Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.
David FincherWe're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.
David FincherI do agree you can't just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.
David FincherThe thing I always say to any writer that I'm working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.
David FincherWhat you learn from that first, 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?
David FincherAwards movies are normally sort of... life-affirming and noble. It's probably too much of an intellectual conceit and, you know, people don't like it when you don't lead the bad guy off in cuffs.
David FincherA movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. 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.
David FincherYou have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.
David FincherPerfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.
David FincherThe thing is, that great actors are everywhere. They're everywhere. They're doing good parts on television. They're doing television commercials. They're doing local theater. There are so few opportunities.
David FincherYou’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.
David FincherIt's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.
David FincherI learned just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise.
David FincherI thought that the behavioral and some of the profiling stuff was interesting. The thing that I was most interested in, and the thing that we were really adament about, was let's get these guys who were there on tape, or in some kind of way, telling what happened. No one has really talked to them all.
David FincherI want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers masturbate to.
David FincherIf you read the good reviews you gotta read the bad reviews. I kind of think of it as like being a quarterback: you get way too much blame when it's bad and way too much credit when it's good.
David FincherA movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.
David FincherI want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying "Oh, god, didn't we already do this 17 times?"
David FincherWe live in a silly time, and people go to the movies to see something that they haven't seen before, and you have to promise to show them that. In a horrible way, you have to promise them a special effect.
David FincherI have great appreciation for people who do anything well. I think that it's very difficult to do what you do well.
David FincherLook, it's nice. I like the fact that critics liked this movie, but most of the movies that I've made, you'll find a handful of people that love it and more than a few other handfuls of people hate it. If I was invested in that, I would've given up long ago.
David FincherFor me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises.
David FincherPeople will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.
David FincherIf I see a movie for the first time on DVD, I watch it all the way through, the lights are down, I don't pick up the phone. The third or fourth time you see a movie, sometimes you just have them on and you check in every once in a while with things that you liked. I think it's a different expectations from that environment.
David FincherI don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.
David FincherOur Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever. You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story.
David FincherYou have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom. You can do whatever you want in your own home. It's a much more relaxed thing. It's more like a book, it seems to me. That's kind of the way I watch movies.
David FincherI want stuff to play as wide as possible. I want to be able to see... if I could play the whole thing in a master and it could be compelling enough, that'd be great. Then it simplifies my day, it simplifies life for the actors when you could just focus on that. But by the same token I don't want to be forced into coverage. So I want it to be as good from every angle and I need to get as many of the kind of shadings that I want from every angle.
David FincherI don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.
David FincherYou can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success.
David FincherIt's based not only on what it played like in the theater, but it's also knowing that certain things play differently in a home theater environment. You have different expectations when you're sitting with 700 people than when you're sitting with your friends or family. It's just a different world.
David FincherYou 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.
David FincherTake ownership of every decision you make because you will be hold responsible for the film, whether good or bad.
David FincherWhen you go and you tell a studio and that it's an ensemble, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.
David Fincher