David Fincher

David Fincher: The Director Who Wears Out the Earnestness

Rooney Mara did ninety-nine takes of a single scene in *The Social Network*. Amanda Seyfried has reportedly gone up to two hundred on *Mank*. A nine-minute scene in *Mindhunter* required seventy-five. Fincher's explanation is not what people expect. "I hate earnestness in performance," he says. "Usually by take 17 the earnestness is gone." He is not chasing perfection. He is grinding away the actor's desire to be seen acting.

San Anselmo

David Andrew Leo Fincher was born on 28 August 1962 in Denver. His father, Howard Kelly "Jack" Fincher, was a bureau chief for *Life* magazine and an author; his mother Claire Mae Boettcher was a psychiatric nurse who worked in addiction programmes. The family moved to San Anselmo in Marin County when he was two, and the neighbour was George Lucas.

At eight he saw a documentary about the making of *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid* and understood, in a way most children do not, that films are manufactured objects — that somebody decides where the camera goes and why. That is the entire Fincher thesis in embryo. As a teenager in Ashland, Oregon, he worked at a local news station and a theatre.

No Film School

He never went to film school. He went to work instead, joining Industrial Light & Magic from 1983 to 1984 as an assistant cameraman on *Return of the Jedi* and *Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom*. This is an unusual apprenticeship for a major director: it is a training in optical trickery and painstaking technical assembly rather than in dramaturgy, and it explains a great deal about how his films are built.

He left to direct a commercial for the American Cancer Society, which got him noticed, and in 1986 co-founded Propaganda Films. Between 1984 and 1993 he directed fifty-three music videos, including Madonna's "Vogue" and "Express Yourself," George Michael's "Freedom! '90," and Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun." He won MTV Video Music Awards and two Grammys for Best Music Video. The videos taught him compression: how to establish a world, a mood and a visual grammar in four minutes with no exposition.

Alien 3

His first feature, in 1992, was a disaster he has never softened about. Studio interference on *Alien 3* was constant, the script changed repeatedly, and Fincher's verdict in 2009 was brutal and self-implicating: "No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me." It is the film that made him incapable of surrendering control ever again.

Seven, and the Nineties

*Seven* in 1995 was the correction. A rain-soaked, unnamed city, a procedural structure, a genuinely nihilistic ending the studio fought — and $320 million worldwide. It established the Fincher signature: desaturated colour, deep shadow, cameras locked on tripods where other directors would go handheld, and a world rendered with such specificity that it feels less designed than exhumed.

*The Game* followed in 1997 and *Fight Club* in 1999, which underperformed on release and then became one of the most argued-over films of its generation. *Panic Room* came in 2002.

Zodiac

*Zodiac* (2007) is where the method and the subject fuse. A film about an unsolved case, in which obsessive men destroy themselves in pursuit of certainty they will never reach, made by a director who required upwards of seventy takes of individual scenes. He cites Buster Keaton as proof that difficult things done in one shot, without cutting away, hit hardest. Since that film he has worked repeatedly with production designer Don Burt, one of a long-standing crew that also includes cinematographers Darius Khondji and Jeff Cronenweth, composer Trent Reznor, editor Angus Wall and sound designer Ren Klyce.

*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button* (2008) brought him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director. *The Social Network* (2010) brought the Golden Globe and the BAFTA. *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo* (2011), *Gone Girl* (2014), *Mank* (2020) and *The Killer* (2023) followed, alongside a second career in television: *House of Cards* for Netflix from 2013, *Mindhunter* from 2017, and *Love, Death & Robots* from 2019, which has won three Emmys. His films have grossed over $2.1 billion.

Why David Is Called a Genius

The faculty is control of information. Fincher's films work because every frame is a deliberate decision about what the audience is permitted to know and when — an approach inherited from optical effects work at ILM rather than from theatre. He rejects the obvious camera position on principle, prefers to let a scene play out in a master shot, and regards the insert shot as "often a crutch" that makes footage "prettier, or more in control."

He also rejects the word most often applied to him. "I think that 'perfectionism' is a term that's thrown about mostly by people who are lazy," he has said. "We're not trying to do something perfect. Perfect is the commercial." That is a more interesting and more defensible idea than perfectionism, and it is the actual engine of the ninety-nine takes.

The counter-case is substantial. Three nominations for Best Director have produced no win. A strand of criticism holds that his films are exercises in surface — brilliantly machined, emotionally chilly, populated by alienated loners and animated by a misanthropy that stands in for a worldview. His method imposes costs on collaborators, and he has never claimed otherwise. He is, moreover, a genre director working almost entirely inside the thriller, and his influences — Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scott, Scorsese — mark out a lineage of craft rather than of philosophical originality. What is not arguable is the level of the craft, or that after 1995 a whole visual register of contemporary cinema became recognisably his.

The Fincher Standard

He married the model Donya Fiorentino in 1990 and they had a daughter before divorcing in 1995; he married the producer Ceán Chaffin in 1996, and she has produced much of his work since. He shoots digitally, favours natural light, and has built a repertory company of technicians rather than of stars.

The measure of his influence is that his methods have become industry defaults without his name attached: the desaturated palette, the invisible digital stitching of shots that appear to be simple, the refusal of handheld camerawork as a shorthand for authenticity. *Se7en*, *Fight Club*, *Zodiac* and *The Social Network* are now permanent fixtures of the canon of American film of the past thirty years. Fincher himself, characteristically, would probably prefer to discuss where the camera should go.

Achievements

• BAFTA Award for Best Direction — 2011
• Notable work: The Social Network
• Notable work: House of Cards
• Notable work: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Notable work: Seven
• Worked as film director, film producer and television producer