David Fincher likes films and he likes cameras, he is as one would put it a visual storyteller of the highest aesthetic order. The Colorado man is currently shooting the second adaption of that Swede Steig Larsson's book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Fincher recently got right into the business of explaining his trade and why he is such a captain of the industry.
“I 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. So, 40 takes is… again, there is so much hyperbole when it comes to this and I think we probably average a little over 20, 23, 24 takes, on average, per shot.”
The director explained the minute details of the time frame that a movie is set in.
“What year does it take place in? Well the books are delivered in 2004, so he’s probably thinking in terms of 2003, it’s not published until 2005, 2007 is the iPhone, so all those apps that would be available to the iPhone are probably something that Salander would have access to ‘cause she’s a bit of a Mac junkie. So you kind of go, “Well where do we draw the line?” So we just said, look everything has to be pre-iPhone technology, because otherwise they would be sitting there going “Well we just go over here.” They would have a compass; they would be able to tell what the weather was like. So there’s all that stuff, you just have to make a decision [that’s] fairly arbitrary, basically everything in the movie is pre-iPhone.”
Amusingly the director was then asked about the possibility of doing some type of romantic comedy.
"I sort of thought Fight Club was a romantic comedy [laughs] but albeit very homoerotic and about narcissistic"
On why he choose to make another adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel.
"Dragon Tattoo came along and I was like “Awww fuck man you cannot make another serial killer movie…you’ve got to fucking stop this.” And it wasn’t really even…it was Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin to an extent but mostly from the studio side that they were committed to this idea that there could be…that there was a hope that you could do a franchise movie for adults. And I thought “fuck man, I’ve been working my ass off for twenty years, hoping that somebody would say something like this.” And I just thought, you get an opportunity to hopefully pave the way for something like that to happen…you know, that would be a great thing."
On how he made Zodiac work for him. [Not literally thats Illegal]
“So in doing all of the leg work and trying to turn over as many rocks that were, would either kind of tear up the fabric of what Graysmith was the proponent of or support what he was a proponent of. You know, you would get stuff where you just go “We can’t include this. This is a really interesting, dramatic fisher that we’d love to follow, but we don’t have enough data to support it as being part of our narrative.” So even though it was maybe 3 or 4 chapters of Zodiac Unmasked, we couldn’t go there.”
Fincher also stated that he is already planning to shoot his version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney using 3D technology.
For more from Fincher and his brain head over to that website known as Collider.com for a really surly sounding audio interview.
