Aint it Cool have done an interview with David Fincher, in which he mainly talk's about Alien 3 and Zodiac.
Quint: Not your fault at all. Now one thing that I think everybody, at least all of the big guys at the site and all of the readers, they love the stuff that you have done and there is an argument starting with ALIEN 3, which I know you had a notoriously hard experience for you, because of the studio interference, but do you think having had that as kind of a trial by fire, do you think that shaped how you approached building a project and were you able to negotiate more creative freedom after that?
David Fincher: Well, certainly through no desire of the studios to give me anymore creative freedom, but I mean look... yeah I walked naively into this spinning propeller of Hollywood, but what I learned was... The thing is is that the creative executives at studios are not really in a position to tell you who the best cinematographer is to work with and the editors or those things. They all have opinions about that stuff, but ultimately those are the decisions you have to make for yourself and I sort of... on my first movie... I would have been much better off making a movie with all of the guys I had been making commercials and music videos with for years, because they would have been invested.
Now, I worked with some amazing people and you know Norman Reynolds is fantastic and Terry Rawlings was amazing and I got to work with Jordan Cronenweth at least for a short period of time on that movie, but 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?
Quint: Yeah.
David Fincher: So it was kind of a... if nothing else, it was a situation where I got to see first hand that if I wasn't going to make the decisions myself, there are plenty of people who are going to line up to chime in and almost no one was going to be there when the shit hit the fan and the movie is judged.
You just learn from that situation. You just say "If I do this again, I'm going down with the ship, so I'm going to make those decisions and I'm going to work with the people that I want to work with and I'm going to be involved in everything."
I sort of did that on SE7EN. We were incredibly instrumental all the way down into getting Darius Khondji his work visas and there were a lot of people at the studio who just didn't want to go through the trouble. They were like "Why do you want a French perfume commercial photographer to do this serial killer movie? You should get the guy who did SILENCE OF THE LAMBS" and so you learn from that. It's like "No, I want to do this and I think taking somebody out of this milieu and moving them into this other one is going to bring this whole other thing to it and here's this costume designer that I worked with on commercials and here's the editor that I think is best suited" and so that process on ALIEN 3 probably made me more of a belligerent asshole than I otherwise would have been, but we're only talking about percentage points here. (laughs)
Quint: I got to know Gino Acevado (special effects guy, now one of the higher ups at WETA) pretty well and...
David Fincher: Oh, yeah! Gino!
Quint: ... and he was showing me all of these pictures of his work on ALIEN and how he was talking... He showed me something that he did for a webbed face hugger...
David Fincher: Yes!
Quint: I don't think even made it into the work print, did it?
David Fincher: No, I mean again there were about six months on that movie where things were really exciting and we were going to do all of this different stuff and then the studio took over and that is sort of where things took a nose dive. It was like things were mandated, like blueprints for sets were cut in half and they just said, "This is the half of the set you get." It all comes down to script. That's the thing you fight over the hardest and the longest and fight for first, but I mean yeah the stupidity of it was of course... I mean we had a lot of great ideas for a lot of really great stuff. Jake Scott did some amazing designs for a bunch of stuff that I brought to London and flipped everybody out with. They were like, "This guy's bringing in his own set design." But there was a lot of really interesting stuff and we just never got to explore it, because we were chasing a start date.
Quint: So he was able to build that kind of aquatic face hugger, but you guys were never able to shoot it?
David Fincher: You know I don't know if it was built. I don't really recall. It's sort of like if you've been in a massive car accident where you just kind of remember the aftermath.
Quint: I remember when he showed me that, it was like "Wow, that is so badass." And when he showed me that, it was before the work print and so I was really looking for it in the quadrilogy that came out and...
David Fincher: Never saw it.
Quint: Never saw it... but no, I love the idea of it adapting to the environment and everything, but I am an ALIEN nerd.
David Fincher: I love the first one, it's amazing.
Quint: I love Scott's and I love Cameron's sequel and I love... I don't know, it's just a great and fantastically designed universe and so I just love that stuff. ALIENS was always my childhood thing, but anyways we should definitely start talking about this special edition of ZODIAC. Now the first DVD release that Paramount put out was pretty bare bones, were you always wanting to have the definitive one?
You can read the full interview as well as download the sound files here,
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/35179
