David Fincher - A Stylist And A Explorer of Darkness

                          David Fincher is one of the contemporary cinema's most dazzling visual stylist. He has produced a string of groundbreaking films that have achieved both critical and commercial success, while constantly challenging audiences to rethink their expectations of generic boundaries. He is a devotee of darkness. The darkness in his films is organic, the element in which his characters swim. Scene after scene in his films takes place in cramped, sparsely lit where malignancy seems ti hang in the air ineradicable damp. 

• David Fincher was born on August 18, 1962 in Denver, Colorado, and was raised from California. He stepped behind a camera at the tender age of eight and, particularly inspired by the work of George Lucas, reeled in his first major industry job ten years later at Lucas' own Industrial Light and Magic. 

• After gaining a credit on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Return of The Jedi, he left the company to helm TV commercials and would go on to create spots for Revlon, Nike and Pepsi. Fincher soon discovered that the slightly expanded format of music videos gave him more scope and he worked with Aerosmith and did some of his best work with Madonna.

• Having always wanted to direct science-fiction movies, Fincher jumped at the chance to make his feature debut with Alien3. With his darker sensibility and nervy, MTV-honed style, he was considered the ideal director to take over the Alien franchise. However, he soon learned that his music video skirmishes had not prepared him for the all-out war of piloting a lucrative franchise previously steered by Ridley Scott and James Cameron.

• Fincher found himself mired in a hopelessly jinxed project. "I got hired for a personal vision" he later recounted, "and was railroaded into something else." Fincher claims not to enjoy directing at all, describing it as "kind of a masochistic endeavor." Disenchanted, he returned to music videos until Se7en came, where he received Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay and almost immediately signed on to helm it. 

                      

• Se7en was a grim atmospheric crime thriller starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as detectives following the gruesome trail of a serial killer. Innumerable critics hailed the picture as one of the most innovative and unsettling of the decade, and duly established its director as one of Hollywood's most exciting and unusual new talents. Next came The Game, a nightmarish and stylistic thriller which projected the same sense of suffocating enclosure and mounting despair as Se7en.

                         

• With Fight Club, Fincher latched on to his most controversial material yet, delivering an adrenaline-charged satire sabout corporate-consumer culture. In 2002, he directed "The Panic Room" starring Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, and Jared Leto. The box-office hit, centered on the plight of a single mother and her daughter hiding in a safe room of their new house as criminals broke in bent on finding a missing fortune.

• It wasn't until five years after the Panic Room that Fincher found critical acclaim with Zodiac. Released in 2007,a period thriller, the film garnered many kudos and was named in over 150 ten best lists, including Entertainment Weekly, USA.  

                       

• Next came 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' an adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald story of the same name that reunited him with Brad Pitt. When that film finally hit theaters, during the awards season of 2008, it rung up strong box office receipts, and garnered 13 Oscar nominations, more than any other film that year.

• With The Social Network, director David Fincher has produced what is arguably the most commercially accessible film of his career. It's a movie about the founding of an online social network,  but it's also one about acceptance and wanting to achieve a new version of the "American Dream" that exists in a virtual world where ideas, dreams and friendships can be crushed with the simple click of a mouse.

                       

• Fincher’s next and latest film "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," was based on the crime novel of the same name by Swedish author Stieg Larsson (1954-2004) and was adapted for the screen by Steven Zaillian, the writer behind such films as Schindler’s List (1993), Gangs of New York (2002).

• Trade Mark : His films often have low-key lighting with green or blue touched color temperature. Downbeat endings. Frequently has characters in the shadows where you cannot make out their face.

David Fincher Quotes

"I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me, I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws (1975) is the fact that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again."

"I do agree you can't just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages."

"People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount."

"Part of my testiness is that I feel I make fifty compromises a day. When people come to me to say 'Why can't you compromise?' I'm like: 'What are you talking about? The fact that we're having this conversation means that we've compromised'."

                            Fincher's films can set up disquieting tensions in the viewer - as shown by outraged reactions of certain critics to Se7en and Fight Club. Fincher talks of being "drawn to things that begin to dismantle the architecture, not of movies, but of the pact that a movie that's responsible entertainment makes with an audience." If this self-styled "malcontent and miscreant" can resist pressure to tone down the edginess and mordant humor in favor of something less disturbing, his future films -- and his influence on main-stream Hollywood cinema -- promise to be, at the least, highly stimulating.

David Fincher - Wikipedia