David Fincher

[DarkImbecile]

David Fincher (1962 - )



“My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive."

Filmography

Features
Alien 3 (1992)
Se7en (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)
The Killer (2022)

Television
House of Cards - S01E01 - "Chapter 1" (2013)
House of Cards - S01E02 - "Chapter 2" (2013)
Mindhunter - S01E01 - "Episode 1" (2017)
Mindhunter - S01E02 - "Episode 2" (2017)
Mindhunter - S01E09 - "Episode 9" (2017)
Mindhunter - S01E10 - "Episode 10" (2017)
Mindhunter - S02E01 - "Episode 11" (2019)
Mindhunter - S02E02 - "Episode 12" (2019)
Mindhunter - S02E03 - "Episode 13" (2019)
Love, Death & Robots - S03E02 - “Bad Travelling” (2022)

Music Videos
Rick Springfield - "Dance This World Away" (1984)
Rick Springfield - "Celebrate Youth" (1984)
Rick Springfield - "Bop Til You Drop" (1984)
The Motels - "Shame" (1985)
The Motels - "Shock" (1985)
The Outfield - "All the Love In the World" (1986)
Jermaine Stewart - "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off" (1986)
The Outfield - "Everytime You Cry" (1986)
Stabilizers - "One Simple Thing" (1986)
Howard Hewett - "Stay" (1986)
Wire Train - "She Comes On" (1987)
Eddie Money - "Endless Nights" (1987)
Patty Smyth - "Downtown Train" (1987)
Bourgeois Tagg - "I Don't Mind at All" (1987)
Loverboy - "Notorious" (1987)
Loverboy - "Love Will Rise Again" (1987)
The Hooters - "Johnny B" (1987)
Willy Deville - "Storybook Love" (1987)
Colin Hay - "Can I Hold You" (1987)
The Outfield - "No Surrender" (1987)
Foreigner - "Say You Will" (1987)
Martha Davis - "Don't Tell Me the Time" (1987)
The Motels - "Tell It To the Moon" (1988)
Johnny Hates Jazz - "Heart of Gold" (1988)
Sting - "Englishman in New York" (1988)
Johnny Hates Jazz - "Shattered Dreams" (1988)
Ry Cooder - "Get Rhythm" (1988)
Jody Watley - "Most of All" (1988)
Steve Winwood - "Roll With It" (1988)
Paula Abdul - "(It's Just) The Way That You Love Me" (1988)
Steve Winwood - "Holding On" (1988)
Neneh Cherry - "Heart" (1989)
Gipsy Kings - "Bamboleo" (V2) (1989)
Paula Abdul - "Straight Up"
Jody Watley - "Real Love"
Roy Orbison - "She's a Mystery to Me" (1989)
Paula Abdul - "Forever Your Girl" (1989)
Madonna - "Express Yourself" (1989)
Don Henley - "The End of Innocence" (1989)
Paula Abdul - "Cold Hearted" (1989)
Paula Abdul - "(It's Just) The Way That You Love Me" (V2) (1989)
Madonna - "Oh Father" (1989)
Aerosmith - "Janie's Got a Gun" (1989)
Madonna - "Vogue" (1990)
Billy Idol - "Cradle of Love" (1990)
Wire Train - "Should She Cry" (1990)
Billy Idol - "L.A. Woman" (1990)
George Michael - "Freedom '90" (1990)
Michael Jackson - "Who Is It?" (1992)
Madonna - "Bad Girl" (1993)
The Rolling Stones - "Love is Strong" (1994)
The Wallflowers - "6th Avenue Heartache" (1996)
A Perfect Circle - "Judith" (2000)
Nine Inch Nails - "Only" (2005)
Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z - "Suit & Tie" (2013)

Web Resources
Video Essays:
The Directors Series - David Fincher [2.1] - Baptism By Fire
The Directors Series - David Fincher [2.2] - Redmption & Triumph
The Directors Series - David Fincher [2.3] - Capturing the Zeitgeist
The Directors Series - David Fincher [2.4] - Into the Digital Realm
The Directors Series - David Fincher [2.5] - The Bleeding Edge

Interviews:
2009 with Amy Taubin, Film Comment
2009 interview with Mark Salisbury, The Guardian
2014 with Amy Taubin, Film Comment
"David Fincher's Impossible Eye", 2020 profile by Jonah Weiner, New York Times Magazine

Forum Discussion
Se7en (Fincher, 1995)
627 The Game
Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
476 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)
Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)
World War Z 2 (David Fincher, 201?)
Mank (David Fincher, 2020)

[Trees]

Vice video piece on him, featuring Ben Affleck, Robin Wright and Jesse Eisenberg

Nice short piece. Makes me want to rewatch some of these films, especially Zodiac.

One thing you see over and over again with great directors is that they are extremely obsessive. The recent, excellent Hayao Miyazaki documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness points strongly to this. You see it in the Tarkovsky documentaries, dealing, for example, with his on-set attempts to film the final house-burning scene in The Sacrifice. Bergman was that way. Cameron is that way. Malick is that way. Think of Welles and Citizen Kane. Obsession is the fuel.

[flyonthewall2983]

This IMDB trivia tidbit from Gone Girl kind of says it all

On set one day, Affleck changed the lens setting on a camera an almost indiscernible amount, betting a crew member that Fincher wouldn't notice. Affleck lost the bet as Fincher brought up, "Why does the camera look a little dim?"

I wonder if he's gone the route of his friend Soderbergh and is just dedicating himself to television now. There's not been much news as far as movies he's been attached to since Gone Girl, and everything since has seemed to revolve around his brief time developing stuff for HBO and now his 2nd Netflix series Mindhunters.

[mfunk9786]

Guys, I will spruce up all of these filmmaker threads as soon as I become unemployed/unemployable

[flyonthewall2983]

[FrauBlucher]

Interesting. Nothing prior to the 60s.

[flyonthewall2983]

Citizen Kane and Rear Window

[FrauBlucher]

Oh man, how'd I miss that.

[Dead or Deader]

With no foreign films outside of 8 1/2. that if you excluded The Road Warrior and Years of Living Dangerously.

[mfunk9786]

His Zodiac belongs on any reasonably sized list of the best films of all time, so I don't feel too much breathing room with which to mock the breadth of films he enjoys

[cdnchris]

It's a fine list. I can't really fault it or him if they're what influenced him. I grew up on my dad's video library which consisted of American films from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, so I could see my list strongly leaning that way since they're what I was heavily exposed to and what got me into film.

Though I was trying to figure out what Ahen was (and it took me a long while to realize the answer I'm sad to say).

[Zot!]

What is the source this? It looks like a relic. The list ok, but it is tiresome that people list all same things. Then again, often time directors/musicians arent the biggest fanboys, as we might expect them to be...which is just fine.

[flyonthewall2983]

Though I was trying to figure out what Ahen was (and it took me a long while to realize the answer I'm sad to say).

Janus

[Roger Ryan]

Given that the most recent film on that list is The Terminator(1984), I'm thinking he put this together somewhere around the mid-80s. The list is actually very close to my own top twenty when I was in high school circa 1980 (Fincher and I are close in age).

[Oedipax]

It does feel like a list that's been frozen in time for a while. I don't have any real issues with the films themselves, but it has the bland surface quality of browsing the classics row on Netflix or whatever.

[beamish13]

It does feel like a list that's been frozen in time for a while. I don't have any real issues with the films themselves, but it has the bland surface quality of browsing the classics row on Netflix or whatever.

It reminds me of something Woody Allen said in an interview about his ambition as a filmmaker being to make the kind of movies he wanted to see as a young person. It's not a a very terribly inspired list, but you can draw beelines from many of those films to what Fincher made, and his beginnings in the film industry as a photography/visual effects specialist.

[flyonthewall2983]

I wonder, how much he changed in between the time he quit Alien3 and when he agreed to do Se7en. Quite specifically, if he would have ever done the latter had the former been more of a harmonious production. I think for a time during that period he had given up on the idea of doing movies entirely, and just went back to doing commercials and videos. It was certainly a solid base for him to fall back on.

[All the Best People]

Perhaps the most influential film for Fincher wasn't a film at all, but a making-of featurette:

MS: Let's talk a little bit about how you came to be a film-maker. You were born in Denver, Colorado, but moved to Marin County when you were two, and you lived down the street from George Lucas. As a kid you were quite artistic: you took photographs, you drew, you conned your parents into giving you a movie camera rather than a gun, so was there a eureka moment, when you realised that you wanted to direct?

DF: It was pretty clear. The eureka moment was when I saw a behind-the-scenes making-of about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was kind of a shabby EPK that had been cobbled together, but it was narrated by the director, George Roy Hill. And it was the first time I'd ever conceived that films didn't happen in real time. I was about seven years old, and I thought, "What a cool job." You get to go on location, have trained horses and blow up trains and hang out with Katharine Ross. [source]

It's fitting that something about the process of filmmaking would prove so crucial to Fincher, as his cinema is preoccupied with portrayals of the process of constructing narratives; this usually exhibits itself in the form of investigations and detective work (Seven, Zodiac), in clashes between an investigator and some sort of unreliable, deceitful narrative creator (The Game, Fight Club, Gone Girl), and in disputes between competing narratives (The Social Network). Even Benjamin Button, unique in Fincher's resume as a film you can show your mother, frames the main body of its narrative in a diary being read after the titular character's passing; he has left the narrative he created as his standing legacy. (One could also see the to-the-camera comments and story manipulations of Frank Underwood of House of Cards in this context.) Only Panic Room would be truly stretched to be included here, as we might remember that Alien 3 happens to contain a brief investigation carried out by Ripley into the circumstances of the deaths that took place while she was in hibernation.

So it is any surprise that 8 1/2 and All That Jazz find their way onto his list? Or Citizen Kane or Rear Window? All are stories about people creating stories.

[swo17]

Why would you want to show your mother such a dreadful movie?

[chetienne]

Maybe because it's a masterpiece and one of the most important American films of the last forty years?

[Morbii]

Though I was trying to figure out what Ahen was (and it took me a long while to realize the answer I'm sad to say).

Janus

It took a minute to decipher Ahen, and I definitely saw Janus, but I still haven't figured out Zeus. Anyone?

[knives]

Zelig.

[L.A.]

Rare ‘Alien3’ Footage Shows David Fincher Working with the Effects Team!

[Ribs]

Apparently, Panic Room will be be put out by Sony itself - on UHD!

[flyonthewall2983]

Apparently, Panic Room will be be put out by Sony itself - on UHD!

Link?