stay for the credits

February 8th
15:35

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"The world of 7:30 on Tuesday nights, that’s dead. A stake has been driven through its heart, its head has been cut off, and its mouth has been stuffed with garlic. The captive audience is gone. If you give people this opportunity to mainline all in one day, there’s reason to believe they will do it…It was an option from the beginning. Eventually [Netflix] came to say, ‘We’re looking at the data of how we screen stuff, and we believe the world is prepared for this idea that you can have it all [at once].’"

— David Fincher, executive producer of House of Cards.

May 21st
07:12

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"We were making Fight Club when Bottle Rocket came out, Brad and I were so obsessed with it that we kept trying to slip references to Bottle Rocket into Fight Club and David Fincher kept saying, “I know what that is, stop it!"

— Edward Norton: I wrote Wes a letter about Rushmore and that’s how we met. (via tobwaylan)

April 24th
17:16

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6 Filmmaking Tips from David Fincher

atencio:

spytap:

tyrannosaurpaddock:

1) “What you learn from that first [film] - and I don’t call it ‘trial by fire’; I call it ‘baptism by fire’ - is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There’s nothing worse than hearing somebody say, ‘Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,’ and you have to agree with them, you know?”

2) “I never fall in love with anything. I really don’t, I am not joking. ‘Do the best you can, try to live it down,’ that’s my motto. Just literally give it everything you got, and then know that it’s never going to turn out the way you want it to, and let it go, and hope that it doesn’t return. Because you want it to be better than it can ever turn out. Absolutely, 1000 percent, I believe this: Whenever a director friend of mine says, ‘Man, the dailies look amazing!’ … I actually believe that anybody, who thinks that their dailies look amazing doesn’t understand the power of cinema; doesn’t understand what cinema is capable of.”

3) “A friend of mine once, he was directing his first film and he called me and said, ‘How many takes can I ask for?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well I’m working with this actress and she said that she’s only going to give me six takes.’ And I said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you ask for whatever it is you need.’ I’ve never understood… It’s not about an actor presenting their work to forty people around them. It’s about, you know, it’s the boom operator, it’s the camera operator, it’s can you tweak the light better, can the person hit their mark better, can they be in focus. There’s so many aspects, it’s not just about the actor. That’s the focus of what you’re trying to get, but it’s a ballet between so many different people. And to me that’s the thing, to make it all coalesce, to make it look effortless.”

4) In the commentary track for Se7en, Fincher explains that when he was working at ILM, he was taught that a director should look at each scene’s set up with each eye individually. Left eye for composition (because it’s connected to the creative right side of the brain). Right eye for focus and technical specs (because it’s connected to the mathematical left side of the brain).

5) “A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the filmmakers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club’s a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn’t look at Panic Room and think: Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire. These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They’re not particularly important.”

6) “You can’t take everything on. That’s why when people ask how does this film fit into my oeuvre. I say ‘I don’t know. I don’t think in those terms’. If I did, I might become incapacitated by fear … How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.”

More discussion, links, videos, and other great stuff here

That thing about looking at each setup with one eye at a time kind of blew my mind. I can’t wait to try that. And totally agree about what you learn on your first movie.

March 22nd
22:49

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nicolaswindingrefns:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2011]: David Fincher’s Commentary

So the title sequence. We had this cover of “Immigrant Song”. I was riding in a van in Sweden and had my iPhone with me…and I was listening to Led Zeppelin, and this song came on and I-I mean, aside from the incredibly, inanely obvious: “I come from the land of the ice and snow”… I just like the idea of an anthemnal, incredibly famous track that could be wailed by a woman. And I called Trent and I said: “What do you think of a cover of ‘Immigrant Song’?” I think at first he thought I was joking [laughing]. And I said, “No, imagine, you know, a woman’s voice singing this.” And he did a version just to the music and I listened to it and I thought it’s evocative of what I think Lisbeth is— Not thinking, but, you know, sort of her marrow. What’s happening down deep inside her bones. And we got Karen O. Ren Klyce gave us Karen’s e-mail address and we asked her to do this. And I think in about three or four days they had a version of this song that was— To my mind, it was undeniable. It just seemed like such a great sort of kindred spirit to what I thought Lisbeth was about. And then we needed visuals to go with it. I went to Tim Miller at Blur, and I said: “What can you do along the lines of a nightmare? What would Lisbeth’s nightmare be?” And he came back with about 50 different little scene cards and we whittled it down to about 20-25. And I turned to him and said: “That looks great. You got eight weeks. Go.”

March 20th
20:08

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January 3rd
20:03

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Interviewer: I have to be honest with you. A while ago when I heard about your way of doing business, for filmmaking and doing so many takes, I sort of questioned it. But the more I’ve learned about the art of the industry, you have a very rare luxury of having the time to do this many takes and the way you describe your editing process, I don’t think you could do it with only four takes.
David Fincher: Well, I’ll go you one further which is… “What the fuck are you doing?” If you’re flying out actors from all over the fucking place, because they’re the right person to read that text, and you’re spending weeks with them in rehearsal, and then you get there and you’re going, “OK, trained monkey, do that thing.” How unbelievably disrespectful is it to everybody’s time? I look at it this way. There are a lot of directors who like having a Technocrane on the truck. So if they decide they want to do a crane shot, Technocrane’s there. OK, well, Technocrane’s fucking $3,000 a day. So, if you don’t have that, you can go another 15 or 20 minutes right before lunch in order to allow for that person to do something better. So I look at it as, I’ll always trade helicopter shots, steadicams, and that stuff in order to have the time to let somebody fail upward. To let somebody… they know what they’re doing, they’ve figured out who their character is. They’re coming from a solid place of contributing, and now you want to get them to a point where they are no longer thinking about, “Which hand is it? I didn’t pick up the thing…” It’s like, you do something 16 times, you can do it in your fucking sleep. Now, once you can do it in your sleep, now let’s get the words to come out of your mouth like it’s the first time you said it and you always talk like this. That’s what we were doing. So you sit there and you go, “Couldn’t the Winklevosses’ attorneys’ conference room be more marble, more carved wood?” Yea, it can be a much more elaborate thing. Does it need to be? No. Would I rather have eight days in there to shoot that stuff than six days? So if I take some of the elaborateness out and I don’t relight as much, and if I take some of the green screen stuff that I wanted to see out the windows of San Francisco and I take that out of my budget. I go, “OK, the windows can be blown out and just be a glow outside because that’s often what it looks like when you try to balance exposure for the real world to the real outside world.” Am I OK with that? Does it get me two more days with Andrew Garfield? Yea. OK, well, I’d rather have two more days with Andrew Garfield. I’d rather give him nine more bites at the apple on every setup.

December 29th
20:55

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(via Of motorcycles and movies)

About a year ago, I finished reading the final instalment of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium trilogy”. I found these Swedish crime novels absolutely gripping—and not just because the heroine Lisbeth Salander rides a motorcycle. In two weeks, the US movie adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo will be released—so here’s a timely look at how the motorcycles used in the film were prepared. The job was given to Justin Kell of Glory Motor Works in LA, and it’s an insight into a rarely-seen aspect of the film-making process.

“I got the call to meet with [director] David Fincher and discuss motorcycles for a new film he was doing,” says Kell. “I bought all three Larsson books and read them in three days: the character of Lisbeth Salander is killer. As I read the books, I kept thinking that Lisbeth’s bike would be the kind of bike most 20-somethings with limited financial recourses would ride. She wouldn’t have an expensive modern bike: she would have an inexpensive older bike that would be customized to fit her personality.”

Originally, the producers considered using modern bikes. “I had to convince Fincher that we could build vintage bikes to be as reliable as modern bikes. David leaves no detail untouched: he knows that a broken motorcycle can delay production and cost the film company thousands of dollars.” Kell also had to keep the art director happy, make the bike fit the conceptual drawings, and build bikes that would start and perform whenever called upon.

He had 30 days to find, buy and rebuild three late-60s Honda CB350s. “I went after low mileage, original machines in stock condition. We looked at updating charging systems and upgrading performance.” The script called for a lot of high speed riding, plus off-road action on ice and snow. Bikes in movies are usually started and shut down hundreds of times during a day of filming: this means that starter motors have to be rebuilt, and three-wire high-output charging systems installed.

Kell also increased the battery box size, so he could fit a higher amperage sealed battery. “The lighting is always super important in a Fincher film, so the bikes were fitted with HID lamps. All the metal parts were stripped and cleaned, and sent out for paint, powdercoating, polishing or cadmium plating. “We ended up powdercoating the wheels and using bigger gauge SS spokes. We replaced everything: new clutches, new brakes, new wiring harnesses and every fastener on the bike. The motors were torn down to the cranks, we trued the flywheels, did valve jobs and replaced pistons and rings.” The carbs were rebuilt and the fuel tanks were stripped and re-lined. Flat track style seats were installed, covered in vintage glove leather.

“We had to build one bike first to get the final approval from David,” says Kell. “We finished that one in about two weeks.” Fincher gave the okay to build two more bikes, and cast Rooney Mara to play Lisbeth Salander. “She was sent over to me to start teaching her to ride,” says Kell. “She had never been on a bike before, so we had to start easy. I’ve trained many actors to ride over the years, and I must say that Rooney was one of the best. She was fearless, but smart. In three days, we had her doing everything that she needed to do on camera at 35 mph.

The final two weeks were “mayhem. Getting three full rebuilds together at the same time requires a lot of diplomacy and hundred dollar bills. We had 30 days straight of 16-hour days, but we finished the bikes on schedule. The day after we turned the last screw, the bikes were in crates on the way to Stockholm for the shoot.”

The bikes are now back in LA though, and Kell is tearing them down yet again—this time to prepare for the second film.

October 4th
20:14

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"I know very subjectively what it’s like to be 21 years old and sitting in a room full of adults who are all taking about how cute your passion for your vision is and how angry that makes you. A certain kind of young person is going to respond by saying, ‘Let’s knock the walls of this thing down, set fire to the conventional wisdom and take the future for a test drive.’"

— David Fincher (via sarah-fincher)

September 30th
21:51

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"

To me this movie does to genre filmmaking what L’Avventura did to narrative cinema in the 1960s, in the sense that in L’Avventura, all of a sudden, the central character disappears, and you’re just left with abstract issues of what was really going on in life around that character.

Here you have the notion that everything is in place for a classic narrative — a serial killer, the cops, a smart guy from everyday life, the ciphers. Everything should fall in place and there should be a resolution, and here you’re only left with question mark after question mark, which ultimately is what real life is about, and it’s very rarely acknowledged by cinema.

What amazed me at the time and still does is the connection with Seven, because it’s like the anti-Seven. It’s this incredible exercise in dialectics. In American cinema, I don’t see an equivalent.

"

— Olivier Assayas on David Fincher’s Zodiac. (via dylzo)

January 30th
12:06

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This is a wonderful Downeyism. He had this little bar trick he wanted to do. [laughs] He showed it to me… He said, “Can I do that?” And I said, “Absolutely.” 26 takes later, he was beside himself. So frustrated, so fed up, because we needed it to match now the master shot to the coverage. And so one of those great moments of inspiration turns into the actor’s albatross. - David Fincher

This is a wonderful Downeyism. He had this little bar trick he wanted to do. [laughs] He showed it to me… He said, “Can I do that?” And I said, “Absolutely.” 26 takes later, he was beside himself. So frustrated, so fed up, because we needed it to match now the master shot to the coverage. And so one of those great moments of inspiration turns into the actor’s albatross. - David Fincher

January 29th
15:46

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Easy To Be Hard by Three Dog Night. From the Zodiac soundtrack.

David Fincher on choosing Easy To Be Hard as the opening song for Zodiac:

“It was odd ‘cuz I was in 2nd or 3rd grade when this whole thing happened [the Zodiac murders]. And I remember so vividly driving through Sonoma from Vallejo. It’s an area known as Black Point. And I remember being at the back of my parents’ ‘65 Impala, windows rolled down, it was the beginning of summer, and you can smell eucalyptus and this song was playing on the radio. There was something about it when I heard it. It transported me personally to the summer of 1969 which is, again, purely a subjective thing. And, you know, making movies ultimately is a wholly subjective thing. But I remember just feeling very misty when I heard that music playing over those pictures.”