There are several major directors, who if you took a retrospective glance over their careers so far, you would notice make a conscious effort never to make the same kind of film twice; who aim to continually surprise by selecting projects that veer in a completely different direction to the films that have made before. Danny Boyle and Darren Aronofsky are good examples of this, and Black Swan and 127 Hours are great examples of how these directors continue to tread new ground with their latest efforts.
Since each new choice by these directors’ seems so fresh and so juxtaposed to their previous work, the films they do select can often be perceived as odd choices for them to opt for. Sometimes the choices seem strange for the simple fact that they differ so much to their previous project (e.g. Aronofsky’s jump from The Fountain to The Wrestler), and sometimes the selections are intrinsically odd (e.g. Punch Drunk Love).
David Fincher is another director who is known for this. With his latest outing, The Social Network (a film about Facebook of all things) seeming a particularly strange choice (both reflectively and intrinsically) and one set against type, we thought we’d take a look over Fincher’s past and future choices and just how odd each decision was.
Alien 3 (1992)
Fincher’s first film, Alien 3, was a critical and commercial failure. It is well known that Fincher despises this film and his involvement with it. In 2009, at the BFI Southbank, Fincher revealed:
“I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.”
Fincher’s decision to take on this project can hardly be deemed an odd one for a filmmaker trying to gain a foothold in the industry. The previous Alien films were huge successes, catapulting their directors into the blockbuster league, so what director in their right mind wouldn’t grab up the opportunity to direct the third installment in this excellent SF series and potentially become a part of that cohort?
Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien also had blown Fincher’s mind when he saw it at the age of 17 and he admits that it was one driving factor that sent him hurtling towards Hollywood. Regarding Alien 3, he commented:
“It would be stupid for me to say that I didn’t know what I was getting into… I always held out for something like this.”
One 1991 article (written a year before the film’s release) reveals: ‘The movie is certainly extraordinary for the choice of its director. David Fincher is probably the only 27-year-old first-time filmmaker ever hired to direct a $50 million movie (Fox’s official number, give or take a few million). Add to that the first director was let go while sets were being built, that the line producer was fired just before the start date, that the script wasn’t finished until two weeks into shooting, and you have a young man with his hands extremely full. As one of his friends puts it, “He was right out of Naval Academy School, and he got put at the helm of the Titanic”.’ It is easy to see why Fincher failed, then, with such a tortured project laid upon him.
On exactly how Fincher feels the film was a failure, he has stated:
“If we failed to do one thing in this film, and we failed to do many things, it was to take people out of their everyday lives. It’s not a scary scare movie but a queasy scare movie and I think people resent that.”
Se7en (1995)
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Fincher then went on to direct Se7en. With regards to how he selected this particular project, Fincher has commented:
“I got a script by a guy who was kind of in my world, and thinking about films the same way I was, and revered the same kinds of movie that I revered – Andy Walker, who had written a script called Seven. He couldn’t get it made and had rewritten it 13 times in order to make it more “likeable”. So this script was floating around… So I read it, and got to the end, with the head in the box, and I called him and said, “This is fantastic, this is so great because I had thought it was a police procedural; now it’s this meditation on evil and how evil gets on you and you can’t get it off.” And he said, “What are you talking about?” And I talked about the whole head-in-the-box thing, she’s been dead for hours and there’s no bullshit chase across town and the guy driving on sidewalks to get to the woman, who’s drawing a bath while the serial killer sneaks in the back window. And he goes, “Oh, they sent you the wrong draft.””
Fincher took forward this older, much better draft, however, and created what is now often now hailed as a masterpiece. To produce a detective piece at this point in his career is not what is unusual about Fincher’s choice for a second film (many directors tackle the genre at some point); it is instead Fincher’s balls to craft something that is so against Hollywood and it’s typified happy-ending mode (and somehow managing to get away with it), which ultimately gave the audience a more truthful and deeper tale.
The Game (1997)
Producer Steve Golin bought the script for The Game from MGM (it originally being attached to Jonathan Mostow to direct, with Kyle McLachlan and Bridget Fonda in the lead roles) and gave it to Fincher in the hopes that he would direct. Like with Se7en, then, this is Fincher’s ‘choice’ only in the respect that he spotted a great project when it was dumped in front of him and had the sense to snap it up quickly.
This film explores deep seated psychological issues (within its protagonist), holds anarchistic tendencies as a positive trait, and has its protagonist’s entire world and outlook turned upside down and altered by the end of the film – all themes that we would see repeated in Fight Club.
Anarchic themes that are anti-establishment and anti-material possessions (Nicholas Van Outen – this film’s protagonist – is work and money obsessed at the start, and is turned around on this by the end; Fight Club’s Tyler Durden infamously holds the opinion of “The things you own end up owning you”) seem like they needed to be compulsory factors in scripts in order for Fincher to take them on. Se7en was anarchistic in its totality, due to its subversive and rebellious ending. It is fair to say, then, that these themes were a driving force in Fincher’s career at this point, regarding what he is trying to portray to audiences through the medium of film.
Dealing with such controversial themes in such an open manner is a dangerous thing for a director to do; if you continually go against the grain and try to make films that all the Hollywood big-wigs, with their condensed data on what the public likes, say “will not work”, you are risking your projects not being made at all, and we are lucky that Fincher made a big enough name for himself before he was snuffed out completely for his diversity and daring.
Fight Club (1999)
Next arrived Fincher’s true tour de force, Fight Club, adapted from popular cult novelist Chuck Palahniuk’s excellent book of the same name. Fincher has commented:
“The book [is] as good as it gets – I nearly pissed myself, I was laughing so hard when I read it. The guy who became my agent, Josh Donen, who was trying to buy the book with me, had told me to read it. I was like, “I don’t read books, and I’m in the middle of postproduction on The Game,” but he said, “You have to read it tonight.” So I did, and I called him back and said, “We gotta buy this.” And he said, “You waited too long. Fox bought it. But go in and meet with Laura Ziskin.” So I did and I told her, “I don’t want to make the $3m version of this; I want to crash planes, I want to blow up buildings and I want to do the thing that Hollywood really shouldn’t do, material like this.””
This final statement again reveals Fincher’s inherent anarchic desire to make films that work against Hollywood’s typical modes. And this is certainly Fincher’s most anarchistic piece to date; when it was released, concerns arose from government types that it might hold too much capacity to sway young minds in the audience towards this way of thinking; becoming anti-establishment and destructive based upon the newly realised discontent with their lives and disillusionment (and indeed, more Fight Club’s were started, to make people feel more alive, and who knows, perhaps a few Project Mayhem’s also).
With regards to his selection of this piece, this is another instance where a great script (or here, book) was dumped on Fincher’s desk and where he retained the sense to snatch the project up. Palahniuk’s book being a work that defines the angst and disillusionment of a generation, it was a project that any director simply shouldn’t ignore, and we should be thankful that Fincher got his grasp on it and portrayed it as it was meant to be, before another director took it and censored the life out of it, trying to conform to Hollywood’s rules.
Panic Room (2002)
After a considerable gap of time, Fincher made Panic Room. This was Fincher’s most conventional film up to this point and thus marks the biggest major step in another direction in Fincher’s career.
One online reviewer, after seeing the film, wrote ‘With the exception of how well the cast holds the film together, there’s nothing to it. There is no edge, no question, nothing left unsaid. Frankly, Panic Room has all of us Fincher fans a little concerned… But I shouldn’t speak too soon. Fincher is full of surprises.’ The film certainly lacks the controversial elements, anarchic outlook and exploration of deep themes that his previous efforts held, and it was not as well received by critics as his last three films. That is not to say that it is a disaster, however; in terms of suspense and the way in which it is shot, it is quite an accomplished feature.
Allegedly, Fincher chose to make Panic Room (a script by David Koepp) after Fight Club, because the latter was filmed across 150 different locations and the director sought a break (filming Panic Room in a self-contained location).
Zodiac (2007)
Next came Fincher’s return to the detective crime genre (explored previously with Se7en) and also a return to Fincher directing subject matter adapted from a book (or several books in this case). It was also the first of Fincher’s films to be shot digitally.
Being originally set to direct The Black Dahlia (a project later filmed by Brian De Palma), Fincher seemed already set to make a return to the crime genre before he agreed to take on Zodiac. He was given James Vanderbilt’s screenplay late in 2003, and Fincher was drawn to the story because he had spent much of his childhood in San Anselmo in Marin County during the initial Zodiac murders. Fincher has commented:
“I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now. And my dad, who worked from home, and who was very dry, not one to soft-pedal things, turned slowly in his chair and said: ‘Oh yeah. There’s a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who’s threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus.’”
Some speculate that for Fincher as a young boy, the killer “was the ultimate bogeyman.” The director was also drawn to the unresolved ending of Vanderbilt’s screenplay because it felt true to real life where cases are not always solved; the true portrayal of stories being something that we know Fincher always looks for.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Here, Fincher turned to a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He commented:
“I read the first draft that was deemed unfilmable. And over the years, I heard about who had it and who was going to try next. I read Eric Roth’s draft in 2001/2002.” It was that particular draft that drew him in; as to why, he commented “I just thought the final image of a 74-year-old woman holding a seven-month-old baby and helping him through death, I just thought it was a beautiful way to end a love story.”
And:
“I think Terry Gilliam looked at it earlier. There are just so many layers of complexity in terms of the period, the evolution of the background, that once you give up the idea of five or six people playing this one person, and you can kind of focus on one actor – that’s what made it work for me. I know Brad will be able to describe this arc, he’ll be able to figure this guy out, and I just have to create a world for him to do that in. The first time I read it, when I read Robin [Swicord]‘s first draft of it in 1991-92, I think I was thinking of it then in terms of five or six actors, and it made my head hurt.”
In 2005 Fincher negotiated a deal with co-financers Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures to direct Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button back to back.
This was Fincher’s first non-realism film since Alien 3 (that being SF and this piece being fantasy). With both Zodiac and this film, we witnessed him return to his routes in a way, through the return to crime and non-realism.
Both Zodiac and this film were highly lauded by critics and showed Panic Room to be only a temporary affliction in the quality of this director’s work.
The Social Network (2010)
And so we arrive at Fincher’s The Social Network, released this Friday 15th October in the UK. When many first heard the notion that a film about facebook was being made, they (especially those who didn’t know about the legal case) were rightly sceptical; what merit could come of a film about the social network made for superficial ‘status updates’ and pointless games? As soon as the news arrived that Fincher was attached to the project though, and the arriving trailers showed it was being handled in a mature manner, assumptions quickly fell away and opinions changed.
This is a very odd choice for Fincher to select. In one respect, it seems like yet another step in an entirely new direction for him, but there is also a similarity with Zodiac here with Fincher choosing to film a true story (and subsequently having to decide how much fact and how much fiction to use).
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
With his upcoming film after The Social Network, Fincher again surprises us with an unusual choice. He is doing what you generally find only small time directors do; he is directing the Hollywood remake of a successful, critically acclaimed foreign film: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Remakes of foreign successes are seen by most to be sacrilege, since they rarely work (or at least are almost always worse than the original) and they are a clear example of Hollywood’s resistance to back originality and its tendency to simply repackage successful ideas to make a profit.
Perhaps Fincher’s version is set to be more of a different interpretation of the book it was adapted from, though. Much like how Matt Reeves claims his Let Me In is less of a remake and more of an alternative interpretation of the novel. We’ll have to just wait and see what he does with it. No doubt it will be very different to Niels Arden Oplev’s version. One thing is for sure; this is yet another example of Fincher be risky with the projects he chooses to undertake, a quality, let us hope, that he always retains.
(This news feature was written by me for the site www.thefilmpilgrim.com, on which it can also be found)
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