In a list published years ago of what he considers the best films in history, David Fincher clarifies that the titles mentioned there do not respect a particular hierarchy. However, when observing said handwritten text where a total of 26 feature films are referred to, how can we not give greater weight to the one that appears above the rest? Although no, he is not a thrillerit is rather the mythical western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), which David Fincher has also described on more than one occasion as the film that planted in his heart the desire to make films, especially after watching a documentary about how it was filmed and which allowed him to discover all the hard work What’s behind the magic?
It happened then that in the early 1970s, this boy raised in the town of San Anselmo, California—where shortly after his neighbor George Lucas would film American Graffitiand Francis Ford Coppola, a scene from The Godfather— asked his parents to give him a Super 8 camera for his eighth birthday, without having the slightest suspicion that before the 21st century, he would have already become one of the most ruthless directors in Hollywood, at least in regarding the brutality of the stories brought to the big screen with his signature. Nothing surprising if we consider that the alternative birthday gift that little David Fincher proposed to his parents, if not an 8mm camera, was a gun (with pellets, of course).
the shadow of evil
The town of San Anselmo (integrated into Marin County) is located northwest of the San Francisco Bay area. There, at the end of the 60s, in the playgrounds, it was normal for children to talk with fear and curiosity about the serial killer who was lurking in the region at that time. “It was him boogeyman definitive,” commented David Fincher decades later, referring to the Zodiac Killer, who in less than two years, killed five confirmed victims, in addition to achieving greater notoriety due to the disturbing letters he sent to local newspapers.
In October 1969, the enigmatic criminal sent a letter to San Francisco Chronicle where he threatened to shoot girls and boys on a school bus. From there and over the course of six months, there were patrols that escorted (among many others) the bus in which Fincher and his elementary school classmates were traveling. And although, fortunately, the promised shooting never occurred, the preventive actions and all the macabre news around the Zodiac made the feeling of danger the daily bread.
“That was then, very clearly, when things changed for me. I became aware of evil and death. California also changed, and then the country,” the filmmaker declared to W Magazine in 2012.
It is well known that Fincher eventually directed the acclaimed film Zodiac (2007), based on the case of the homicidal namesake that marked his childhood. However, it should be emphasized that by then, this director trained in the school of music videos was already considered a proactive voice within the thriller genre; basically, since the release of his second feature film Se7en, the seven deadly sins (1995), whose antagonist played by Kevin Spacey even fit perfectly with the way Fincher came to slyly define the Zodiac killer: “an aberrant thinker who reduces the herd.”
The mechanisms of David Fincher’s thriller
The legacy of Se7en It becomes evident with each new film that, whether it recognizes it or not, it draws on its gloomy, dirty and hopeless atmosphere (Saw and Batman, to mention a few cases). But honestly it seems absurd that we try to reduce David Fincher’s seal in terms of latent pessimism – nothing strange in various exponents of film noir that preceded him such as Chinatown— or the inhuman acts and terrifying scenarios it portrays. Yes, perhaps some of the germ of his interest in stark detective narratives lies in the “zodiacal” context of his childhood, but if his cinema has transcended something, it is not so much because of the subject matter, but because of the millimetric way in which he uses all of them. their film creation tools.
Added to the mania of filming many takes and paying attention to every minute detail of the filmed material, the director of The game (1997) and The fight Club (1999) confirms his perfectionism in the way he conceives camera movements. For example, it is very recognizable his tendency that when the camera follows a character, each pan, tilt either tracking shot It must be coupled with rigorous accuracy to the movement of said character.
“[La regla es que si un personaje] He slides forward a little, we slide with him. And if he stops, we stop,” explained Jeff Cronenweth, cinematographer and frequent Fincher collaborator (via The New York Times). “David is very intelligent when it comes to designing movement to enhance a scene. It’s not about moving the camera for the sake of moving it, but to generate much more intimacy with the characters”.
Judging by the enormous fascination caused by thrillers of David Fincher, it seems very valid to say that indeed that stylistic resource does not arise from mere whim, but from a clear understanding that Suspense essentially depends on the place the audience occupies in relation to the characters.. In the case of Se7en, our closeness to detectives Mills and Somerset through the camera causes us to feel more immersed in the pursuit of the murderer. (There are even those who would swear they had seen the contents of “that box”, when in fact it is never shown in the film).
Anticipate, don’t improvise
Alfred Hitchcock’s maxim regarding suspense is that the audience not only closely accompanies the characters, but is also in a more privileged situation of knowledge; knowing that under the unsuspecting protagonist’s chair there is a bomb about to explode. And even in the face of such a strict notion of the concept, David Fincher—a fan of rear window— has known how to adapt and lead his stories along that path, literally getting into the kitchen. It is enough to remember the “impossible” sequence shot of The panic room (2002) where the camera travels without cuts from the protagonist’s bedroom to the different access areas of her house to reveal that some thieves are about to break into it.
Years later, regardless of his foray into other genres, David Fincher continued to return to the thriller and again. after the drama The curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and the biopic Social network (2010), he devoted himself fully to adaptations of detective novels The girl with the dragon tattoo (2011) and Loss (2014). And after his black and white vintage tape mank (2020), which was both a bombastic look at old Hollywood and an intimate tribute to his father, the three-time Oscar nominee chose to make The murderer (2023), another violent film, full of tension and a good dose of bloody action; project that in fact reunited him again with Andrew Kevin Walker, the same screenwriter of Se7en.
You might also be interested: David Fincher ranking of his films.
In The murderer, the director insists on taking care of the complicity that we viewers establish with the protagonist, who on this occasion, is a murderer for hire played by Michael Fassbender. a voice in off He takes us to the recesses of his mind, while the ambient sound and the camera’s perspective repeatedly place us in his shoes. It’s Fincher again making use of all his powers to hook us in no time and surprise/distraught/intrigue us based on the character. What he knows and does, and what he doesn’t.
Curiously, his feature films furthest from thriller They are the only ones that have earned David Fincher Academy Award nominations for Best Director. But for this director raised in the times of the Zodiac, it is good not to be the one who makes films just to win the most prestigious awards. According to him he told Guardian full of pride last October: “I will never be a more mature filmmaker. “I will take my 12-year-old self with me wherever I go.”
Antonio G. Spindola I have very bad memory. Out of solidarity with my memories, I choose to get lost too. Preferably, in a movie theater.