Summary

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff chats with David Fincher in celebration of the 4K release of Se7en.

During their conversation, Fincher explains how he chooses which of his films to restore and when.

Fincher also details his approach to making changes to his films during the restoration process — which types of changes are okay, and which are going too far.

It’s officially 2025, and that makes it the year of Se7en’s 30th anniversary. Released in theaters on September 22, 1995, David Fincher’s second feature film enjoyed a successful run at the box office, scored an Academy Award nomination for Best Film Editing, a BAFTA nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and is still revered as top-tier cinema to this day.
The movie stars Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as detectives. Freeman’s William Somerset is a respected veteran on the verge of retirement, while Pitt’s David Mills is a recently transferred detective with loads of confidence, but lots to learn from Somerset. The pair is assigned to investigate a string of elaborate and ruthless murders, each one connected to one of the seven deadly sins.
In celebration of Se7en’s release on 4k UHD on January 7, and also its first-ever IMAX release on January 3, I got the opportunity to get a peek behind the curtain of the restoration process courtesy of Fincher himself. He broke down the factors he must consider when choosing which of his films to restore, where he draws the line when making changes to the original film during this restoration process, how he used AI to pull off “the most thrillingly stupid fix in the world,” and loads more. You can read about all of that and his thoughts on his Netflix projects getting physical releases in the interview below.
How David Fincher Selects a Film to Release on 4K

“It’s really a question of who wants to endure because it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

In addition to this, the 4K release of Panic Room was just announced, so it did make me wonder, how do you go about choosing which one of your films to remaster and when? For example, why was now the right time for Se7en and Panic Room but not, let’s say, The Game?
DAVID FINCHER: These things are tricky, and in most cases, it has to do with who owns the IP and who wants to spend the money to exhume these films. PolyGram, I’m sure that the library was still owned by Universal, but I think they licensed it to Criterion at one point. Things get complicated. We’ve been working on Panic Room for years, and part of the reason is that a lot of the visual effects in it were done in very primitive 8-bit. Again, I didn’t want to go in and remake the visual effects because I think that’s a cheat. You don’t get to redo it. You have to just kind of make the best of what you have. So, we were working on both of them simultaneously. I’m working on Fight Club right now, but it’s a costly process. It takes a lot longer than I thought it was gonna take, in both cases, both Se7en and Panic Room. It’s really a question of who wants to endure because it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I hate to say this, but, you know, we think of, ‘Well, it’s negatives. It’s been properly stored. I’m sure it’s in some subterranean salt mine, in some perfect-pressure, positive-pressure environment.’ Not really. As the Universal fire taught us not long ago, these things are printed on plastic, and they fall apart. For instance, the first months, I would say probably two to three months, of Se7en was truly exhuming just the stuff that we needed to fix. When you run a negative, you get very tiny scratches from synching. The film, you have a core and then the negatives on it, and when the core gets tightened, you end up with these tiny little scratches, which are completely invisible in the film printing process to a release print, and they’re almost invisible in HD, but in 4K, they are not. There was a lot. We had to really get a baseline assessment of how deep we were going to go in fixing it.
I think people think, ‘Well, you take the negative out, you run it through, and tell them that’s your DVD.’ And then, 10 years later, 12 years later, you’re gonna take it and you’re gonna scan it, or you’re gonna take it to another film chain or telecine, and that’s gonna be your high def. 4K derived from an 8K master reveals so much of the degradation that takes place. So we weren’t really so much remastering as we were remaking the negative.
David Fincher Explains Where He Draws the Line with Making Changes to His Films

“If you see it, we didn’t do our jobs. And you probably won’t see it.”

I have so many follow-up questions. Some of your answer is making me think about something you said during your Tribeca talk. You mentioned you won’t make major changes to a movie when doing a 4K release. To give our readership a sense of where you draw the line in that respect, can you give me an example of something that did need changing in Se7en, and also something that you considered changing, but then concluded that that would be going too far and it would risk changing what the film is?
FINCHER: There was a sequence where two actors, who shall remain unnamed, are meeting at a bar to discuss their kind of collective ennui about the case in front of them. This was a one-night shoot, and we had to move very, very quickly, and we had to load in. We shot the thing, I don’t know, probably close to eight or nine hours, and I had 14 or 15 takes of each setup, and there’s probably like five or six setups, but when you pick the ones that mean the most to you in terms of a performance, every once in a while, you’re going to have technological malfeasance.
In this case, there was this unasked-for and unearned camera pan where a character moved, and then the camera panned over to follow them but followed them late and overshot them and ended up seeing more of the bar than was intended. But the performance in it was so good that we went with it. Well, in this case, we can take that and go, ‘What’s the issue here with stabilizing this pan that happens at such an inopportune time?’ There was no issue in terms of the background. We had enough of the background, but at the beginning of it, we had cleaved off one of the actor’s shoulders, and he’s wearing a black leather jacket, and there’s no data. We don’t know how that shoulder connects to the sleeve and the kind of supple wrinkling and deformation of the leather in that jacket. So I asked, ‘Based on these other takes that we have, can we restore this jacket so that I can take this pan out because this pan happens at such a clumsy time? It’s right as I want to watch a reaction, and the camera’s moving.” And we didn’t know if we could.
So we took three or four different shots from earlier, which had a jacket in them that we liked, and then we input that, and then we had it spit back out AI, and then took the background from where the camera landed and just composited them together. So it ends up being the most thrillingly stupid fix in the world because if you see it, we didn’t do our jobs. And you probably won’t see it. You probably won’t be aware that it’s happened. But you look at it, and you just think to yourself, ‘It’s so nice that we can fix that kind of stuff today.’

Image via New Line Cinema

Related

David Fincher’s Psychological Thriller ‘Se7en’ Gets 4K Theatrical Re-Release for 30th Anniversary

The 4K release will also be available on Digital and Blu-ray.

Also, it became apparent to me as I was looking at all of the limitations — in this case, it was shot four perf, but we’re extracting two, three, five, from just above and below the center, two perforation — I have no wiggle room left to right, but I have tons of room top and bottom to reposition the image. But I realized as I was doing this, all of the modifications that we asked for from Red and our workflow that kind of devised pretty much about the time, I guess it was Social Network, almost all the look-around-room, shooting in 8K, oversampling, down-resing, and all that stuff was a reaction to all of the hardships that we were now experiencing, and it really is a reclamation. It’s not just, you know, you lace it up, make sure all the perforations are where they’re supposed to be, find a color balance that you like, and run it in 4K. It is painstaking, taking every scene and every shot and looking at them and going, ‘Does this warrant stabilization? Does this warrant trying to get this to match?’
Darius Khondji is a very sophisticated purveyor of exposure techniques, and one of the things that he would do is that he would mix and match raw stock within a scene. I mean, certainly, the benefits for him in terms of gamma at the time were he felt that they were necessary, so we would go through the trouble of having two different kinds of raw stock to shoot a scene with. And when you print it on film, it’s actually an incredibly soft medium. There were shots that I didn’t even realize where I would consider today to be unusably out of focus, and some of those things we were able to go in, make mattes of the section that we wanted, and use AI to at least get the focus in the eyes to be on the soft side, but not completely useless.
So there was that kind of exhumation. We did a lot of that stuff. But again, everything was devised with the intent in mind — I remember going with Beverly Wood to a Deluxe on Western — I think it was a Wednesday — and screening the CCE match release print one afternoon, and watching going, ‘Okay, that’s what the movie looks like. Everything that we’re gonna print from this point on has to look like that.’ That’s what we were trying to get back to. Now, you could change your mind in 30 years and go, ‘Well, maybe the gamma’s a little heavier,’ but I was really just trying to get back to that Wednesday afternoon.
No, We Won’t Get a ‘Mindhunter’ Physical Release from Netflix

“Their whole thing is that mainline that connects your eyeballs to their servers.”

Image via Netflix

So now that we’re lucky enough to get Se7en and other films preserved on physical media in a variety of ways, it was making me wonder, is there any hope of getting a physical release of your Netflix films, and also perhaps Mindhunter? The appetite for that is through the roof, and I don’t think it’s ever going away.
FINCHER: That’s very sweet, but I don’t know. I like physical media, but I really like on-demand. I mean, I love liner notes, and I kind of prefer laser discs to anything just because I’m old and I remember what LPs used to be like. I do like the act of holding them. But I can’t imagine there’s any interest in the business plan from Netflix to make packaged goods out of the stuff that I’ve made for them because their whole thing is that mainline that connects your eyeballs to their servers. So, yeah, I doubt it. But I’m with you. I do like having a disc. But I think if you realized how much data compression is going on — at some point, there’ll be an up-res version of 4K where they’ll be able to — I mean, we have HDR now, but bit depth is only going to increase more. I don’t know that film could handle 24-bit color depth.
One could hope! But in the meantime, I’ll continue to cherish the award screeners I’ve been lucky enough to get over the years. I’m not letting those DVDs go for anything.
FINCHER: It’s so funny because if you blow that stuff up and you really look at it, it’s a travesty. [Laughs] You know, DVD, I loved it just because I loved the idea of a whole movie on one side of a disc, but in terms of archiving and in terms of it being the document of cinema, it leaves a lot to be desired. The HD one’s pretty good too, but I think HDR is really amazing. The extended dynamic range of not 1,000 nits, but getting into the 308 — I think we mastered this at, like, 380 nits — that’s about as high as we would go because you begin to hurt people’s eyes.
I don’t miss going back to DVD in terms of the gamma, in terms of the dynamic range that it has. Sometimes I do feel 4K is too sharp. It’s funny, when we were remastering Panic Room, one of the things that we had to decide six months into the process was we’re not going to be able to go with the enhancement du jour because we had a lot of visual effects that were done in very early 8-bit CG, and you just don’t have the detail. And especially if it’s HDR, you’re seeing so much. Everything in cinema is a compromise, and all this stuff is reflective, looking at it in terms of, ‘What was the intention back then? How do you capture that without turning it into a new experience?’ You want it to kind of be beholden to its period.
Movies are very much a byproduct, not only technologically, but you see a movie that revolutionized cinema for two or three years after its release, and then obviously, the success of that begat a lot of other imitators, and people forget how powerful the original idea is. You think about Jaws, and you think about how many movies you’ve seen where there’s some object that’s set up or something that’s explosive, and somehow it gets into the mouth of an orca, or a bear, or a wild boar. By the time 25 years go by, you forget that was a revolutionary idea in 1975. Movies, like clothes, are a byproduct of their time, and you have to kind of be respectful of that.
Se7en arrives on 4K UHD on January 7.

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Two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his motives.

Release Date

September 22, 1995

Runtime

127 minutes

Main Genre

Crime

Se7en begins its exclusive IMAX engagements on January 3.
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