1.
PLAYBOY: You’ve made movies as different from
each other as The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and
earned best director Oscar nominations for both. But you’re better known for
darker, more twisted films such as Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac and The Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo. What frightens the guy whose movies provoke, scare and
unsettle others?
2.
FINCHER: Complacency. Also, I don’t like
spiders, snakes, sharks, bears or anything that could make me part of the food
chain. In our part of Los Angeles I’m usually okay, but when our daughter was
three, this big fucking green garden spider as large as my palm built a
gigantic web at about face height for a three-year-old. We were convinced that
thing was thinking, If I can just get the tykester to come into my net, I could
feed off that little one for two years. It would build this web every single
night, and every single morning someone would walk through it. I was like,
Dude, seriously? Give it a rest.
3.
PLAYBOY: What else creeps you out?
4.
FINCHER: I heard about a German man who put
an ad on an internet site saying he wanted to devour somebody. Someone actually
answered the ad. The guy videotaped himself anesthetizing the willing victim,
segmenting his body and consuming him. Before the victim died, they ate his
genitals together. I don’t know if it was some bizarre psychosexual
fulfillment, but it’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever heard. When
you can’t count on somebody to even fight for his life, when he goes
willingly—well, it’s so out of left field, it’s not even on my radar. Even
though that was the most troubling thing I’d heard in a long time, the things
that interest me in cinema kind of work the same way. I like starting with an
idea that unlocks a whole Pandora’s box of other ideas.
5.
PLAYBOY: Do people ever confront you for
unlocking their personal Pandora’s box of dark thoughts?
6.
FINCHER: It was offensive to me on a certain
level that when Saw and those other movies came out, people said, “Well,
torture porn really started with Seven.” Fuck you. There’s enough pervy shit
going on in Seven that I don’t have to get on my high horse to defend its
artistic sensibilities. It was lurid. It was supposed to be lurid. But the
thing I appreciated about it and what I thought Andrew Kevin Walker’s script
did so well was that it got your mind in overdrive. It worked on your
imagination. We were extremely conscious of the fact that we were talking about
torture, but we never actually showed it.
7.
PLAYBOY: It’s interesting how even some fans of
Seven swear they saw the severed and boxed head of Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays
the wife of the detective played by Brad Pitt, at the end of the movie.
8.
FINCHER: Exactly, but they never saw it. Because
we had Andrew’s script and Brad and Morgan Freeman playing the detectives, we
were in great shape and didn’t have to show the head in the box. Directors get
far too much credit and far too much blame. But the fun of movie storytelling
is when you know you have the audience’s attention and you can see or feel them
working to figure out where the movie’s going. I’m interested in the psychology
of not only leading the audience along but also being responsible for getting
them there sooner than the characters, so the audience is watching things and
going, “Oh no!” It’s an interesting relationship to have with 700 people, even
if 200 of them miss it entirely.
9.
PLAYBOY: You’ve cast Brad Pitt as the star of
Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. What’s the dynamic
between you?
10.
FINCHER: Brad fucks with me all the time. So
does Ben Affleck. When we did Fight Club, the studio said, “This is awesome;
this is going to be great,” because we were going to have a scene with Brad
opening the door naked. When it came time to shoot it, being Brad, he said, “I
should open the door and have a big yellow dishwasher scrub glove on.” I said, “Perfect.”
When the studio executive saw it, she said, “You got him with his shirt off and
then you fucked the whole thing up.” I was like, “Excavate that line from
Animal House: ‘Hey, you fucked up—you trusted us.’”
11.
PLAYBOY: Obviously a movie star of Pitt’s
stature helps calm nervous investors so you can make the movie you want.
12.
FINCHER: Yeah. With my first movie, Alien 3, I
had to get permission for everything, but my second movie, Seven, was my movie,
Andy Walker’s movie, Brad Pitt’s, Morgan Freeman’s and Kevin Spacey’s movie. I
didn’t look to anyone for permission. I made a pact with [studio boss] Michael
De Luca and just said, “Dude, the audience wants a revelation. I’m going deep.
It’s $34 million and fuck it.” He was a thousand percent there, even when push
came to shove and we went $3 million over budget. We gave the audience a
revelation with Brad and Morgan and by throwing in Gwyneth Paltrow, whom people
had seen a bit of. It was the alchemy of those faces, those careers and the
ascendance of different talents in that period. I’d direct Seven in a different
way today. I would have a lot more fun. It was only by the time I did Zodiac or
Benjamin Button that I knew what I was doing.
13.
PLAYBOY: Do you watch a lot of crime shows on
TV?
14.
FINCHER: I like Forensic Files, that kind of
stuff. My wife will turn it on, roll over in bed, and things like “The body was
found near the parking lot of the 7-Eleven just off the interstate” go into her
ears while she’s asleep.
15.
PLAYBOY: Having lived with, raised a daughter
with and worked closely with your wife, Ceán Chaffin, as your producer since
the 1990s, do you ask her for advice when you’re on the fence about material?
16.
FINCHER: Constantly. It’s a blessing and a
curse, because she’s obviously someone who knows me, in some ways, better than
I know myself. There are definitely things we disagree about. She was extremely
vociferous, for instance, when she said, “Don’t make The Game.”
17.
PLAYBOY: That’s the 1997 thriller in which Sean
Penn gives his brother Michael Douglas a voucher for a live-action game that
takes over his life.
18.
FINCHER: Yeah, and in hindsight, my wife was
right. We didn’t figure out the third act, and it was my fault, because I
thought if you could just keep your foot on the throttle it would be liberating
and funny. I know what I like, and one thing I definitely like is not knowing
where a movie is going. These days, though, it’s hard to get audiences to give
themselves over. They want to see the whole movie in a 90-second trailer.
19.
PLAYBOY: Do you ever feel trapped by your own
track record as a director?
20.
FINCHER: I know that if a script has a serial
killer—or any kind of killer—in it, I have to be sent it; I don’t have any
choice. [laughs] My responsibility to myself is always, Am I going to be the
commodity that people want me to be, or am I going to do the shit that
interests me? I have a lot of trouble with material. I don’t like most comedies
because I don’t like characters who try to win me over. I don’t like being
ingratiated. I don’t like obsequiousness. I also have issues with movies where
two people fall in love just because they’re the stars and their names are
above the title. I could maybe do some gigantic mythological Hero With a
Thousand Faces–type movie, but so many other people are doing that.
21.
PLAYBOY: Superhero stuff?
22.
FINCHER: I find it dull. I like to anticipate
the energy of a movie audience that’s waiting for the curtain to come up and
thinking, Well, one thing we don’t know about this guy is that we don’t know
how bad it can get.
23.
PLAYBOY: Things get really bad in your new
thriller, Gone Girl, both for the audience sweating it out and for the
ex-magazine journalist played by Ben Affleck, who keeps swearing he had nothing
to do with his wealthy, blonde, apparently perfect wife’s disappearance. The
book is famous for its twists and turns, so it’s tough to discuss the movie
without spoiling it. You’re known for toying with audiences, but do you worry
that the big international fan base for Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel may
be rocked by alterations you and she made for the movie version?
24.
FINCHER: There are certainly a lot of elements
in Gillian’s book that are well trod in my movies, like the procedural aspect, people
putting together clues and things like that. It’s also a very naughty book. But
my thought when I first read it was, Fuck, how do you throw away two thirds of
this and still end up with the same journey? How do you still play with the
Scott Peterson aspect [the notorious case in which Peterson murdered his
pregnant wife]—which we all know is the jumping-off point—but make it about
something bigger and more universal?
25.
PLAYBOY: Bigger and more universal, such as…?
26.
FINCHER: I think the movie works on a purely
procedural level and on a purely page-turning-mystery level. But it has a real
riptide to it, taking to task our cultural narcissism and who we think we are
as good wives, good husbands, good Christians, good neighbors, good Americans,
good patriots. Once you get fractal about every fissure in somebody’s public
facade, you’re going to see stuff you wish you hadn’t. Can we hold ourselves to
the same scrutiny to which we hold people we’ve never met? The great gift of
Gillian, who’s very wry and bright, and the fun I’ve had on this movie was
having a kindred spirit who likes the naughtiness of going, “You can have your
cake and eat it too—but it’s preachy cake.”
27.
PLAYBOY: The book also says dark, funny,
troubling things about marriage.
28.
FINCHER: I think Gillian’s book is talking about
marriage and hiding it in an absurdist confection. When you peel back the
layers and get to the kernel, you think, Wow, I feel queasy for a whole
different set of reasons than I thought I would. Remember the 1970s National
Lampoon record That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick? That was what I wanted to go for
in terms of performance and tone. That and Lolita, because both are
unbelievably funny and unbelievably naughty. They’re about disturbing ideas and
very disturbed people and their facades of normalcy. There are moments when you
find yourself torn by what the characters in Gone Girl have done in service of
their urges. They’re kind of irredeemable and yet intensely human.
29.
PLAYBOY: You’re happily married, but you were
previously married to, had a daughter with and divorced a woman who
subsequently married and fought a very public and ugly divorce battle with
actor Gary Oldman, who recently gave a forthright interview in PLAYBOY. Did any
of your history and relationships come into play while directing Gone Girl?
30.
FINCHER: Gary and I certainly have a shared
history. I know him very well. In fact, I wanted to cast him in Alien 3, but we
couldn’t work it out—though, in hindsight, if we had, we probably would never
have spoken to each other after that. Gary’s not cruel. He’s an incredibly
thoughtful guy. I see him from time to time, but I haven’t seen him in a while.
I heard about the Playboy Interview, but I haven’t read it yet. It shows you
how pathetic it is that I don’t know anything else that’s going on when I’m in
the bubble of finishing a movie.
31.
PLAYBOY: Given your relationship with Pitt and
considering how many actresses’ names were floated to star in Gone
Girl—including Charlize Theron, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon and Emily
Blunt—why did you choose Affleck and Rosamund Pike?
32.
FINCHER: I offer everything to Brad, not because
I’m pathetic but because he’s good for so many things. Both Brad and Ben have a
default “affable” setting. Neither wants you to be uncomfortable. You cast movies
based on critical scenes. In Gone Girl there’s a smile the guy has to give when
the local press asks him to stand next to a poster of his missing wife. I
flipped through Google Images and found about 50 shots of Affleck giving that
kind of smile in public situations. You look at them and know he’s trying to
make people comfortable in the moment, but by doing that he’s making himself
vulnerable to people having other perceptions about him.
33.
PLAYBOY: What kind of perceptions?
34.
FINCHER: In Ben’s case, what many people don’t
know is that he’s crazy smart, but since he doesn’t want that to get awkward,
he downplays it. I’m sure when he was a 23-year-old and all this career-success
shit was happening for him, he was like, “I just want to go to the after-party
and meet J. Lo.” I’m sure he said a lot of glib shit and people went, “Ugh,
fake.” If you have a lot of success when you’re young and good-looking, you
realize it’s okay to let people write you off. It’s the path of least
resistance. You don’t want to be snowbound with them anyway. I think he learned
how to skate on charm. I needed somebody who not only knew how to do that but
also understood the riptide of perceived reality as opposed to actual reality.
35.
PLAYBOY: In casting the “girl” of the title, how
familiar were you with Pike, the British beauty people may know from An
Education and Jack Reacher?
36.
FINCHER: I wanted Faye Dunaway in Chinatown,
where you think, This person has experienced avenues of pain that no one can
articulate. Or Faye in Network, where it’s, You’re never going to get to the
bottom of this, so just stop. It’s crazy how much Rosamund reminds me of Faye.
I’d seen probably four or five things Rosamund had done, and I didn’t have a
good take on her. I realized why when I met her. She’s odd. The role is really
difficult and Rosamund was born to play it. There was a moment on the set when
I overheard Rosamund asking Ben, “What do you think Fincher saw in me that he
would cast me in this role?” Ben said, “Why don’t we ask him?” I, of course,
turned to Ben and said, “You should be asking the question, What did Fincher
see in me that he wanted me for this role?” Because what we asked him to do was
“Open vise, insert testicles and turn” for the entire length of the movie. Ben
and Rosamund are both great in it.
37.
PLAYBOY: So far your Gone Girl cast has been
mum, but other stars you’ve worked with, such as Daniel Craig, Robert Downey
Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal, have spoken about the experience as being tough but
worth it, with you demanding many retakes of the same scene.
38.
FINCHER: If you didn’t get hugged enough as a
kid, you won’t find what you’re looking for from me. That’s not my gig and I’m
not attuned to it. On Zodiac I had a conversation with Jake, and I said, “I
guarantee I’m going to make a good movie out of this. You can decide if you
want to be the weakest thing in it, or you can decide if you want to show up.”
Downey had an interesting relationship with Jake on that movie. I think he felt
it was his job to point out how difficult it is to be a 24-year-old actor with
a lot of eyes and expectations on you. In spite of all the drama about whether
we were allowing Jake to be the best version of himself because we were
expecting so many iterations of his performance, to an extent I also felt that
way about him. I also empathized with the wizened Downey looking back at
himself in his Less Than Zero days and wanting a more nurturing influence for
Jake.
39.
PLAYBOY: Both Downey’s and Gyllenhaal’s
complaints were about reshooting scenes over and over. What do you get on take
11, say, that you don’t on take five?
40.
FINCHER: Part of the promise when I work with
actors is that we may be on take 11 and I’ll say, “We certainly have a version
that we can put in the movie that will make us all happy. But I want to do
seven more and continue to push this idea. Let’s see where it goes.” Now, I may
go back to them after those seven takes and say, “It was a complete fucking
waste of effort, but I had to try because I feel there’s something to be mined
from this.” That’s a lot of extra work for an actor, and sometimes it pushes
them out of their comfort zone. In some cases they’re not getting paid as much
as they would on another movie. I go out on a limb, and people work harder for
me than they do for other people. But I want them to be happy with the fact
that we were able to do something singular, something unlike anything else in
their or my filmography.
41.
PLAYBOY: Something that doesn’t look much like
anything else in your filmography is your big foray into television, the
biting, juicy, inside-politics series House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey and
Robin Wright. The show has won a viewership and a slew of awards, put Netflix
on the map and made binge watching the new normal.
42.
FINCHER: Netflix is fucking righteous, so smart.
I directed two episodes of House of Cards and also did the marketing. We were
working with a tiny marketing budget, and I knew the cast, so I said, “Let’s
keep this really simple.” I didn’t want to drag Kevin away for three days to do
a photo shoot, so we had the art department make that Lincoln chair, and we
rolled it over in the corner, dropped Kevin in it and took a picture of him. It
wasn’t born of wanting to put talented photographers out of work as much as it
was, “I think we can do this in an hour and a half because I can say to Kevin, ‘Okay,
that scene in episode 11, give me that look.’ ” We whacked this thing together
and showed it to Netflix, and they said, “That looks great.” I give all credit
to Netflix. It was smartly done and very strategic, and they’ve been able to
make a fairly big splash.
43.
PLAYBOY: When The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
was about to hit theaters, some of the press focused on your mentor-protégée
relationship with young actress Rooney Mara. Why do you think Mara’s co-star
Daniel Craig described the relationship as “fucking weird” in one magazine
piece?
44.
FINCHER: The thing got cloud-seeded by way of
one magazine story. Had that one journalist from Vogue delved as deeply into
why people were behaving the way they were as he did into what shoes they were
wearing, we might have gotten some insight. But it was more interesting for him
to do a Tippi Hedren–Alfred Hitchcock sort of thing. From the beginning I said
to the Sony publicity people that the purpose of plucking someone like Rooney
from obscurity is that they walk on-screen and you immediately believe who the
fuck they are, rather than, “You were on Gossip Girl, right?” Rooney will tell
you that I let her do anything she wanted. But it seemed counter to what we were
trying to do to see her on the cover of Seventeen or being trotted out on every
television show to go, “Here she is, cute as a fucking button and not at all
this goth Swedish punker.” I said, “I think this is absurd,” but it didn’t move
the needle in any way. The Sony publicity people were frustrated with my
getting in the way of the exploitation of the character Lisbeth Salander.
45.
PLAYBOY: Do you know if any actors have backed
away from working with you because of what they think you’re like?
46.
FINCHER: I’m sure there are people who think I
bite the heads off puppies. There’s nothing I can do about that. The
relationships that matter to me are always with people who wouldn’t have
preconceived notions based on somebody’s work. I gave up worrying about that years
ago. I remember giving a quote, “I’ve got demons you can’t even imagine.” It
was a joke. It was fun. It was out of context. My parents were always concerned
about things I was quoted as saying. My dad thought for a time that I was
playing into it.
47.
PLAYBOY: Let’s talk about your parents and your
home life. You were born in Denver, but when you were two your family moved to
California, eventually settling down in San Anselmo in Marin County. What was
it like growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, when the area became
synonymous with progressive thought, self-expression and a relaxed view toward
drugs and sex?
48.
FINCHER: It was a bizarre, great place to grow
up in during that time, with the human potential movement, EST, a lot of drugs
and a lot of mixed messages, like “We want you kids to feel free to do whatever
you want, just not that.” There was always the potential for suffocating
liberation. As absurd as it sounds, the movie with Martin Mull and Tuesday
Weld, Serial, was a prescient and truthful view of Marin County—a place people
think of as affluent, but at the time it wasn’t. I grew up before the yuppies,
before the Me decade, before “Greed is good.” It was never “What are you
driving?” I was a latchkey kid. I’d put a note on the fridge, “I’m going to
Chris’s house” or “I’m spending the night.” No GPS, no cell phones. You were
trusted. People had a much healthier attitude toward a lot of things.
49.
PLAYBOY: Including sex?
50.
FINCHER: We talked about sex from the time I was
eight or nine. I don’t think there was any confusion about what people were up
to from the time I was in second or third grade. There were a lot of drugs. One
of my dad’s friends was Thomas Thompson, a writer for Life magazine who also
wrote the book Richie: The Ultimate Tragedy Between One Decent Man and the Son
He Loved, about a man who killed his son who was on drugs. I had friends with
older brothers who were well on their way to being strung out.
51.
PLAYBOY: Did you really slather your sister’s
dolls in ketchup and hurl them onto the freeway?
52.
FINCHER: I did, because we thought it was
funny. We used to egg cars and do all that kind of stupid shit, and it did
escalate to all kinds of lunacy. No one was ever injured. I’ve gotten into a
lot of trouble talking about that. You do a lot of dumb shit when you’re 10 or
12.
53.
PLAYBOY: Your father also wrote for Life, among
other magazines, right?
54.
FINCHER: He was a reporter and then a Life
bureau chief. He quit to write nonfiction books on human intelligence,
left-handedness and hundreds of magazine stories for Reader’s Digest,
Psychology Today, Sports Illustrated. Later in his life he wrote a couple of
screenplays. He also wrote a novel that he burned in front of my mother. That’s
a story I was told and it has probably been hyperbolized, by me. But it’s who
he was. He wanted to get it right.
55.
PLAYBOY: Your mother worked in mental health,
specializing in treating drug addiction. Were drugs attractive or scary?
56.
FINCHER: I’ve definitely been there with my
friend in high school on a sodden, rainy, pouring-down night after we’d drunk a
bottle of really bad champagne stolen from a restaurant he worked at. I
remember trying to keep his mom’s Corolla station wagon from slipping off a
cliff. I’ve done all that stupid crap. It’s not to say I didn’t do my share,
but there was no allure for me to see where experimentation could take you. My
mom ran a methadone maintenance program, after all. Besides my mom’s work, I
have too much of a work ethic to disappear into that space. I had a normal
teenage life. The only difference was that by the time I was 19, I was working
six days a week, 14 hours a day for Industrial Light & Magic.
57.
PLAYBOY: What brought you to a place where you’d
be working at the George Lucas–owned, premier visual effects company in the
world?
58.
FINCHER: I was the guy who waited in line to see
The Empire Strikes Back. I was the kid who didn’t read the Time magazine
article about Jaws because I was not going to let that fuck it up for me. My
dad took me to movie matinees. Movies were all I wanted to do. And I grew up in
a perfect time and a perfect place, with all this incredible stuff happening
around me.
59.
PLAYBOY: Like what?
60.
FINCHER: George Lucas lived two doors down from
my house. I saw American Graffiti being photographed on Fourth Street in San Rafael.
They were making The Godfather on Shady Lane in Ross, California. Dirty Harry
was being shot at Larkspur Landing. By the time I was 14 I was on my way to a
high school that had film courses, 16-millimeter cameras and double-system
sound recording. I couldn’t wait.
61.
PLAYBOY: So your career path probably hasn’t
surprised your childhood friends from Marin.
62.
FINCHER: I still have a handful of friends from
there—the most cynical, perverse, sardonic, funny, irreverent, ruthless people.
They’re dark and sinister but wrapped in this perfectly humane, affable
package. They get the cosmic joke. I always wonder, Was it something in the
water? Or maybe it was being eight years old and having people say, “Okay, if
your school bus gets the tires shot out of it, just stay on the bus. The Zodiac
killer has sworn that he’s going to pick off the little kiddies.” My dad was
super dry in his delivery, like nothing was ever cause for alarm. He’d say, “Oh,
Dave, you should know there’s a homicidal maniac who has written to the San
Francisco Chronicle.” Years later, when we were making Zodiac, I remember the
opening scene of the movie wasn’t working until [music supervisor] George
Drakoulias brought me Three Dog Night’s version of the song “Easy to Be Hard,”
from Hair. We put that music over the scene, and it was like I was in Black
Point and could smell the eucalyptus. I was suddenly in 1965, in a green Impala
with a huge backseat and a steel dashboard, like I was transported. I’ve
harbored bizarre dreams of returning, but you can’t, you know? Sausalito’s not
the same thing it was in 1976.
63.
PLAYBOY: Did you pursue your moviemaking passion
once you hit high school?
64.
FINCHER: My parents became disenchanted with
Marin just when I was about to enter high school. They were a little too
Midwestern and reticent to succumb to Marin’s kind of grooviness. They came
back from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival convinced that the three of us kids
would love southern Oregon, so they moved us there. I was on the cusp of doing
what I wanted to do, and to have it snatched from me was like being
choke-chained out of the perfect environment.
65.
PLAYBOY: Did you act out because of it?
66.
FINCHER: I always sort of acted out, but I wasn’t
a bad kid. Once I realized my parents weren’t going to come to their senses, I
knew the only way out of there was going to be on me. I wouldn’t be able to be
in the film business in southern Oregon and wouldn’t witness the things I’d
been seeing. So instead, as this scrawny drama nerd who always wanted to be a
director, I developed my own curriculum and executed it.
67.
PLAYBOY: What kind of jobs did you have as a
kid?
68.
FINCHER: For most of high school, after school
until six, I would work on plays and design sets and lighting. From six until
12:30 or one I would rush off to the local second-run movie theater, where I
was a non-union projectionist. I got to watch movies for free, hundreds of
times. That was a great job for someone who loved movies, because I got to see
Being There, All That Jazz and 1941 180 times. Of course, I also had to watch
things like Audrey Rose 180 times. On Saturdays I worked at KOBI in Medford, a
local television news station, as a kind of production assistant. I would lug
incredibly unwieldy cameras to shoot location stuff, like when there was a barn
on fire or something like that. I also had jobs as a fry cook, busboy,
dishwasher.
69.
PLAYBOY: Were your parents down with all this?
70.
FINCHER: When I was about 15 or 16, they sat me
down and said, “We want to know where you think you’re going and what you think
you’re going to do.” I laid it out for them: “After high school I’m going to
move back down to Marin. I want to eventually get a job working at Industrial
Light & Magic. From there, I’m going to make television commercials and
move to Los Angeles. Then I’d like to make sequels to my favorite science
fiction movies.” My dad, who was big on taking long, deep breaths while
thinking about things, said probably the most important thing ever: “Well, what
if that doesn’t work out?” I was kind of like, “Fuck you. I’m not thinking
about plan B.”
71.
PLAYBOY: Your career pretty much followed that
trajectory you laid out as a kid—except for the making-sequels part.
72.
FINCHER: I went back to Marin, where my younger
sister had done voice-overs for [filmmaker] John Korty, and I got a production
assistant job with him—moving Xerox machines, mopping floors, helping rewire
animation stands. I rose very quickly in the ranks because of my work ethic. I
was doing effects animation, shooting some second-unit stuff and becoming a
visual-effects producer. I met wildly talented, inspirational people there. It
was kind of a great film school, though some people were definitely like, “Who
the fuck does this 18-year-old think he is?”
73.
PLAYBOY: What did your parents make of the fact
that within a few years you were directing commercials for some of the biggest
clients in the world?
74.
FINCHER: When I was
making commercials for Nike, Chanel and Pepsi, I think my parents thought I was
doing stuff like “Come on down to Waterbed Warehouse.” That was their idea
of what television commercials were, so that’s what they thought I was doing.
My dad was an Okie and my mom was from South Dakota, and because they had a
very different view of what one could expect, they wanted to protect me from
disappointment. I think it clicked after we started Propaganda Films, and they
started to think, Oh wow, he’s okay financially.
75.
PLAYBOY: Propaganda was a very successful music
video and moviemaking company that you, Dominic Sena and others launched in
1986 and which boosted the feature-film careers of interesting directors such
as Spike Jonze and Antoine Fuqua, among many others.
76.
FINCHER: It’s weird. Ceán and I were talking
about our daughter, who is 20 now. That’s the age I was when I directed my
first television commercial. The idea of walking in the door, rolling up my
sleeves and saying, “Okay, here’s what the next 10 hours are about. For the
first shot, we’re going to.…” That doesn’t seem so weird or different to me,
because that was me at the age of 20. And yet I would have a hard time
listening to a 20-year-old tell me, “Here’s what we’re going to be doing.”
77.
PLAYBOY: You directed some of Madonna’s most
stylish videos, such as “Vogue” and “Bad Girl,” the latter depicting the singer
as a film noir femme fatale who gets strangled with panty hose. Why do you
think that Madonna never translated to the big screen?
78.
FINCHER: Madonna is very crafty. She’s
street-smart. The video directors who did the best work with her—romantic,
amazing stuff like what Jean-Baptiste Mondino did—were the ones she allowed to
take risks and the ones who made videos she would throw herself into. I made
commercials to make money, but I did music videos as a kind of film school. I
learned that the way to be with Madonna was to follow her impetus, because the
artist in a music video is not only the star but also the studio. I could say
to Madonna, “I need you to do it again. I need you to stop blinking. I need you
to get your fucking chin down. And I need you to be better.” Whether it was
Madonna, Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck, I’m well aware that the work got financed
because of them. But they needed to know I had to get them off their mark, get
them to a place where it might get warm, because there might be friction.
79.
PLAYBOY: How do you look back on directing your
first feature movie, Alien 3?
80.
FINCHER: I was a 27-year-old rube trying to
navigate an impervious bureaucracy. It was an absurd and obscene daily battle
to do anything interesting with what we were allowed to do. It was the same
studio but very different players when I made Fight Club. There were 80
corporate people who, for all the right reasons, became terrified of what the
movie became. The biggest tipping point was, “God, the movie’s so homoerotic,”
and that was a real problem for them. At the time, it was incendiary, but I
look back on it now and it’s so fucking tame, it’s almost a TV movie.
81.
PLAYBOY: After that movie, did guys try to
fight you, to take you on just for fun?
82.
FINCHER: I’m not tough, but I’m mean. I think
people know I’m way too vindictive to try that shit.
83.
PLAYBOY: If any movie divides your ferociously
partisan fanboy base it’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—a deeply
emotional, odd movie clearly made by someone who has grappled with death and
the passage of time.
84.
FINCHER: I’d never made a movie with that big a
body count. Everybody dies. And the truth of the matter is everyone is going to
die, yet we spend so much time ignoring that fact.
85.
PLAYBOY: Whose death has most affected you?
86.
FINCHER: My father died in 2003, and I’d never
been with someone when they died before. Almost all the decision-making I’d
done in my life was in hopes of pleasing him or reacting against the things I
felt he was shortsighted about. All of a sudden there was no north anymore,
only south, east and west. When I read Eric Roth’s draft of the script, it felt
as though it was talking about an experience I’d had. Everybody kept saying the
character was a little passive, and I was like, “My dad was a little passive.
People do go through their entire lives being passive.” Benjamin Button is a
bit of a dirge. I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was an accomplishment.
87.
PLAYBOY: What do you think happens after
death?
88.
FINCHER: When my father was sick, starting
his chemo and puttering around our house after moving from Oregon to L.A., I
could tell when he was about to appear at the bottom of the steps even if I
didn’t hear him. Of course, I knew him so intimately. When he passed I could
tell he was no longer in the room. I was profoundly aware that the frequency he
was on was suddenly gone. I’ve never been a religious person. I’ve always felt
that the responsibility we have to one another should transcend punishment,
that you should do what you feel is right because it’s right, not because you’re
going to be scalded forevermore. I hope the ether is out there somewhere and
all the star children pass on knowledge, experience, forgiveness, whatever.
89.
PLAYBOY: How do you assess The Social Network, a
movie many people thought deserved to win the best picture Oscar over The King’s
Speech?
90.
FINCHER: It’s as close to a John Hughes movie as
I can make. For me that was stepping outside my comfort zone by showing nerds
in their natural habitat. People said, “Oh, you’re making a Facebook movie?” as
if we were capitalizing on a trend or doing a Linda Blair Roller Boogie
roller-disco movie after disco was dead. I was able to say to the studio, “There
are no movie stars in this, just kids between 20 and 25.” It was incredibly fun
and freeing to be able to just put the best people in those roles.
91.
PLAYBOY: For better or worse, over the years
lots of Fincher projects have been announced and then vanished, including a
top-chef project meant to star Keanu Reeves and a Steve Jobs movie with a
script by Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for writing The Social Network. But
the most intriguing was a proposed remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
92.
FINCHER: Dude, it was fucking cool. It was smart
and crazy entertaining, with the Nautilus crew fighting every kind of gigantic
Ray Harryhausen thing. But it also had this riptide to it. We were doing Osama
bin Nemo, a Middle Eastern prince from a wealthy family who has decided that
white imperialism is evil and should be resisted. The notion was to put kids in
a place where they’d say, “I agree with everything he espouses. I take issue
with his means—or his ends.” I really wanted to do it, but in the end I didn’t
have the stomach lining for it. A lot of people flourish at Hollywood studios
because they’re fear-based. I have a hard time relating to that, because I feel
our biggest responsibility is to give the audience something they haven’t seen.
For example, Gillian Flynn and I are doing Utopia [about fans of a cult graphic
novel] for HBO, and that’s all I’m focusing on next year.
93.
PLAYBOY: In the end, what do you most want
people to know about you?
94.
FINCHER: Studios treat audiences like lemmings,
like cattle in a stockyard. I don’t want to ask actors or anyone else on a
movie to work so hard with me if the studios treat us as though we’re making
Big Macs. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is not a Big Mac. Gone Girl is not a
Big Mac. This TV show I’m doing about music videos in the 1980s and the crew
members who worked on them, or this other show, a Sunset Boulevard set in the
world of soaps—they’re not Big Macs. I don’t make Big Macs.
This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of
Playboy.
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