David Fincher

Born in Denver (Colorado), on May 10, 1962, David Leo Fincher is the son of Jack, editor of ‘Life’ magazine. At the age of 8, he discovered his passion for cinema thanks to Two Men and a Fate , which impressed him so much that he began shooting his own shorts, with an 8-millimeter camera. At the age of 18, he was willing to do anything to work in the cinema and ended up accepting a precarious job in the production company of director John Korty ( Oliver’s Story ), where he was in charge of simple tasks such as transporting the material. Another film that marked his life was The Empire Strikes BackWell, after seeing it, he went to ask for a job at Industrial Light & Magic, the company that had done the special effects for the film. He was assigned to the miniatures and optical effects department as a camera assistant, a role he performed on Return of the Jedi , The Neverending Story , and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom .

After leaving ILM in 1984, Fincher was tasked with directing a powerful anti-smoking ad for the American Cancer Society, which featured a human fetus smoking a cigarette. He attracted so much attention in the advertising world that he was quickly hired to direct spots for major clothing and beverage brands. He soon began directing video clips, a field in which he gained enormous prestige, due to his undeniable visual talent, which he put at the service of music stars such as Madonna, Michael Jackson , Aerosmith or the legendary The Rolling Stones.

In 1992, Fox executives decided to fire Vincent Ward ( The Navigator. An Odyssey in Time ), who was in charge of directing Alien 3, because they were not happy with their vision of the film, marked by religious symbolism. Finding a replacement was not easy, especially since these directors imposed severe conditions, and left very little time for filming. After unsuccessfully trying to recruit a few prestigious filmmakers, they ultimately settled on David Fincher, because he had shown his wild imagination in the video clips, and because they thought a newcomer wouldn’t cause them as many headaches as Ward. Curiously, the fatalistic and hopeless Fincher was very much in tune with the work his predecessor had done. So he kept some of his ideas, including religiously inspired symbolism, as can be seen in the sacrifice of Ripley, who immolates himself with his arms outstretched, referring to an image of Christ on Calvary. Fincher shot a very cold film, marked by bluish and ocher colors, which, despite the fact that it did well at the box office, was not very well received by critics.

For Fincher, the experience of Alien 3 was not as rewarding as he had hoped, and he stayed away from the cinema for a while, to return to focus on video clips. It was not until 1995, the year in which New Line was looking for a project along the lines of The Silence of the Lambs , and decided to give the green light to the thriller Seven , whose realization fell to Fincher. We are facing the high point of his filmography, as it combines a disturbing setting, based on the filmmaker’s very personal and stylized images –created with gloomy lighting–, with a subtle denunciation of corruption, and of the excesses and perversions of society. modern. Brilliant sequences abound, such as when Tracy ( Gwyneth Paltrow), wife of Detective David Mills ( Brad Pitt ), goes to see Detective Somerset ( Morgan Freeman ) to tell him that she is pregnant by her husband. Somerset is reluctant to bring new life to a world where crimes like the one he is investigating occur. Or the already iconic and macabre discovery of the man murdered due to his chronic laziness, played by an actor with a prosthesis, although at first glance it appears to be a doll. Kevin Spacey wasn’t in the opening credits so the fact that he played the killer was something of a surprise. For his part, Brad Pitt became good friends with Fincher during the filming, and has returned to put himself under his orders on two subsequent occasions.

Nicholas Van Orton, a rich financier with a gray life, receives a peculiar gift from his brother, a game that will make him value the minimum necessary to survive, in The Game , Fincher’s next work. And although it does not reach the level of his previous film –perhaps due to a hurried pace and excessively long footage– it is an interesting film with a dark setting –Fincher’s hallmark– that updates the spirit of “A Christmas Carol”. , from Dickens. Fincher partially returned to good form with Fight Club , a memorable adaptation of the groundbreaking novel by Chuck Palahniuk ., which undertakes it against mediocrity, lack of communication, unleashed consumerism and the lack of vital perspectives. And she does it through the story of a young man lacking in ideals who suspects that his life is completely empty. One day he meets Tyler by chance –played by Brad Pitt, Fincher’s favorite actor–, a quirky individual who makes him a member of a secret club whose members beat each other up to feel alive. Fincher momentarily put aside the social critique that defines him in Panic Room , a Hitchcock-esque thriller. Although it had a rather light script by David Koepp , compared to the filmmaker’s previous works, it manages to create enormous tension.

Fincher’s most disconcerting film is Zodiac , where the filmmaker seems to have decided to reinvent himself. This reconstruction of the criminal career of a Californian serial killer from the 1960s seems the antithesis of the rest of his filmography, as if fed up with being singled out on the street as ‘the director of Seven ‘, Fincher had decided to drop the label. If in Seven there was a rather unreal elaborated photograph, here he opts for a realistic style, at times close to documentary. For the first time in his career, the director is based on a true story that, to top it off, does not have a closed ending like Seven, since the police did not solve the case. And compared to the avant-garde and modern images that characterized his films, this time Fincher opted for a style that can only be defined as classic.

Brad Pitt is back for the third time in a Fincher project in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , feature film number 7 from the author of Seven . This adaptation of a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald – about a man who is born with the appearance of an old man, and later rejuvenates – is totally amazing and impressive, an original parable about life and death.