

Before we see this setting, we hear it.

Watch the scene here:

Sound Design in Opening Scene of Fight Club

The sound design clues us in about our location. There are deep echoes and reverberation to everything. The dialogue, the click of the gun against the Narrator's teeth, the creak of the chair. There is also a room tone, a low hum that we associate with empty spaces.

The room they are in is under construction. It is bare bones, hollow and cavernous. So, the echoes we hear are exaggerated but also motivated by the location. It gives the quietness and the strangeness of the scene a reason to be.

As the camera leaves these characters, it takes on an omniscient and rapid tour of the situation. We descend into the parking structure below the building. The camera's motion is paired with a whooshing sound as it passes through the ground and concrete walls.

We also hear alarms and sirens outside the building, but we don't see their sources. These dramatic sound effects suggest the danger inherent in the situation. Finally, we hear the electronic buzz and beeps of the timers rigged to the explosives.

As we jump back to the Narrator, he sets us up for the flashback that will occupy the majority of the film. We hear a rapid ticking sound, like a watch at high speed.

This suggests the jump back in time, but also a reminder of the imminent disaster.

It is a short scene, lasting just over a minute - just enough time to meet our characters and understand that they end up in a terrible situation. The images tell us a lot about this scenario, but the emphatic sound design seals the deal.

The amount of storytelling you can achieve in a short amount of time is due to what we hear just as much as what we see. Consider this strategy for your next project.

4.2 Ironic and Thematic Music in Zodiac

Music for Irony and Theme

For his true crime epic, Zodiac, Fincher's initial plan was to forego an original score. He wanted the pop music of the time to ground the film. Along with the period-accurate production design, the music choices are about transporting us back in time.

And to remind us that the Zodiac killer was real. He lived in our world, and we listened to the same music.

Fincher is as deliberate with his music choices as he is with the imagery. He has a strong sense of when to use music to complement or contradict those images.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he uses a smooth, easy-listening Enya track during a torture scene. And who can forget the iconic marriage of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?" as the world crumbles in Fight Club?

In Zodiac, the strongest and most memorable pairing of theme, character, and music is "Hurdy Gurdy Man." The Donovan track is used as the killer's theme song, like the two-note piano melody from Jaws.

Before we see his first murder, we hear "Hurdy Gurdy Man" on the radio. When Zodiac arrives, the volume raises just enough to suggest their connection. As he shoots the teenagers in their car, the music goes full blast.

But there is another thematic yet ironic music choice in Zodiac. The very first scene of the film is soundtracked with Three Dog Night's cover of "Easy to Be Hard."

Watch both scenes here:

Music in the Opening Scene and First Murder

We begin with a god's eye view of San Francisco on the 4th of July. Fireworks are cracking over the city. We then cut to an eerily smooth tracking shot from the inside of a car, passing by suburban homes. Kids run around outside, waving sparklers.

This would be idyllic if it weren't for the lyrics to the song we're listening to.
"How can people be so heartless? How can people be so cruel? How can people have no feelings? How can they ignore their friends?"
With such pessimistic lyrics, you might think the music would be equally bitter. But it isn't. It is a slow and beautiful arrangement, more befitting of a love song.

The irony between the lyrics and music complicates this scene. We know what movie we're watching. We understand that a serial killer is somewhere in this world.

The music formally introduces us to a world where bad things are about to happy to innocent people. It is a subtle and ominous scene built around music in a way Fincher makes look easy. Perhaps this level of detail is why Zodiac is considered one of David Fincher's best movies.

Music is an element that works more subconsciously on the audience. If done with subtlety, layers of meaning can be delivered without them even realizing.

Consider these opportunities as you decide on the music for your next project.

David Fincher Movies

David Fincher's Filmography

This list represents the Top 10 David Fincher movies. Granted, he's only made ten films but who's counting? They're all great in their own way. Even his debut feature, when he was a director for hire, has visible evidence of his stylistic trademarks. Here's a collection of interviews with Fincher as he lays out some of the core principles and aesthetics of his directing style.

After her last encounter, Ellen Ripley crash-lands on Fiorina 161, a maximum security prison. When a series of strange and deadly events occur shortly after her arrival, Ripley realizes that she has brought along an unwelcome visitor.

David Fincher Movies: Alien 3

David Fincher Movies: Se7en

After a wealthy banker is given an opportunity to participate in a mysterious game, his life is turned upside down when he becomes unable to distinguish between the game and reality.

David Fincher Movies: The Game

David Fincher Movies: Fight Club

David Fincher Movies: Panic Room

David Fincher Movies: Zodiac

Tells the story of Benjamin Button, a man who starts aging backwards with bizarre consequences.

David Fincher Movies: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher Movies: The Social Network

David Fincher Movies: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

David Fincher Movies: Gone Girl

Up Next

The Directing Style of Zack Snyder

In the past, Director, David Fincher has mocked the "spandex summer, superhero tentpole" nature of studio films, but one director who has mastered the comic book movie is Zack Snyder.

Gain insight into the Batman v Superman and Justice League helmer's cinematic elements and directing style in the next post.

Tags: Alien, Best Directors, David Fincher, Fight Club, Gone Girl, House of Cards, Mindhunter, Panic Room, Se7en, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Game, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, Video Essays, Zodiac

Brent Dunham earned his B.A. from USC and an M.A. from Chapman University in Film Studies. He has taught various film courses to students from 7th grade to undergraduates.

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The Directing Techniques of David Fincher

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If you're familiar with David Fincher movies, you know they focus on serial killers, robbers, brawlers, and murderers alike. You might also know that he has a reputation for being an exacting, obsessively technical director. However, dark subjects and visual meticulousness belie Fincher's overlooked secret weapon: his ability to connect with actors on a human level to draw out authentic and defining performances.

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This was originally posted on the 24/03/2020

Quick Disclaimer: I originally wrote this as a University essay so there are quoted parts I've moved around and they no longer have their citations but below there will be an entire list of my bibliography!

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Zodiac and Obsession: An Analysis of Fincher's Greatest Film

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This was originally posted on the 24/03/2020 Quick Disclaimer: I originally wrote this as a University essay so there are quoted parts I've moved around and they no longer have their citations but below there will be an entire list of my bibliography!

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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/9/23/21451400/david-fincher-protagonists-zodiac-fight-club-gone-girl

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How David Fincher Puts Himself in His Movies

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The protagonists of everything from ‘Fight Club’ to ‘Zodiac’ to ‘Gone Girl’ have something in common: they’re all cut from the same cloth as their director

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Best To Worst: David Fincher’s Complete Music Videography Ranked

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Best To Worst: David Fincher’s Complete Music Videography Ranked

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David Fincher’s Impossible Eye (Published 2020)

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With ‘Mank,’ America’s most famously exacting director tackles the movie he’s been waiting his entire career to make.

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David Fincher may be a pretty big deal among film geeks today, as his resume boasts classics and fan favorites like Fight Club, The Social Network, and even TV shows like the recently "cancelled" Mindhunter. But his movie directing days started out with an assignment that turned out to be the ultimate trial by fire: the troubled production that would come to sit on the shelf with the name Alien 3. Long at odds with the movie that eventually resulted, Fincher recently found himself in a reflective mood putting his finger on what exactly went wrong with that project.

As he's starting to promote his latest film, the Netflix original/almost assured Oscar magnet Mank, which centers on the story of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, David Fincher spoke with Vulture about his experience reading his father Jack's first script for the film, and he explained how the timing lined up with when he was about to go direct Alien 3. Remembering how the first draft of Mank "was [about] a great writer obliterated from memory by this showboating megalomaniac," Fincher remarked,

Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and had been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work. I kind of resented his anti-auteurist take. I felt that what the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration: You may not like the fact that you're going to be beholden to so many different disciplines and skill sets in the making of a movie, but if you're not acknowledging it, you're missing the side of the barn. A script is the egg, and it needs a donor to create the cellular split that moves it into the realm of something playable in three dimensions and recordable in two dimensions and presentable to other people.

It's amazing to think that Jack Fincher's script for Mank has been around since David Fincher was about to head into the director's chair for Alien 3. However, through his father's own script and the horrible experience that awaited him on that infamous 1992 sequel, Fincher understood that writers and directors are more beholden to each other than one would think - knowledge that would have come quite in handy on Alien 3.

Putting it into the mildest terms, Alien 3 was an omnishambles. Armed with a trailer and a release date, 20th Century Fox didn't know what the movie was going to be about, but knew it was going to come out in 1992. A film that had already seen several writers and directors come and go, with just as many concepts making their way through the revolving door, the resulting story came partially from re-writes done by David Fincher himself. In the end, no one would know just how the experience would turn out, as a pretty impressive, yet misleading, teaser promised quite a bit:

Through his trial by fire on Alien 3, David Fincher emerged as a directorial phoenix, and went on to make Seven as his next feature film. Understanding that writers and directors literally need to be on the same page, the lessons learned from his own career and also from reading his father's script, Fincher understood that no person is an island in the movie business. If only the Fox executives that trashed his version of Alien 3 could have learned that back in 1991, maybe we'd be talking about the "absolute classic" Alien 3, rather than the very expertly crafted euphemism that David Fincher used to describe what was essentially, a living hell.

Mank will make its mark on movies in limited theatrical release on November 13th, with Netflix running the film on its streaming service on December 4th. If you want to see what else is on deck for a theater near you, check out our 2020 release schedule to see what's still primed and ready for the big screen!

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Alien 3 Director David Fincher Opens Up About What Went Wrong

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David Fincher may be a pretty big deal among film geeks today, as his resume boasts classics and fan favorites like Fight Club, The Social Network, and even TV shows like the recently "cancelled" Mindhunter .

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Fincher has become well known for his approach to directing. It is no secret that he records many, many takes of a scene until it is perfect. For example, the first scene in The Social Network took 99 takes to complete. By the time he directed gone girl he averaged 50 takes per scene. When asked about his approach he's been quoted saying: "We’re going to find the moments between the moments that move and resonate. And if you’re not willing to hit that hole a lot of times, don’t do this. Because it’s going to be agony for you. If the charge for you is wardrobe malfunction, you’re not going to get that. There’s not going to be a lot surprises here, you’re going to surprise yourself. I’m going to have you do it until you have gone past memorizing it, gone past knowing your own name, until we can get all of the the physical nonsense so ingrained that we can get to what the actual text is.” In short Fincher wants the words to feel natural, real and lived in, almost like a reflex, and thus, they would leap off the page more authentically.

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Articulated, polished and complex - these are the three words I'd use to describe the work of David Fincher. Critically acclaimed and recognized as one of the finest directors working today, Fincher is notorious for his ruthless quest for perfection. With a wide range of genres under his belt, Fincher's style is instantly recognizable and consistently reaching a high standard in every aspect of filmmaking. Fincher works meticulously with his actors as well as making sure the technical aspects of the film match the performances given. He has won a BAFTA for Best Director and has earned both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.

Fincher's Point of View

Fincher's career began as a production assistant working for John Korty, before being hired a few years later by Industrial Light and Magic as an assistant cameraman, working on Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. After directing a commercial for the American Cancer Society, which featured a fetus smoking, he garnered attention from producers in Los Angeles. This led to a directing job on the 1985 Rick Springfield documentary, The Beat of the Live Drum. This led to more commercial directing for large companies such as Coca-Cola, as well as many highly acclaimed music videos for artists such as Madonna.

Forming Propaganda Films, Fincher continued to follow directing as a career path. The company was also the place where many other directors started their careers directing music videos, such as Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry. His first Hollywood feature as a director was Alien 3, which was not met with high praise due to disputes over the film's script and budget. Famously, Fincher hates the film and went back to directing music videos until directing the critically acclaimed Seven in 1995. Since then, he has directed many highly praised films such as The Social Network, Gone Girl, Zodiac, and cult classic Fight Club.

His Approach

Fincher has become well known amongst movie fans for his approach to directing. It is no secret that he records many, many takes of a scene until it is perfect. For example, the first scene in The Social Network took 99 takes to complete. In an interview with Armie Hammer, who plays the Winklevoss twins in the film, he states there is a reason for this extreme technique:

"There's a method to his madness," says Hammer. "Yes, you do a lot of takes, but you feel extremely protected. He told me he knows that actors are inherently vain-we sit in front of a mirror and think to ourselves, Oh, in this moment, I'm gonna give him this look. And he didn't want us to bring that to set."

- Armie Hammer on the filming of The Social Network

His Signature

Themes

Thematically, Fincher's films often fall under similar categories. Outcast characters, unhappy endings, betrayals and often feature a lack of closure for the audience. An example of the latter is the killer in Zodiac does not get caught. The end of The Social Network does not coincide with the conclusion of the film's legal battle plot. In fact, it ends with Zuckerberg repeatedly refreshing the Facebook page of a girl he used to date to see if she had accepted his friend request - a perfect and succinct metaphor for how Zuckerberg's personal life was affected by the creation of Facebook. His lead characters are often detached in some way, either from society, relationships, or even themselves.

His films often feel anti-Hollywood. Typical Hollywood tropes are often refused and reversed within his films as discussed above. His early films pushed limits of controversy, and his work often does not shy away from sexual violence and murder. His later films such as Gone Girl and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo are prime examples of this, with many uncomfortable scenes in both.

Notably, the color palettes in his films are instantly recognizable. Hazy, muted, and dark - black is often a dominant color in a lot of his films, resulting in very moody and often dimly lit scenes. For example, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's color palette revolves around shades of black, white, and blue, matching both the icy environment of Sweden, where the film is set, as well as the tone of the story and characters. The Social Network's color palette highlights the glow of computer screens and the stifling atmosphere during the legal talks.

Filmmaking

Known for his love of technology, Fincher often uses computer-guided camera movements and computer-generated imagery to map them out. The benefit from this comes with the intricate set design he often uses. Another example of this is in The Social Network, where Armie Hammer plays both of the Winklevoss twins. His face was digitally added to the movements of Josh Pence. Fincher's camera techniques often come in the form of long takes, with either smooth pans and zooms or static shots. He doesn't utilize hand-held movements often, if at all. Insert shots are also used in his films often to signify themes in his films. In Fight Club, they are used as subliminal messaging, which is in keeping with elements of the film's plot (Tyler Durden's job in the cinema) as well as themes of the value of advertising.

David Fincher remains one of the fiercest and most intimidating directors working today, with comparisons to the methods of Stanley Kubrick. However, it should be noted that these methods produce results. Despite the surgical precision and meticulous craft, his films never feel empty or overworked- he just understands how much work it takes to create an excellent film.

More from Directors

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Articulated, polished and complex - these are the three words I'd use to describe the work of David Fincher. Critically acclaimed and recognized as one of the finest directors working today, Fincher is notorious for his ruthless quest for perfection.

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- Alien 3 (1992)
- Seven (1995)
- The game (1997)
- Fight club (1999)
- Panic room (2002)
- Zodiac (2007)
- The curious case of Benjamin Button (2008)
- The social network (2010)
- The girl with the dragon tattoo (2011)
- Gone girl (2014)
- Mank (2020)

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https://www.zavvi.com/blog/features/the-social-network-at-10-loneliness-in-the-decades-most-significant-movie/

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Facebook. Despite being wrapped up in scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, it has continued to dominate - recently recording over 2.7 billion active users, even whilst new platforms like TikTok grow rapidly.
That's right. 2.7 billion. For context, that's roughly a third of the world's population.

An online powerhouse like none other that has reinvented the way we communicate, advertise, consume content and even vote, it remains the definitive social media site, making the name of David Fincher's biographical drama still rather apt.

Released a decade ago today, The Social Network chronicles the founding of Facebook, and thus the morally ambiguous rise of creator Mark Zuckerberg.

Part supervillain origin story, part gripping legal drama, the film also focuses on the lawsuits brought against the company by both Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevoss twins, both essentially claiming they had been f*cked over by Zuckerberg.

It is strange to think that those two lawsuits used to be Facebook's biggest concerns, long before the data leaks, privacy debates and various incidents that have commanded newspaper front pages.

And that's before the phantom of Cambridge Analytica came to haunt the site.

The world has dramatically changed since the movie's release, including for both Zuckerberg and the site.

However, whilst Fincher's film tells the story of a different era of Facebook, in a way it laid out the next chapters of the site's journey, with its themes being very much still relevant today.

Many argue that The Social Network is the most significant film of the past ten years, simply because it is about Facebook and the rise of social media, something which has defined the decade.

But whilst this is true, the way Fincher's movie cleverly analyses the crucial themes of power, corruption, class, friendship and isolation also marks it out as the most important film of the decade.

In fact, arguably The Social Network isn't even about Facebook, but instead about loneliness. It just so happens the isolated man at the centre of the story is the one and only Mark Zuckerberg.

Writer Aaron Sorkin really taps into this central irony, that whilst Facebook is supposedly all about connection, its creation is driven by the opposite - disconnection.

This is mapped out from the very first scene, which in typical Sorkin fashion takes place at super-speed with Jesse Eisenberg's Zuckerberg and Rooney Mara's Erica magnificently delivering the witty and verbose script at a breakneck pace.

The scene may be short but it tells us everything we need to know about Zuckerberg, establishing him as intelligent, arrogant, abrasive but, and most importantly, disconnected from society, a man with a talent for pushing people away.

In a harsh blow Erica here tells him the reason girls don't like him isn't because he's a nerd, but 'it'll be because you're an asshole', thus setting up the events of the movie.

Although Zuckerberg spends much of the film in crowded rooms, at parties and in the hubbub of the Facebook offices, really he is always alienated and alone, as emphasised in the concluding shots which sees him continually refreshing his friend request to Erica.

Just before he does so Rashida Jones' character notes that "you're not an asshole, Mark, but you're trying so hard to be", and whilst it is therefore left up to the audience to decide whether they agree with this statement, it also highlights once again Zuckerberg's isolation from society.

Facebook started with a break-up and in a way it ended with one too, in respect to Saverin's parting of ways with both the site and Zuckerberg.

Although the lines between good and bad are blurred in Fincher's movie, if you had to choose who the villain of the piece was, it would be Zuckerberg, making Andrew Garfield's business partner and friend Saverin the 'hero'.

Saverin is continually there for Zuckerberg, either as a friend with a beer in-hand to help his pal through a break-up, or as a business partner providing money, contacts and ideas.

As established in the opening scene though, Zuckerberg is an 'asshole', and so we are just waiting for him to betray arguably his only friend, which of course he does, repeatedly.

The more the site grows, the deeper the betrayal becomes, reflecting not only how increasingly disconnected Zuckerberg is from society, but also how he is now being driven by power.

And of course jealously too, another defining theme of the movie. It is made incredibly clear that the reason Zuckerberg turns against Saverin is because his friend got into The Phoenix Club, the final club he is so desperate to become a part of.

Despite his genius, success and wealth, the closest Zuckerberg ever comes to being in a club is when he is taken to the bike room of The Porcellian Club by the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra - who of course he also betrays.

Although this is a commentary on the class system in America and the barriers it presents, it once again emphasises just how isolated Zuckerberg is, left out in the cold of the lobby.

Even at Facebook's offices Zuckerberg is alone, surrounded by people all plugged into their computers, disconnected from the real world.

Fincher's movie was never going to predict just how big Facebook grew to be, and the large role it would play in politics, misinformation and privacy debates.

However, what it did understand a decade ago was that crucial relationship between social media and loneliness, something which has been much talked about since as sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have grown and grown, increasingly disconnecting people from their realities.

You may have 500 friends on Facebook but how many of those people do you actually speak to? And connect with? In the real world that is.

Not only did Zuckerberg change the world of technology, politics, economics and more for good or for worse, but with Facebook he also helped usher in a new era of loneliness, a journey which started with his own disconnection from society.

That final scene which sees Zuckerberg continually refresh his pending friend request to Erica will not only haunt the Facebook founder himself, but the rest of the world too.
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The Social Network At 10: Loneliness In The Decade's Most Significant Movie

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Facebook. Despite being wrapped up in scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, it has continued to dominate - recently recording over 2.7 billion active users, even whilst new platforms like TikTok grow rapidly. That's right. 2.7 billion. For context, that's roughly a third of the world's population.

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It could be argued that the social network is not necessarily about Facebook, but it's about loneliness. This is because throughout the film we see just how isolated of a person Mark really is.  Throughout the film we see how Mark continually keeps pushing people in his life away because of his ambition and arrogance, For example the film starts off with a break up, and he pushes away and ruins his friendship with his only real friend 'Eduardo', Although he does this we can see that he still seeks connection, in the way that he is obsessed with joining the 'Phoenix Club', and how he tries to reach out to Erica half way through the film, and by the end after everything, he still goes to look her up on Facebook, implying that he still has feelings for her.

There is an irony, in the idea that  Facebook is supposedly all about connection when it's creation is driven by the opposite which is disconnection.

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https://nofilmschool.com/2017/10/3-ways-david-fincher-uses-color-completely-mess-your-head

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The color palettes David Fincher uses in his films are just as powerful as his dark, unstable characters.

There are a lot of words to describe David Fincher's films but "subtle" isn't really one of them. The worlds he creates have a characteristic normalcy, albeit dark and slightly off, but as their stories progress we're always brought to the nightmarish carnival that is Fincher's creativity-peeking past the curtain to see a fight club, a missing woman stabbing a man to death mid-coitus, and a mummified man barely alive laying in a room full of pine tree air fresheners.

However, there are areas in which Fincher uses some restraint and finesse in order to carefully lay the groundwork for his more over-the-top sequences, one of which is color. In this video essay by StudioBinder, we get to see how the director employs different color palettes to communicate important themes and character traits to his audience, as well as to ramp up the anticipation in suspenseful scenes.

Representing inner and outer conflicts

All movies have inner and outer conflicts. Many times Fincher will utilize complementary colors to represent visually what is happening emotionally on screen. It's actually a pretty literal reading of the color palette: two colors from opposite sides of the color wheel mirror the inner and outer conflict of a character who wants the opposite of what they actually need.

Conveying rigid worldviews

Like many filmmakers, Fincher uses monochromatic colors, but he uses them as a means to convey mundanity, boredom, or stagnation, or as StudioBinder puts it, "rigid worldviews of unbalanced characters." The Narrator (Edward Norton) in Fight Club is shown in a wash of colors that all seem to bleed into one another, creating this earthy, muddy look that perfectly represents his 9-to-5 khaki nightmare of a life in which he is but a piece of perfectly assembled IKEA furniture-until Tyler Durden, dressed in a red leather jacket and rosy shades, completely deconstructs him.

Drawing attention to elements to build anticipation

Color can be used as a great harbinger of both doom and hope: a flashing red light on a dark and desolate street, a black figure stomping through the snow, a dot of yellow on a sprawling blue ocean. Fincher includes isolated splashes of color in his films, too, only he uses them to build anticipation for the horror that is about to befall the characters in the scene. Think about it-John Doe's orange jumpsuit against the dusty rolling desert hills, the orange power tools in Martin Vanger's torture room, the Zodiak Killer's black outfit casting a shadow on a bright and sunny day at a California lake-each one of these examples don't overtly tell you, "Someone's 'bout to die," but those colorful elements keep grabbing your attention as if to remind you of their presence and their murderous intentions.

If you want to know more about David Fincher's creative use of color in his films, check out StudioBinder's very interesting, very thorough blog post about it.

What are some other ways that Fincher, or any other director, has used color to tell better stories? Let us know in the comments below.

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3 Ways David Fincher Uses Color to Completely Mess with Your Head

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The color palettes David Fincher uses in his films are just as powerful as his dark, unstable characters. There are a lot of words to describe David Fincher's films but "subtle" isn't really one of them.

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Much of his work is influenced by classical Neo noir and film noir genres, and involve a non linear narrative, with a number of storytelling techniques such as flashbacks, backstories, foreshadowing and narrators

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- Alfred Hitchcock (Rear window, Psycho)
- Martin Scorsese (Taxi driver, Goodfellas)
- George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The sting)
- Alan J Pakula (To kill A mockingbird, All the president's men)

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https://www.thedigitalfix.com/film/antagonise-this-the-harsh-narrative-of-david-fincher/

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Brad Pitt- Seven, Fight Club, The curious case of Benjamin Button

Rooney Mara- The social network, The girl with the dragon tattoo

Jared Leto- Panic room, Fight club

Bob Stephenson- Seven, The game, Fight club, Zodiac

Michael Massee- Seven, The game

Christopher John Fields- Zodiac, Fight club

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Cinematographer- Jeff Cronenweth (Fight Club, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl)

Production Designer- Donal Graham Burt (Zodiac, The social network, The girl with the dragon tattoo, Gone girl and Mank)

Composer- Howard Shore (Seven, The game and Panic room)

Composers- Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The social network, the girl with the Dragon tattoo, Gone girl and Mank)

Sound designer- Ran Klyce (All of his films since 1995)

Editor- Angus Wall (The girl with the dragon tattoo, The social network, The curious case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac, Panic room)

Assistant director- Bob Wagner (Fight club, panic room, Zodiac, The curious case of Benjamin Button, The social network, The girl with the dragon tattoo)

Casting director- Laray Mayfield (Fight club, Panic room, Zodiac, The curious case of Benjamin Button, The social network, The girl with the dragon tattoo, Gone girl)

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One element of Fincher's visual style is the specific way in which he uses tilt, pan and track in the camera movements. When a character is in motion or expressing emotions, the camera moves at the exact same speed and direction as their body. The movements are choreographed precisely between the actors and camera operators. The resulting effect helps the audience connect with the character to understand their feelings

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If there is an overarching theme to Fincher’s work, it would probably be raw, unfiltered obsession. Be it fame or fulfillment, the characters in his films are driven by extreme motives that slowly ensnare them, usually culminating in a climactic final scene that lingers long in the mind. For example the exploding banks ending scene in Fight Club or Brad Pitt’s, “What’s in the box?!” meltdown in Seven

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https://thefincheranalyst.com/2018/11/15/pressure-and-obsession-in-the-films-of-david-fincher/

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Pressure and Obsession in the Films of David Fincher

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Piers McCarthyFebruary 2012 / November 15, 2018 This dissertation aims to show the recurring themes of pressure and obsession in the work of film director David Fincher. Looking specifically a…

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Most of Fincher's characters from the shy and humble Robert Graysmith to the cold and uncaring Nick Dunne are all in some ways Narcissistic because of their self inflated views of themselves.

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David Fincher fans have had plenty to celebrate over the past few months. September marked the 25th anniversary of Se7en, Fincher's deeply disturbing psychological thriller that established the then 33-year-old as one of the most iconoclastic young directors in Hollywood. Then, just a couple of weeks later, The Social Network, Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's searing exploration of Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, turned 10. Most exciting of all for Fincher aficionados, though, is the fact that, more than six years after the release of his last feature film Gone Girl, Mank will finally arrive on Netflix on 4 December.

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Fincher has waited around 20 years to find the perfect home for the film, which was originally written by his father Jack in the late 1990s. But while most major Hollywood studios were put off by the idea of a black and white biopic of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz, Netflix gave Fincher carte blanche to fulfil his vision.

Fincher's interest in this aspect of the human psyche was sparked because he grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Zodiac Killer terrorised the region. He meticulously detailed this period and story in 2007's Zodiac, and then continued to explore the mental process of serial killers in Mindhunter's two-season run on Netflix.

For Laurence Knapp, film studies professor and editor of David Fincher: Interviews, the final scene of the first season of Mindhunter, which sees Jonathan Groff's Holden Ford having a nervous breakdown because of how much he relates to the murderer Ed Kemper, is Fincher's way of acknowledging the danger of "getting too close to this material", and how you can reach a point where you lose your "bearings and balance and sense of self".
Smart take
While Fincher's point of view is undoubtedly unique, and his ability to mesh it with Hollywood's mainstream demands even more so, his rise from music video and commercial director to cinema has also been integral to his success. Knapp says his journey, and the work ethic it required, separates him from the other filmmakers, like Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and Richard Linklater, who also emerged during the mid 1990s.

"He was very savvy in terms of getting into music videos and then getting into features through there. He has a craftsmanship and attention to detail, which you don't feel as much with the other filmmakers," Knapp tells BBC Culture. "He is very prescient in terms of industry changes and practices. Look at how he jumped on to Netflix so early with House of Cards."

It was while making commercials and music videos that Fincher learnt how to truly collaborate and trust his production crew, too. As Knapp points out, Fincher might be a "consummate filmmaker" who is always "highly conscious of the editing, sound, and the work as a whole", but he has always shown a "remarkable facility for collaborating, while still clearly maintaining his own authorship".

Mayfield has always noticed how Fincher only wants to work with "vital and important" people that are intent on solving problems on his set. "We don't work for David, we work with David. We're there to support the vision and, with our departments, move forward. Even on the hard days." Ultimately, though, Fincher is fully aware that the "buck stops with him", says Cronenweth, and he "takes ownership of the good, bad, wrong, or right of all of his movies."

Luckily for Fincher, most of his output has been adored by audiences and critics alike. Knapp believes his impact stretches far beyond the mere craftsmanship and beauty of his visuals or the smart and thought-provoking subtext that's layered throughout his work. For him, Fincher is "the therapist to American society", a mantle he has taken from his great inspiration Alfred Hitchcock, since "he is keenly aware of the audience and is able to communicate with them and sell his work".

Meanwhile what Mayfield finds most inspiring about Fincher, above and beyond the fact that his films mean his name is "already etched in cinematic history as one of the great directors ever", is his simple regard and respect for getting to fulfil his life-long ambition to be a filmmaker.

"He takes this very seriously. This is a big responsibility. People give you a lot of money to make a movie. David does not take that for granted. That's another thing with Dave, there's no excuse not to do things to the very best of your ability. Because it's a gift that we get to do what we do."
Mank is released on Netflix on 4 December. Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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David Fincher: Hollywood's most disturbing director

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David Fincher fans have had plenty to celebrate over the past few months. September marked the 25th anniversary of Se7en, Fincher's deeply disturbing psychological thriller that established the then 33-year-old as one of the most iconoclastic young directors in Hollywood.

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On the cusp of the 25th anniversary of Se7en and the 10th anniversary of The Social Network, The Ringer hereby dubs the next five days David Fincher Week. Join us all throughout the week as we celebrate and examine the man, the myth, and his impeccable body of work.

In the early 1990s, Michael Alan Kahn worked as David Fincher's first assistant director. Kahn had already paid his dues on Joel Silver productions like Die Hard, Hudson Hawk,and the first two Lethal Weapon sequels-big-budget action flicks made by big personalities whose off-camera tantrums rivaled the on-screen explosions. Fincher was coming off the failure of Alien 3, a film that the director still hates and hates talking about. As Fincher entered his 30s, he had returned to making music videos and commercials, two worlds where he'd earned a reputation first as a prodigy and then as a master. "When I linked up with David I immediately recognized that it was a whole different level," says Kahn.

Not only was Fincher's work inventive and distinct, it was meticulously constructed. Kahn remembers a series of spots they made for Heineken. They had two days to film four tableaus of the bottle in different environments, including one on an airplane. "You'd start from scratch and [Fincher] would spend five hours and 57 minutes dressing the fuselage, dressing the background, moving the background around, putting the bottle right in place, finessing the light so it felt like you were in flight, the right amount of spritz on the bottle, the right amount of napkin," says Kahn. "Every aspect of every aspect was considered and perfected. Then he would roll the camera for three minutes, and that was lunch and that one was done. It was an amazing thing to watch because you see a blank frame and then you see him paint, basically."

But trying to realize the vision of one man-and a man as doggedly obsessive as David Fincher-could be a double-edged sword, especially when the director moved back to filmmaking. Shortly after production began on 1995's Se7en, "I had one of those moments where I looked around and I appreciated where I was," says Kahn. Fincher had often admitted to Kahn how badly he wanted another chance to make a movie. "I went up to Fincher and I said, 'Look at this! Look! It's here! We're here! You did it! We're shooting a movie! There's Morgan Freeman. There Brad [Pitt]. There's Kevin Spacey. ... Isn't this amazing? Isn't this wonderful? This is what you wanted.' And he looked at me as though I were from outer space and said, 'No, it's awful.' And I looked at him and I said, 'Why is it awful?' And he said, and I mean sincerely, 'Because now I have to get what's in my head out of all you cretins.'" Early in his career, Fincher already knew that no matter how an entire film unspooled in his brain, actually turning it into a reality would require him to make an endless amount of compromises, most of which only he would perceive. But that hasn't stopped him from fighting his way toward his version of a flawless end product.

Throughout Fincher's 40-year career, from his time as a teenage production assistant in Marin County to his upcoming 11th feature, Mank, he's established himself as one of his generation's most talented, and most emulated, filmmakers. He's also become notorious for his singular style of making films. He's gained a reputation as a demanding director who is never satisfied and doesn't suffer fools, and seems to have little interest in being likable. But of course the full story is more complicated. During interviews with more than a dozen cast and crew members-ranging from those who have worked with him consistently since his earliest days as a director, to those who were part of a single project-he was called "exacting," "razor-sharp focused," "intense," "tough," "extremely observant," "very articulate," and "relentless." Some also admitted that "there are times he can be a dick," that he was "difficult," "condescending," and "a bit of a bully." But he was also described as "very self-depreciating," "so witty," "fucking hilarious," "one of the smartest people I've ever met," "very generous," and "my dearest, dearest friend."

Nobody says making a Fincher film is easy. Most say it's worth it.

David Fincher was born in Denver, but his family came to the Northern California town of San Anselmo during the mid-1960s, when he was a young child. George Lucas-who soon moved onto Fincher's street-shot THX 1138 and American Graffiti nearby, while directors Francis Ford Coppola, Philip Kaufman, and Michael Ritchie also lived in the area. His family relocated to Ashland, Oregon, when he was in high school, but Fincher came back to the region after graduating. Though he already knew he wanted to be a director, instead of enrolling in film school he took a PA job at the small independent studio Korty Films and then got a low-level position at Lucas's visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. "The culture was already, 'We're not in Hollywood anymore, we are trying things differently,'" says Eric Dachs, who was raised in the Bay Area a couple decades later and worked as an assistant sound designer on Panic Room. "My sense is that [Fincher] was already naturally predisposed to that way of working anyway, which is, 'I don't care what the other approach is, I have my way I'm going to do this, and I have a high degree of conviction in it.'"

During the early 1980s, Fincher moved to Los Angeles, where he embraced music videos and proved himself to be a standout with his innovative-at-the-time clips for Rick Springfield and the Motels. In 1986, he became one of the founding partners in the production company Propaganda Films. Celebrated for their cutting-edge work and a roster that would grow to include upstarts like Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek, and Antoine Fuqua by the 1990s, Fincher remained Propaganda's top talent. "You could tell all the little directors were in awe of him, most of the producers were scared to death of him," says Kevin Tod Haug, who would become the visual effects supervisor on Fincher's films The Game, Fight Club, and Panic Room.

After directing ad campaigns for Nike and classic videos including Madonna's "Express Yourself," Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun," and George Michael's "Freedom! '90," 20th Century Fox offered Fincher the third Alien film when he was 27 years old. With a reported budget of $50 million, it was the most expensive movie ever given to someone so young. The studio had already sunk millions into screenplay development and sets, and had lost their original choice for a director, Vincent Ward. Production began without a finished script and a crew that Fincher largely hadn't used before, and whose loyalties he questioned. It was a legendarily contentious process that went over schedule and over budget, and found Fincher constantly clashing with the studio.

As he rebuilt his career through more music videos and commercials after the debacle of Alien 3, Fincher began leaning more on young, ambitious crew members from the Propaganda sphere. Just out of college, Angus Wall managed the production company's archive when Fincher tapped him to cut three spots for Nike's Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood campaign after his usual editor, James Haygood, had a family emergency. The first time Wall worked on a Fincher movie was editing the unsettling title sequence for Se7en. Seventeen years later, he won back-to-back Best Film Editing Academy Awards for The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. "Sometimes in a craft you can become the collection of your tricks. When you become a collection of your tricks, you're dead, you're kind of over from a developmental, creative standpoint," says Wall. "So I think he always liked working with people who may not have known what the fuck they were doing all the time, or even some of time, but were willing to learn and listen and work really hard."

Laray Mayfield met Fincher on her first day in Los Angeles when he was 22 years old. At the time she was dating the director David Hogan and had come out from Nashville to visit him. When Propaganda started, they hired her to set up the rented office space and she soon became Fincher's assistant. He eventually encouraged Mayfield to start a casting agency for commercials and music videos, since that had been part of her responsibilities for him and was something she excelled at. Though she turned down his offers to work on his first three movies for various reasons, she took the position as casting director on Fight Club, a huge leap for her career. Incredulous film industry veterans she had to deal with would ask her who she was and how she got the job. "It was horrifying and horrible most of the time because I was like, Oh my God, I can't quit, because that would be very disappointing to Dave. I don't want to get fired, because that would be humiliating to me. So we're on Hollywood Boulevard, maybe I should just go throw myself in front of a bus. If I got hurt, that would be OK," says Mayfield. "I overcame the urge to do that on a daily basis." She's now been the casting director on every Fincher project since Fight Club, helping elevate the careers of actors including Rooney Mara, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, and Taraji P. Henson. She's also expanded her circle of clients, including casting the recently released Antebellum, Spring Breakers, and all of Netflix's Marvel series.

Fincher came to rely on Ceán Chaffin, his producer and longtime partner, to find talent for his crews from within the Propaganda orbit. Though Fincher already had a harsh reputation, nobody turned down the invitation to be a part of his circle. "Those were the cool kids," says Haug, who had worked on Romanek's videos for Madonna's "Bedtime Stories" and "Scream" by Michael and Janet Jackson before being tapped for The Game. "When Ceán asked me to come work on a movie with Fincher, there was no question that was the right thing to do, no matter how difficult it was going to be. If you were that timid, you weren't at Propaganda to start with. You leaped in with both feet."

Following his experience on Alien 3, Fincher never made another film without first constructing an intricate understanding of what he wanted it to be. While some directors make movies fueled by spontaneity, Fincher fixates on precision. "We used to call him the Watchmaker, because everything had to fit together perfectly," says Patrick Fugit, the actor best known for starring in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, who later portrayed Officer James Gilpin in Gone Girl.

When working on a movie, a director is forced to answer hundreds of questions and make hundreds of choices each day. While these demands can be paralyzing for some, Fincher seems particularly equipped for it, because he clearly knows what he wants. "David is nothing but decisive," says Arthur Max, a veteran of Ridley Scott projects for more than 20 years who was the production designer on Se7en and Panic Room. "You know exactly where you stand with him. He either improves and embellishes or wants more. Or he'll just kick it down the stairs."

From the start of a film, Fincher establishes his parameters with his crew, and then he puts it on them to execute those ideas. "He sets up certain rules of the game, and you have to stay within those rules or you get a red card or a yellow card for going out of bounds," says Max. "And that goes for everybody in the crew. It has to do with the power of the movie and the atmosphere. In Se7en he described it very succinctly: 'This is a world that's fucked up and nothing works.'

"Everything had to have a patina of neglect in every aspect, and I loved that," he continues. "You almost wear a designer's whistle and if somebody did something that was too bright-a red or too rich a green-you blow the whistle and say, 'Yellow that down and make it gloomier and put some more floor wax on it.'"

Casey Storm came up through the rambunctious world of Jonze's music videos and films before Fincher hired him as the costume designer on Zodiac. For a relatively short sequence in the film set during a screening of Dirty Harry for members of the San Francisco Police Department, Storm dressed 600 extras in period clothes down to their shoes, even though most of them would be filmed only from the waist up. Yet time and budget were never an issue, unlike on many other sets. "[Fincher] and the producers would give you enough leash to do what you wanted, but also enough leash to hang yourself," he says. "They gave you everything you asked for so there was no excuse to not have everything be exactly right. I got that pressure working there, but it never felt like a burden. It felt like an inspiration to live up to."

Fincher hates inefficiency and distractions on his sets. Filmmaking to him isn't a glamorous job, or a particularly fun one. All energy at all times should be focused on doing the best job possible. "We're here to do work and we're here to do something special, and we have the opportunity to do that," says Bob Wagner, who has worked as a first assistant director or second assistant director on six of Fincher's films. "If it's about the paycheck, if it's about the wrap party, if it's about the crew gift, you know what? Eff off. That's Fincher's approach, and I agree with that."

While Fincher's indefatigable pursuit appeals to some, Haug says it has its limitations. "Directors break into these two categories; the polite way to put it is the connoisseurs and the visionaries," he says. "In my head, they're shoppers and miserable fucks. Honestly, visionaries see this thing and they can never get it out of their head and onto the screen. They're just frustrated as hell all the time because they are not getting what they want. The shopper types, the connoisseur guys, if they have good taste, it's much more fun to work with them, because you learn what their taste is and you can give it to them. They're happy, you're happy, everybody goes away happy. Fincher was never happy with anything he did."

As Fincher himself put it during a 2014 interview with Playboy, "If you didn't get hugged enough as a kid, you won't find what you're looking for from me. That's not my gig and I'm not attuned to it." Instead, Kahn says, if you're looking for encouragement or praise from Fincher, you learn to recognize it in other ways: "If you know him, you can look him in his eye and know that he's pleased, and that's enough."

That said, unlike some directors (and film producers and agents and executives, and so on), Fincher doesn't take out his frustrations on production assistants and runners simply because he can get away with doling out abuse to low-level workers. His most famous battles have come with the people at the studios who fund and distribute his movies. "The further up the food chain you are, the harder you get the truth," says Wall. "So if you're a film exec and you're working with him, he's going to savage you because people up the food chain are making more money, they have more responsibility, and they should carry that. I never saw him speak badly to someone who was below him who was carrying their weight."

As he's aged, Fincher's sets have become less combustible. He's no less determined, but he's learned some restraint. "He's got a normal maturity pattern," says Peter Mavromates, who has been the postproduction supervisor on six of Fincher's films, as well as a coproducer on House of Cards and Mindhunter."He probably had a reputation as being hard on the set, and in that respect I think he's mellowed and is more confident and calmer about stuff. I think the thing that was true then and is true today is that he is relentless in wanting to improve everything to the very, very last second that he can."

Since the different sound department teams were spread around the country in different offices, they had to rely on an already arcane faxing system to make sure each group was up to date with the latest notes. Dachs wrote a rudimentary software program so they could stay in sync with each other electronically. After Klyce told Fincher about the prototype, the director checked it out for a couple minutes during a break as he worked on the film's sound mix. Fincher didn't say much and Dachs figured he'd blown his opportunity to impress him. A few months later, Fincher summoned Dachs to Los Angeles to talk about his program and how it could be used to dispense his directions more efficiently. "He does have a brain where when somebody shows them a new process-like they pull a widget maker out of a box and then there's a manual for the widget maker and it tells you what the widget maker does and how it makes it-he goes to that demo and understands what's in that manual," says Mavromates. "When he walks away, he's got 30 different things in his head to do with that widget maker that the manufacturer did not intend."

Dachs soon launched PIX System, which has become a secure way for productions to internally share media. Following Fincher's early adoption of PIX on Zodiac and his continued in-depth consultations with the company to improve their products, its use has spread among filmmakers and studios. In 2019, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences gave PIX Studios a Technical Achievement Award. "David has always been the guy who got it before everybody else," Dachs says. "[He] could see down the road of what this could do for not only his own process, but what those who adopt a similar methodology could do for the industry."

But there are still limitations to how much control a director can exert over a movie. At least for now, you still need humans, not just computers and robots. When making Panic Room, Fincher built an entire five-story Upper West Side townhouse with a functioning elevator on a soundstage in California's Manhattan Beach. Before production began, he shot and edited a previsualization-a technique usually reserved for complex action sequences-of the entire film. He conceived Panic Room more like a mathematical equation, or an animated film with real-life actors and real-life crew members. And then the real-life problems mounted. Nicole Kidman, the film's star, dropped out because of a knee injury. She was replaced by Jodie Foster, whose pregnancy had to be hidden during filming. He fired Darius Khondji, his cinematographer who shot Se7en, in the middle of filming. Being stuck on the same set day after day became emotionally oppressive. "It just started getting on you," says Wagner. "I think more people can relate to that now with this whole quarantine thing. It was a quarantine of a movie." Fincher hasn't made a film since then that's felt as cold or claustrophobic.

The most common refrain about Fincher is that he thinks he can do any crew member's job better than them, and that in reality, he probably could. Similar descriptions have been made about individuals ranging from James Cameron to President Obama. But Haug pushes back on this assessment, explaining that Fincher wants his team to be his "power steering," not his Replicants. "It's not so much he believes he can do everything, it's more that unless he can't imagine doing it as well as you are, he can't imagine why you should be there," he says. "If he can imagine he can do the job as good as you are doing, what the fuck are you doing there?" This is part of the reason why Fincher likes postproduction more than filming. The team is much smaller, about 15 people rather than 300-which means he's less likely to encounter someone he thinks can't hack it.

In 2003, young screenwriter James Vanderbilt had three of his scripts get made into films: Darkness Falls, Basic, and The Rundown. In meetings with agents and development executives, he'd tell them that his dream project was to adapt Robert Graysmith's investigation Zodiac, which he read while in high school. After Disney gave up its rights after years in development, Phoenix Pictures optioned it so Vanderbilt could write a script based on the book and its follow-up, Zodiac Unmasked, as well as interviews he conducted with the author. They sent it to Fincher, but figured he probably wouldn't want to do another serial killer movie. They didn't know that Fincher had grown up in the area when the Zodiac Killer taunted the police and Northern California newspapers and threatened to shoot up school buses full of children, so they were surprised when the director expressed interest. He may have also been drawn to the movie because it's really about obsession. Still, Vanderbilt doubted that it would make it to production with him. "[Fincher] dates a lot, but he doesn't get married very often," he says, alluding to the long list of movies and TV shows the director has been attached to but never made. Fincher, though, went all in on Zodiac, telling Vanderbilt that they should approach it like journalists. They immersed themselves in the history for a year and a half before they returned to the screenplay. "No one told us to stop, so we just didn't," says Vanderbilt.

George Drakoulias, the film's music supervisor, remembers visiting Fincher's office when Zodiac was in preproduction. "The whole bottom floor was just research: books and evidence, transcripts, documents, photographs," he says. "It was a little frightening, especially given the subject and how deep he had gone into the research."

Graysmith used some pseudonyms in his book, since he implicated individuals as being possible murderers, but Fincher was determined to use only real names, which meant verifying everything with at least two sources. Vanderbilt and Fincher would travel to San Francisco and spend days talking with the cops who'd worked the case when it happened, those who had taken it up in later years, and the two survivors of the killer's attacks. The shooting script swelled to 202 pages, the depiction of Graysmith shifted, they introduced uncertainties about Zodiac's criminal capabilities, and Fincher encouraged Vanderbilt to abandon contrived plot conventions like Jake Gyllenhaal's and Mark Ruffalo's characters meeting early in the film. "I had had three movies made at this point," says Vanderbilt. "One was about a killer tooth fairy, one was a John Travolta-Samuel L. Jackson movie that I describe as 'the one they did together that wasn't Pulp Fiction,' and one was The Rundown, which I love, but is the Rock's second action movie. Doing a serial-killer procedural with David Fincher was a very different world to be in."

Major studio features often bring on at least one new screenwriter for a pass at the script before a film is made, and at the time Fincher even shared office space with Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter of Se7en. Vanderbilt felt like he kept seeing the man who would eventually take his job walk by, but he remained the sole author on Zodiac until the end. "David just expects everyone to be good at their job," he says. "He wanted me to be the writer. He wasn't the guy who wanted to come in and tell you how he wanted the scene. He wanted you to go figure out the scene. If he felt it didn't work, he'd tell you he felt it didn't work and he'd give you a suggestion. I've worked with directors who want to rewrite the script themselves through you, but don't know how to. This wasn't that process at all."

Fincher is known for being particularly hard on his camera and lighting departments, even to the point of talking to an operator through a camera move step-by-step during filming if it's not being executed perfectly. In other areas, he's more likely to take advice or accept recommendations. When Drakoulias was helping him select the music for Zodiac, his film with the most jukebox-y soundtrack, Fincher knew he wanted to use Donovan's eerie 1968 single "Hurdy Gurdy Man" for the first murder. He temporarily included "All Is Loneliness" by Janis Joplin's group Big Brother & The Holding Company for the movie's opening sequence as fireworks exploded over the town of Vallejo. "It was kind of a dark, creepy, weird thing," says Drakoulias. "I was like, 'You're going to see these two kids get murdered in a few minutes and everybody's tense coming into the theater as it is because of the subject matter.' I thought we should maybe try and misdirect them or at least let the audience settle in." Fincher conceded and took Drakoulias's suggestion of Three Dog Night's more melancholy "Easy to Be Hard."

When New Line Cinema's Robert Shaye introduced Fincher to Howard Shore to score his film Se7en, the composer already had done Silence of the Lambs and worked with director David Cronenberg, but he hadn't won his three Academy Awards for his work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy yet. Fincher would go on to use him again on both The Game and Panic Room. Shore recalls their interactions as incredibly straightforward, almost classical in their arrangement. "He was very generous, very egalitarian with me. Very open to everything I was doing," says the now 73-year-old. "He would come to the sessions, he would watch everything and listen to everything. At the end of the day he would shake hands, say thank you, and go home."

Even when Fincher does exert his incredible command over all the micro elements that make up a film, he can still struggle with its larger, macro issues. Douglas Urbanski-Gary Oldman's producing partner, an occasional conservative talk show host, and a gregarious raconteur-has known Fincher for years. (He says that in the early '90s, Oldman and Phil Joanou, a director Urbanski was managing at the time, were offered Se7en. They unanimously turned it down because the script was so grim.) Urbanski is a producer on the upcoming Mank, but a decade ago, Fincher had him play Harvard University president Larry Summers in The Social Network. Before the cast was finalized, Urbanski took part in a table read of Aaron Sorkin's script. "I remember David following me to my car and he said, 'Do you think anybody will want to make this movie or want to see this movie?'" says Urbanski. "A few weeks into the shooting of it, David was on the East Coast. I wrote him an email. I said, 'How's it going?' And he wrote me back an email that said, in essence, 'I'm not sure what movie I'm making.'"

While Fincher's filmography has been characterized as distant, dark, a little perverted, hyper-stylized, special-effects driven, and fixated on death, Urbanski believes that the director deserves more credit for the chances he takes. Mank is the latest departure for Fincher. The film about Herman J. Mankiewicz, the dyspeptic screenwriter of Citizen Kane, was shot in black and white in the style of movies from the 1930s and comes from a script that Fincher commissioned his journalist father, Jack, to write before his death in 2003. "David goes out on a diving board over the Grand Canyon," Urbanski says. "He plays in a really, really dangerous area, meaning he goes outside of his comfort zone, outside of his skill set."

Fincher is probably most infamous for the amount of takes he shoots of each setup. While directors usually average fewer than 10 takes, but may get up to around 15, Fincher operates in a range between 25 and 65. There are times when he goes over 100. Asking the stars of his films about the amount of takes he required of them has now become a standard question from journalists. In a recent interview with Collider, Amanda Seyfried estimated that for one scene in Mank she did 200 takes.

Such demands can be rough on actors. After filming Zodiac, Jake Gyllenhaal was open about his frustrations with Fincher's style and Robert Downey Jr. (maybe) joked to The New York Times, "I just decided, aside from several times I wanted to garrote him, that I was going to give him what he wanted. I think I'm a perfect person to work for him, because I understand gulags."

While part of the reasoning behind Fincher's approach is to strip away the performance in each actor's performance in order to reach something more genuine, it's not always about them. He might need another take becomes he's fixated on something like an askew strand of hair, a distracting extra, a problem with a special effect, or some other technical problem. In a 2006 Fight Club retrospective piece for Total Film, Helena Bonham Carter quipped, "As long as the camera's moving, don't even start acting until take twelve!"

While Fincher's number of takes may dwarf those of other directors, he's often able to accomplish them in the same amount of time because of the complete control and lack of distraction he needs on his sets. "The thing that happens on a normal production is that as soon as the assistant director yells 'Cut!' chaos erupts on set," says Will Dearborn, a camera operator on Mank and the second season of Mindhunter. "People are resetting props and people start their conversations back up and there's all this blither-blather. The amount of time in between takes is more than the time that you're actually shooting. That becomes a real impediment for someone like David, who relies upon being able to evolve the shot or the concept or whatever he's trying to get from that performance. Every single take he's pushing the ball further down the field. He needs to get that number of takes because he can only push it a little bit each time. And he's very patient about it."

Wall says that in the end, he didn't always use the final take of the day while putting together Fincher's films, but he did have to devise a special system that's been passed on to subsequent editors "that allowed me to sleep at night knowing that I had a mechanism in place so I knew I was getting all the best stuff." Editors typically look at all the takes of a scene in chronological order from first to last before selecting the best one. Wall would instead look at the starred take, Fincher's favorite from the day of shooting, and then use that as the gauge against all the other takes. Next he would look at all of Fincher's circled takes in descending chronological order, then all the other takes from last to first. But not only does Fincher shoot many takes, he shoots long ones, so Wall would often have to break up a scene into separate beats and order them with his system, then pick the best one from each subsection. "You may take a line from take 38, you may take a line from take 13, you may take a line from take 17, and you put the scene together with the best performances and camera work from the body of media you're pulling from," says Wall. Fincher shot the five-minute, verbally acrobatic opening scene of The Social Network, in which Mark Zuckerberg gets dumped, in a procession of single takes. It took Wall three weeks to edit it into a masterpiece.

Despite his reputation and what he requires of actors, Mayfield says they're never at a loss for people who want to work with him. Most are open to the challenge. "He's very much an actor's director," she says. Reflecting on his time making Gone Girl, Fugit says, "I knew David as a very collaborative, a very sensitive observer. By 'sensitive' I mean his sensors are very attuned to any subtle shifts that you make in your contribution."

Despite all of Fincher's technical prowess, on set he gets along better with the cast than the crew. But that doesn't mean he'll coddle his actors, no matter how famous they are. "On mine and Kim Dickinson's first day, we realized that overshooting or undershooting our marks was not going to be acceptable," says Fugit. "Some actors are like, 'Fuck your marks, I'll do whatever I want,' but that's obviously not the case when we're dealing with film and composition, and David Fincher is very specific about composition."

But Fugit adds that Gone Girl was one of the funniest sets he'd ever been on. In between takes, Fincher would always have some dry joke to crack. It kept the mood jovial since they knew they'd have to be there for a while. As Urbanski says of performing in The Social Network, "I had more fun on those scenes than I'd probably have had riding my Jet Ski around Barbados."

During an interview with Film Comment in 1999, Fincher called directing "a masochistic endeavor." Still, he keeps making movies. Maybe it's the collective pain that brings his crew together. "You're so challenged and obsessed with the challenges he's giving you, you kind of become numb to how unpleasant it can be," says Dearborn.

Others see Fincher's approach as an inspiration. "The main thing that I took away from him was that I've always had OCD traits," says Storm. "On Zodiac, I think it was the first time that I was able to acknowledge that those OCD traits, while they might be kind of debilitating in some aspects of my life, in my work life they are a huge asset. They make me really good at that job. The obsession and the eye for detail, recognizing it in him and recognizing it in myself made me excited rather than challenged." Storm is a director now, specializing in bizarre, comedic commercials. He admits that if a shot doesn't feel right to him, he'll keep filming takes long after the ad agency and client are happy.

Recently, the legend of the uncompromising genius has started to lose its luster in our society. We've begun to question whether the single-minded pursuit of excellence is worth all the collateral misery and self-doubt. Can greatness be achieved without making the people around you suffer? At the same time, no matter what level of difficulty a Fincher production presents, almost everyone who's worked with him is quick to acknowledge that he's brought the best out of them, and that having credits on his films has burnished their careers. Though that doesn't mean they're all clamoring to sign up for another turn. As Haug says, "He's a great school to have graduated from."
Eric Ducker is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.

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David Fincher, as Explained by the People Who Work With Him

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On the cusp of the 25th anniversary of Se7en and the 10th anniversary of The Social Network, The Ringer hereby dubs the next five days David Fincher Week . Join us all throughout the week as we celebrate and examine the man, the myth, and his impeccable body of work.

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David Fincher rarely gives interviews, but for the New York cover story on his new movie, The Social Network (which opens October 1), the director sat down with Mark Harris for a long, revealing chat. Only some of the conversation made it into the article, so we're presenting their entire, in-depth talk in full below. What better way to inaugurate our new recurring feature, the Vulture Transcript: extended, revealing, and virtually uncut interviews with fascinating cultural figures. Here, Fincher dishes on the enormous difficulty of speeding up Aaron Sorkin's motormouth text (" Faster. That was my only real direction."), his surprising "enormous amount of empathy" for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and much much more.

I loved Aaron Sorkin's script, which was 162 pages, and when I went to see a screening of The Social Network, I asked how long the movie was and they said, 116 or 118 minutes, and I thought, Oh, no, they've cut all the stuff I loved. But it all seems to be there.
No, we just simply said, faster. That was my only real direction - take a minute out of that!

I don't believe that.
It's kinda true. The characters in the movie are people who need to get to the end of their thoughts before they can really focus on what it is they meant to say. And in describing it to them that way - I mean, Jesse [Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg] actually talks like that, he can do it - but a lot of people would come in and read and say, "Wait, what is he talking about at this point?" And I'd say, "There are people who need to work their way through the kelp beds of their own thought processes on their way to the exact idea they've been trying to fucking find, to get to this word and that's the word that's he's actually been looking for." And once they got that, they took to it like ducks.

It was kind of shocking to hear Jesse Eisenberg doing Aaron Sorkin's dialogue, because you suddenly realize this is what he was born to do.
We looked and looked and looked. We read every young actor in Hollywood. And it had been rumored on blogs and stuff that we were talking to Jesse Eisenberg. And you know, I hate to be told what to do by blogs, so I was like, "Yeah, we should probably see him but I don't know if this is his thing ... " And he put himself on tape reading the first scene, and I remember getting this thing on my computer and opening this little QuickTime, and here's this kid doing Sorkin: the first person that we'd heard who could do Sorkin better than Sorkin.

But was that a language that everyone in the movie kind of had to learn?
The studio initially said, "We don't know what you're gonna cut, but you're gonna have to get it down to a reasonable time limit, you can't shoot ... " I think it was 166 pages. And Aaron and I went back to the office and I took out my little iPhone and set it down and put the little stopwatch on and said, "Start reading." And we went through it and he was done in an hour and 59 to two hours. And I called the studio and said, "No, we can do this, it's gonna be about a two-hour movie." They said, "You're crazy." And I said, "No, I think it can be done that way. If we do it the way that Aaron just spoke it, it'll be two hours. It's up to me to have dialogue that pre-laps scenes, and to be able to establish places as quickly as possible." And when I opened this little QuickTime of Jesse Eisenberg, it was the first time I said, "We're gonna be under two hours!" He can just flat-out fly. And you can see in his eyes that he is searching for the best way to articulate something in the middle of articulating two other things; he's processing where he's going.

Oftentimes, you'll say to an actor that, you know, the notion of being present is not to be thinking of the next thing you're going to say but to actually be listening. You know, a lot of people are trained to give you the "thoughtful" thing, but at the same time, they're trying to process their next line. And Jesse can be half a page ahead, and in the now. I remember turning to Aaron and saying, "Okay, have we ever seen anything this good?" He just said, "That's the guy." We brought him out to LA and he came into my office and I said, "Hey, it's a pleasure to meet you." And he said, "Great, what do you want me to read? I've prepared three scenes." And I said, "No, no, no. You got the job. We're just having you here because we wanted to meet you and say hello, but you're in the movie." That's the fun part - to be able to tell them you enjoy what they do.

The actors said the pace you set was really fast, but - and I know this isn't your favorite topic - you are known for doing a lot of takes. So how was a fast pace even possible?
No, you know, I will normally trade helicopters and cranes and the incumbent extra technicians it takes to have toys like that for more hours, more time, more days. For $39 or $40 million, whatever it ended up costing, normally you're going to get about 45 or 50 days of shooting. And we shot for 72 days, because we knew that was the kind of time it was going to take. You know, everybody had to know their lines, but we didn't necessarily know where exactly the scene was going to take place until we found the locations. There was a lot of negotiation going on with Harvard and different places in and around Cambridge that we wanted to use. And things would fall apart at the last minute, so something that was supposed to take place walking down the sidewalk would take place in a cab.

We rehearsed the notion of overlap - we rehearsed the idea of talking over one another very pointedly. The opening scene of the movie [an extended conversation in which Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend], which is nine pages in under five minutes - we had two days to shoot that. And the studio said, "That's crazy." First they said, "It's one scene! You don't need two days for one scene!" Then they said, "It's nine pages! You can't do nine pages in two days!" We said, "Okay, make up your mind, which one is it?" We got through most of the scene in the first day, and then the second day was just going in to pick up certain things in close-ups. We shot 99 takes.

Of just that scene?
Yeah. We put two cameras on it so that they could interrupt and talk right over each other. So it took an enormous amount of time to stage the background, probably close to the first half of the first day. And then we just started shooting. And then I would just go in and encourage them and say, "Here's what you're talking about here." Or: "Try to talk about this." Or: "Just get angry a little later." And the two of them are such facile creatures, they would just play. I look at it this way: You're gonna bring all this equipment, you're gonna bring all these people, you're gonna fly them all in and put them up in hotels, you're gonna run all this cable, do all this stuff, hang these lights ... Then the actors have to have their time to fall face-first into it. Rather than say, "Okay, we'll do two, and let's move on," it seems like such a waste of talent to get somebody's second or third or even fifth or sixth thought at something. Especially with this kind of dialogue, it really needs to seem to fall out of their subconscious. Because a lot of what Sorkin does is think out loud. So it has to look like thought.

One of the actors told me -
[ Laughs.] Which one?

Two of them said interesting things about your process. Andrew Garfield [who plays Eduardo Saverin] said that you had them keep in mind that in any scene, anyone who's talking always thinks he's right. And Armie Hammer [who plays Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss] said that he thought the multiple takes were really helpful in ridding them of all of the things that they'd worked out in their heads that they thought were going to be their big moments the night before.
So many Oscars are won in the tub! I'm not, like, trying to psychologically remake people, but look, it's an incredibly neurotic thing to want to do with one's life. It's incredibly hard to stand in front of a camera and be the focus of that attention and not be self-conscious. It makes you self-conscious, and to get beyond that self-consciousness, I absolutely want people to have their idea of what the scene is about, to have an idea of what their moment is. And then I want to take them through that process to a point where they've literally forgotten their own names. I want to take them past the point where they go, "But I had it all worked out." If it's still there but you're doing it a little bit later or doing it a little bit flustered. You know, it's an interesting thing: It happens very rarely, but invariably, when an actor's in the middle of a take and they go, "Uh, hang on a sec, sorry, my fault, can we start again?" always it's the best take. Always the best take before they cry uncle, before they go, "Wait a minute, I've lost my train of thought." And I can show them on the monitor: "Look at you here, that is you at your most present, when you're falling-down ill, like Dudley Moore in Arthur, ass-over-teakettle trying to remember where you were in the thing, that's when you are stunning and real and amazing." Little things happen. There's this moment at the beginning of the movie where Rooney [Mara, who plays Zuckerberg's girlfriend] interrupts him and says "Mark!" And Jesse did this thing where he leaned forward in a very prodding way and said "Erica!" Oddly condescending. She gets really pissed off - and he'd never done it before. It was kind of great. I went up to him and he said, "Do you want me to do it again?" And I said, "No, but I bet you it's going in the movie." That's the kind of stuff you want to find.

Let's go back to when you read the script. I feel like a lot of directors of your caliber, honestly, might have read it and said, "It's great, but there's not much for me to do here." I'm fascinated that you saw interesting directorial challenges in it.
I think telling a good story is always an interesting directorial challenge. I read it and thought, "Oh my God, this is how I feel about the notion of the Internet and communication, and so much about the loneliness that characterizes much of modern interpersonal communication." I also loved the idea of old-world business ethics put to the test by new-world ability to beta-test and iterate. I thought it was an amazing idea. Harvard is this 300-year-old institution built by people who understood business and innovation as: You find a place to cultivate a workforce and train them and create a factory or an assembly line, and you build a product and it comes out and everyone in this little village is rewarded by that. And that's innovation. Then there's this new world where somebody goes: If I've got DSL and enough Red Bull, I can prototype this thing! And then I can get it onto 650 desktops and then eight years later I can get in on 600 million desktops! That is a new paradigm.

The movie seems to put two different kinds of ruthlessness in competition with each other.
I don't know. You said ruthlessness? I don't know. I have an enormous amount of empathy for Zuckerberg. I felt like it was easy to do the Revenge of the Nerds version of this, but there was something more compelling about his wanting to do it his way. Because he was right. It shouldn't be done using an advertising model. The ultimate communication tool needed to be devised by someone who doesn't have the best communication skills. You see him with Lesley Stahl, you kind of go, "I'm not sure this guy should be speaking on his own behalf." But I thought it was amazing that this was the guy who figured out how hundreds of millions of people would want to connect with each other. I thought that was a great, ironic notion. It may indeed be dramatic license, but I thought Aaron did it beautifully.

Do you mean dramatic license in terms of Sorkin's decision to shape him as that kind of guy?
We know that Zuckerberg took out some of his vitriol on a woman in his blog, but I don't know that he continues to pine for her today. As a director, it doesn't seem to me that you should. There's a lot of directors out there who think, Oh, this'll be great, I'm gonna get to go to Rome. Or: This'll be fun, I've never shot the London subways. Or whatever. But I was just looking for a story and I thought, Well, it's not The Paper Chase and it's not Breaking Away and it's not Fight Club, but it's a little bit of a lot of these things, and in an interesting way.

Aaron Sorkin told me that on the set, you were more insistent on the accuracy of small details than he was, that when there was push and pull between you, you wanted to hew closer to the record.
Well, I don't know. I always think that if you have a bit of research, you can go, I think it'd be cooler if the person wore this. But if you have a photograph of him from that period of his life, you go, Really, a T-shirt over a dress shirt with a tie? That's such an odd thing, and yet there's something about that that speaks to who that person is. I feel like if you have something that in some way is real, it informs things in a different way. It's easy to make stuff look good or slick or cohesive, but I also think that if you're dealing with stuff that's real ... I mean, it broke my heart that we couldn't shoot at Harvard. And yet by the time we were done with all the bureaucracy, I was happy to go to Johns Hopkins. They were so helpful. They were so much easier to deal with that I didn't really care that it wasn't the real Kirkland because it was such a pain in the ass to deal with. And in those cases you just go, "Well, they shot a lot of interiors of The Paper Chase at USC, so screw it." But I do think reality informs things in a different way. Oftentimes it doesn't make things as clean in terms of storytelling, but it's almost always better in terms of character. Is [Sorkin] talking about the beer and stuff? [Indeed, there was a dispute over whether Zuckerberg should be drinking a beer or a screwdriver while he hacked into Harvard's databases.]

He was. Small stuff like that.
Yeah, originally, he'd written this thing about making a screwdriver, and I was like, "That's great, except we have a blog. And in the blog it says, 'Here I am and I'm drinking Beck's.'" It felt like, well, he's a Beck's guy. I liked what it said: A 19-year-old guy with a case of Beck's in his dorm room. It doesn't say the same thing as Smirnoff and OJ.

So were most of your disagreements on that scale rather than about, say, character?
We almost never disagreed about intent. Remember, Aaron comes from a world where he generates a kind of page count on a daily basis that I can't even imagine, and he accomplishes an enormous amount. In his previous discipline, television, Aaron is used to thinking fast and making bold decisions. He works with a meat ax. The words are the important thing because it's what you're getting paid for. In television, you don't have the time to pick gnat shit out of pepper. But in the movies, my whole thing is, everything that we put on the screen is going to be debated and scrutinized in some way. So it's not even that there's an opportunity here to do more. It's that it's incumbent upon us, if we're going to put a prop next to somebody's hand and they're going to do three pages of dialogue with it, that prop is going to get a lot more important than it would in a two-page scene on television. It's going to be seen and scrutinized more, so we need to make sure it's not saying something we don't want it to say or undercutting anything about the environment or where they are in their head space.

Do you feel comfortable with the idea that people will walk out at the end of this movie with differing opinions about whether Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy or a tragic hero or a bad guy? You've left a lot of room for people to disagree with the Rashida Jones character's assessment of Mark as someone who's not an asshole but is trying so hard to be. Some people will watch the movie and say, "No, actually, he's an asshole."
Look, it's not my intention to crucify Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg is a guy who accomplished an enormous amount at a very, very young age. And I, not in the same way, not in the same world, but I know what it's like to be 21 years old and trying to direct a $60 million movie and sitting in a room full of grown-ups who think you're just so cute, but they're not about to give you control of anything. It's just, "Great - look how passionate he is!" I know the anger that comes when you just want to be allowed to do the things that you know you can do. In order to accomplish what he's accomplished, you have to have not only a great deal of drive, you have to have an unshakable, freakish confidence. A lot of people will look at that and wonder what kind of hubris does it take to know what it is that you want at 21?

So I feel it would be irresponsible to say this is the story of a guy who betrayed his friends. I think Eduardo had a real failure of imagination, and I've been in those situations before. I've had companies where the partners were all in it for the right reasons at the beginning. And then four or five years down the line, when it's a commercial endeavor that's throwing off a lot of cash, you go, "I think you need to go in this direction." And other people say, "Everything's good just the way it is, let's just keep it here." You reach a point when you say, "We're working at cross-purposes, we're no longer aligned, you need to go do your thing and I need to go do my thing."

And I've been in situations where people say, "Look, it's best for everyone if this person is marginalized." Those things happen. So I have an enormous amount of empathy for everyone involved. I didn't want the Winklevosses to be the "Haves" who were surly and stupid. Cameron really has a strong sense of what it means to be a Harvardian. He's not joking. He was raised right.

The idea of being gentlemen is very meaningful to them.
Yeah! When we were shooting the phone call [to Cameron Winklevoss's father] I told him I wanted him to say, at the end of the call, "I love you, Dad." It's not in the script but that's the kind of kid this guy is. It should be surprising that this six-foot-five, 220-pound kid says that. And I don't know the Winklevi, but they'd somehow gotten a hold of the script because it was on the fucking Internet ...

You don't sound like you're much more of a fan of the Internet than Aaron Sorkin is.
I just resent the whole ... I hate the idea of pre-auditioning clay pigeons for people. I really resent the idea of people reading screenplays that have yet to be produced. In any case, the Winklevosses got to us and said, "You know, that's not my dad's name." Aaron had changed the name originally. That was the one note we got. Little things like that were important to me. We were just trying to make the world as realistic as we could. There were times Aaron Sorkin and I would turn to each other and say, "What are we doing here?" And I said, "It's the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies." Sean Parker is half of Jedediah Leland, and Eduardo is the other half, the hurt half. It's not, "If I hadn't been so rich I might have been a truly great man." But: "If I'd known then what I know now, three years later ... "

Related: Inventing Facebook [NYM]

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The Vulture Transcript: An In-Depth Chat With David Fincher About The Social Network

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David Fincher rarely gives interviews, but for the New York cover story on his new movie, The Social Network (which opens October 1), the director sat down with Mark Harris for a long, revealing chat. Only some of the conversation made it into the article, so we're presenting their entire, in-depth talk in full below.

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Fincher, uses a fluid tracking camera with unlimited access to the environment — it appears to have the ability to travel through walls and solid objects.

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Fincher, uses a fluid tracking camera with unlimited access to the environment — it appears to have the ability to travel through walls and solid objects.

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Fincher uses:
- Monochromatic colours, but he uses them as a means to convey mundanity, boredom, or stagnation and also to convey rigid worldview of unbalanced characters.
- Discordant colours to draw attention to out of place elements to build anticipation.
- Complementary colours, because opposing colours represent conflict both inside and out.

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frequent use of low key lighting  and heavy use of shadows

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frequent use of low key lighting  and heavy use of shadows

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                                  films to focus on

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                                  films to focus on