David Fincher was in a characteristically misanthropic mood during a discursive Q&A with Steven Soderbergh Thursday night at Tribeca Festival. The directors have been pals since Soderbergh’s indie career launched more than three decades ago while Fincher became a Hollywood enfant terrible with “Alien 3.”
“I hate reality, but it just keeps seeping in,” Fincher told his friend, who moderated the conversation at Manhattan’s Spring Studios, while noting that he is a “regret-generating entity” who loves rehearsal but, he said, “I don’t enjoy shooting.” Later, when asked by an audience member for advice on how to get an independent film out in the world, Fincher deferred to Soderbergh and said, “I’m a slave. I’m essentially going to beg for an inordinately huge amount of money,” noting that the “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” wunderkind might be better suited to answering the question.
But one bit of news to come out of the conversation that should please ’90s Fincher fans is that the director — now set up at Netflix with “Love, Death, and Robots” and films “Mank” and the upcoming “The Killer” — is working on a 4K remaster of his 1995 serial killer noir “Seven.”
That’s likely an uncomfortable experience for the director, who said he never looks back at his old work. (“I’m not brave.”) Fincher discussed the specific challenges of burnishing his moody urban nightmare starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as idealistic and hardened detectives, respectively, chasing a murderer who’s modeled his kills after the Seven Deadly Sins.
“We’re doing ‘Seven’ right now, and we’re going back and doing it in 4K from the original negative, and we overscan it, oversample it, doing all of the due diligence, and there’s a lot of shit that needs to be fixed,” Fincher said. “Because there’s a lot of stuff that we now can add because of high-dynamic range. You know, streaming media is a very different thing than a 35-millimeter motion picture negative in terms of what it can actually retain. So there are, you know, a lot of blown-out windows that we have to kind of go back and ghost in a little bit of cityscape out there.”
Perfectionist Fincher said that while issues may not be noticeable, “on a 100-inch screen, you’ll look at it and go, ‘What the fuck, they only had money for white cardboard out there?’ So that’s the kind of stuff on print stock. It just gets blown out of being there. And now you’re looking at it, going ‘I can see, you know, 500 units of what the fuck.’”
Amid a time when Steven Spielberg is now regretting taking the guns out of “E.T.” for the 20th anniversary re-release of the film, and a racial epithet has been censored out of “The French Connection” on streaming services, Fincher said he is “fundamentally against the idea of changing what [‘Seven’] is.”
“You can fix, you know, three percent, five percent. If something’s egregious, it needs to be addressed. But, you know, I’m not gonna take all the guns out of people’s hands and replace them with flashlights,” he said.
“David’s got a laser pointer and it’s frozen on the shot and you’re like, ‘I want that part of the wall a quarter of a stock darker,’” Soderbergh said. “I walked out and laid down on a couch in the lobby because of what torture it is to see that.”
Fincher’s “The Killer,” starring Michael Fassbender as an assassin gone rogue, is expected to release from Netflix in the fall.
