David Fincher
David Fincher
David Andrew Leo Fincheris an American director and producer, notably for films, television series, and music videos. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for the romantic fantasy drama The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttonand the drama The Social Network. For the latter, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Director and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth28 August 1962
CityDenver, CO
CountryUnited States of America
I like people that like to work the way that I like to work.
Awards 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.
I have great appreciation for people who do anything well. I think that it's very difficult to do what you do well.
I want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying "Oh, god, didn't we already do this 17 times?"
We 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.
When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.
I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.
You 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.
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.
What 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?
Hire the right people and get the hell out of the way.
When 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.
I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.
People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.