While watching Zodiac
last week, I found myself utterly dumbfounded by a brief aerial shot of a
moving taxicab. If you’ve seen it, you won’t forget it. The camera glides
perfectly from above, as if it’s an extension of the cab itself. When the cab
switches lanes, the camera gracefully changes lanes with it. When the cab makes
a right turn, the camera pivots so exactly, that the effect is somehow
mesmerizing.
So I wondered: How the hell can a director make the movement
of a taxicab so visually stimulating? And then it hit me: the reason that shot
is so incredible is because David Fincher is the master of making mundane
things look cool. He gives purpose to the bland. Originality to the common. The
more I thought about this notion, the more examples I was able to come up with.
So below are a handful of shots and scenes that most any other director wouldn’t
think twice about. But because of his passion for detail, Fincher was able to
give theses seemingly throwaway moments true purpose.
Se7en
A Man Does Research in the Library
I used to dread the library scene in Se7en. As a teen, I was eager to get back to the grim world that
David Fincher had created in the film. And I could never understand why he
slowed his film down so purposefully (and so early) with a boring scene in a library.
Watching the sequence now, I’m embarrassed to admit that I used to find it dull.
For starters, it’s gorgeous. Those
horribly mundane green desk lamps (a staple in so many American homes in the ‘90s)
have never had more purpose. With Bach’s “Suite No. 3 in D Major” blissfully
blaring away, Morgan Freeman doing nothing (but doing everything), and the seven deadly sins as seen from Dante… it’s an
immaculate set piece that may seem dull and mundane to an eager 12-year-old
kid, but to the adult me, it is certainly anything but.
What Fincher Said: “There’s not much characterization
in films anymore. You gotta kind of get to the fuckin’ point, get to the
digital effects. But the stories I’m more drawn to are character ones. The
audience wants to see a story, I think. So much of real police work is sitting
around in cars, drinking bad coffee, waiting for somebody to show up. There is
a lot of legwork. But [this sequence] is very much about setting up who these
people are, and what their relationship is to their surroundings.”
The Game
A Man Gets a Physical
One of Fincher’s best and curiously overlooked films, The Game, is full of magnificently
mundane shots. Like Michael Douglas silently playing a solo game of squash in
slow motion, or the “simple” shot from under a plane as it takes off.
But my favorite mundane-made-cool sequence in the film is
when Douglas undergoes mental and physical testing for the mysterious company,
CRS. Using a series of cross dissolves to show the slow passage of time (a
motif Fincher executes throughout the film), we watch as Douglas’ helplessly
entitled character is forced to sit through something he cannot control. From
taking an excruciatingly long multiple choice test, to sitting in an empty
theater, alone with a Clockwork Orange-type
experimental “film,” only David Fincher, with help from the late, great
cinematographer Harris Savides, can make the act of undergoing a physical
something so incredibly eerie.
What Fincher Said: “I just like the idea of being
left in a theater. It’s like, you’re not done until the movie is done with you.
You have this weird test, and you don’t know how the test works, and it seems
like the people who are running the test are off getting a coffee, and you’re
asking these questions and no one can answer them for you. It’s this idea of who’s minding the store.”
Fight Club
A Man Walks Through His Living Room
Leave it to Fincher to make the simple act of a man walking
through his living room the most entertaining shot of a movie. Just as we’re
getting to know the plight of Edward Norton’s character, we cut to a 360 shot
of his apartment. As the camera pans around, the room literally begins to build
itself with new furniture, as perfectly timed catalogue descriptions of the
items pop into frame. Norton casually shrugs by (notice how his body blocks
some of the descriptions but not others… what a nice touch), as the dryness of his
narration helps accentuate the mundaneness of the whole affair.
This is a man defined by his things. Things that give him a
pathetic sense of status, of purpose. Things that make for one hell of a
visually divine sequence.
What Fincher Said: “It was some kind of visual
representation of the idea that we’re a byproduct of the armor that we select
to let people know who we are. And that’s not just clothes and cars and
hairstyles. It’s also the furniture you pick and whether or not it’s Southwestern
or Pottery Barn or Ikea. In this case, it’s Ikea.”
Panic Room
A House is Discovered
The best shot of Panic
Room is a three minute-long work of sheer bravado. As Jodie Foster lays to
rest in her new, lavish brownstone, the camera gently pans away and glides
downstairs. Once on the first floor, we move to the window and notice a few
thieves quietly trying to break in. We glide over to the front door, go through the keyhole, then come back out the keyhole and on and on. Whether
the camera moves between the handle of a coffee pot, or through an entire floor
of the apartment, everything about this sequence is utterly captivating. Sure,
digital effects play a big part in the shot’s overall finesse, and Howard Shore’s
score is as important as the camera’s movement, but the shot will forever
remain a staple of Fincher’s panache for camera trickery.
What Fincher Said: “This is called The Big Shot. It
was one of the first things that interested me in the movie, the notion of
being inside a fish bowl, looking out and seeing the cats. I liked the
discipline, the rigor of what David Koepp was doing when he decided to show you
the guys on the outside breaking in, exclusively from the inside. It may have
been a mistake to smooth all of this stuff out. We went back on a computer to
smooth out a lot of the movement. But
I like that it looks so mechanical, it tends to look like it was made by a
machine. There’s an exactitude there that precludes human involvement. I saw it
as something without a personality. There’s no one there. There’s no one pushing a dolly, there’s no one pulling
focus.”
Zodiac
A Cab Drives Down the Street
One could argue that the entirety of Zodiac is Fincher at his most masterfully mundane. After all, the
film is essentially about a handful of middle-aged white guys sitting around
talking. For the cab shot… just think about how much time, effort and money
Fincher could have saved if he didn’t include that aerial shot. But that’s what
makes David Fincher so goddamn cool,
the man isn’t interested in saving time, effort, or money (within his budget),
he’s interested in telling stories in ways we’ve never seen.
What Fincher Said: “The
cab shot is one of those moments people seem to really remember in the movie.
The idea here was to have this sense of detachment; God’s POV of looking down
on something that he has no control over. And also, this way of being locked
onto what’s happening and powerless to change it.”
A Blacked-Out Passage of Time
A lot of time passes in Zodiac,
the biggest jump (aside from its epilogue) being the four years that pass
between Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo talking at the Dirty Harry premiere, to Jake Gyllenhaal deciding he wants to
reinvestigate the case on his own. But this particular passage of time is worth
mentioning, simply because I’ve never seen anything like it.
The screen fades to black and stays that way for 52 whole
seconds. Seven different songs fade in and out over the soundtrack, audibly
blocked by actual news recordings of events at the time. It’s startling in its
simplicity, and gives you perfect notice to the fact that the film is far from
over.
What Fincher Said: “I wanted to have a real mass
culture reference in transporting us forward four years. So the idea was to do
this montage purely of audio, of different songs. And to finally take the movie
from mono to stereo, since six-track stereo only really came on the scene with Star Wars. I wanted to open up the
surrounds and kind of stretch the audience forward and let them know that the
movie is not over, in fact, in some ways, this is the mid point, which I’m sure
elicited groans from test audiences.”
The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button
A Couple Laze in Their Living Room
When Benjamin Button and his long lost love, Daisy (Cate
Blanchett), are finally the same age, they decide to buy a duplex and spend
their days lounging on their living room floor.
With a bed mattress placed snuggly in the middle of the
room, we watch with glee as Benjamin and Daisy create a life together – making
food, making love, making memories. It’s easily my favorite sequence in the
film, heightened by an utter lack of creative flourish. Essentially, it’s just
a handful of cameras, locked in place, and two actors swirling around,
convincing us that it’s all real.
What Fincher Said: “We shot this on a sound stage so
there’s blue screens out the windows everywhere, and one of the interesting
things was originally it was this giant motion control, this big camera move
that circled around the whole stage. And then I started thinking that [this
time period] was kind of the beginning of situation comedy, so we ended up
cutting all these holes on the set and poking five cameras in and locking the
cameras off, rolling and just saying, “Go.” We’d change the lighting and say, “Okay,
it’s night time, you’re going to bed,” and we’d roll. We wouldn’t tell them
what to do, they’d come and inhabit the set. It worked out in this weird I Love Lucy way.”
The Social Network
A Few Gentleman of Harvard Compete in a Boat Race
I appreciate that people might consider the Henley Royal
Regatta the Super Bowl of boat racing (Fincher’s words), but before seeing The Social Network, I hadn’t the
slightest clue what the Henley Royal Regatta even was.
And then there it is, midway through the film, a boat racing
scene of astonishing technical achievement. I don’t have the slightest damn clue
how Fincher pulled this Henley Royal Regatta sequence off. The focus is so
sharp but so oddly soft, wide shots look like the whole scene was achieved
using miniature models, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music blares away
thrillingly, the camera pans this way and that, the editing is perfectly
precise – it’s a dazzling achievement that, to put it succinctly, could only be
executed at the hands of David Fincher.
What Fincher Said: “So this was one of those
sequences where the only time we could shoot it was July 4, 2010. It was
literally five to six weeks before we had to finish the movie. The movie had to
be done so we could get it in theaters, and [the Henley Royal Regatta] were
incredibly helpful to us and made it all possible.
“One of the reasons it was done in this faux, swing and
tilting lens board style was because all of the close-ups of the Winklevosses
and the Dutch rowing were done in Eton on a man made lake that doesn’t look
anything like Henley. [It] just has green grass, but we would shoot the
close-ups of all the people and then we had to matte in still photographs that
we’d shot at Henley. There was a team of 20-35 artists who toiled around the
clock to finish that sequence so we could get the movie done.
And they did a great job.”
The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo
A Girl Sits on Her Floor
Shortly after Lisbeth Salander is sexually victimized for
the first time by her new legal guardian, Fincher invades her life for the
briefest, but most striking of moments. We fade in as the camera quickly moves
up to Lisbeth from behind, as she sits on the floor, heat lamp sweating in
front of her. She sits there, smoking, thinking, and in one graceful move, the
camera flips upside down and holds her inverted face in the frame. It’s a very
short sequence, but one that clues us in on the fact that this girl is going to
get her goddamn revenge.
What Fincher Said: “We wanted to shoot a scene when
she’s plotting her revenge of Bjurman and I wanted the idea that her world
literally gets turned upside down. I like the idea of taking a technodolly and
just flying over the top of her head and seeing her face as you see her eyes
darting around and she’s lost in vindictive fantasy.”
I love this.. man, I love this list so much and every time I watch Zodiac love it more and more. And I never realized but I think Fincher is my current favorite director because he hasn't failed me yet. And he has most movies in my Top 50 list. Such talent.
ReplyDeleteNice! So happy you like the post. Fincher is just incredible, isn't he? He's as important to American film as any filmmaker of his generation. The man never misses.
DeleteExcellent post, I've always thought that scene in se7en was amazing.
ReplyDeleteThanks! It's such a eery, yet oddly poignant, scene. Great stuff.
DeleteGreat post, man... Can't wait for Gone Girl!
ReplyDeleteThanks man! Oh, same here.
DeleteLove that Dragon Tattoo scene, it's such a great trick with upside down shot, very memorable. It's like yet another way of letting us know that Lisbeth is not an ordinary girl and her mind works in a unique way.
ReplyDeleteThat scene from Se7en in library when Air plays in the background is so hauntingly beautiful.
It's one of my favorite moments in Dragon Tattoo, for sure. It takes such balls for a filmmaker to decide to capture a moment like that upside down. So fucking cool.
DeleteGreat post! This is one of the great aspects of Fincher's approach to storytelling. He seems thoroughly enthralled with procedure. Not just the routines of detectives and investigators, but the routines of ordinary people. They're the things most of us never think about, but Fincher has a way of making them fascinating to us, too.
ReplyDeleteZodiac is a perfect example of this and it's one of many reasons why it's my favorite Fincher film. That opening, in which we follow the Zodiac letter from the mailroom up to the daily budget meeting is fantastic. Having sat through many, many budget meetings because of my work, I can say Fincher nailed the personalities and the procedures of a newsroom.
I also agree that The Game is tremendously under-rated. Same with Panic Room--that panning shot through the home is just magnificent. Granted, when compared to the rest of Fincher's filmography, the latter film ends up near the bottom of the list but still a great film.
I don't dig shameless self promotion, but I wrapped up my year end citations. I'd love it if you had a look. Cheers!
Thanks man! One of the reasons I love Zodiac so much is because it's so true to that newsroom setting. I was a newspaper beat reporter for a few years, and like you said, those personalities in Zodiac are so spot on. There's a I'm-so-good-I-can-do-whatever-the-fuck-I-want Paul Avery in every newsroom.
DeleteAlso really pleased to hear your praise for The Game and Panic Room. Not as good as other Fincher flicks, but definitely both still great.
I'll give your post a read ASAP!
Thanks for giving it a read, Alex! The blog has mostly become an annual viewing list for friends and co-workers, although it's big in Japan (and Ukraine and Sri Lanka) if stats are to be believed. I completely lack the wherewithal of folks like you to make it a routine.
DeleteMy pleasure! It was a great read. I do wish you blogged more, but I completely get what you mean. I've been blogging a lot less over these past few months. Made my primary focus the production of my film. But if I have a free moment here and there, I do find relaxation in writing about flicks. Either way, loved your post!
DeleteI dare say those green desk lamps were put to even better effect in Network
ReplyDeleteOhhh I like that. I think I may agree with you.
DeleteOh, this is a fucking great post. I was entranced by that cab scene in Zodiac. Especially the Royal Regatta w/ the Reznor/Ross take on "In the Hall of the Mountain King" piece.
ReplyDeleteIt's among the reasons why Fincher is one of the best filmmakers working today as he can find something beautiful in something mundane as the news of Reznor/Ross contributing the score for the next film has me even more excited.
Especially as I'm still very upset over what happened at the Grammys this past Sunday which only added to the furor over the results of WWE's Royal Rumble.
Thanks man, really appreciate you reading. I'm so pumped that Reznor and Ross are scoring Gone Girl. They add so much to Fincher's complex and grim worlds.
DeleteWrestling with theVoid! That's fucking awesome! Man, so impressive how much content you put out there on a daily basis.
Ah, Alex. This is why I love And So It Begins... so much. This post rocks. The elements of film that we too often take for granted. And you're so right that Fincher is a master of these. Like you say, "Zodiac" IS making the mundane dramatic. It's a whole movie of it! That's such a significant accomplishment. And as the years have gone by, I realize what has lingered with me the most about "Seven" is those little mundane things - the green lamps, the rain beating on the windshield, the wine in the water glass, etc.
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't you think Michael Mann is a master of these moments too? I think of Pacino & Crowe sending faxes in "The Insider" - faxes!!! - and how suspenseful it felt.
Wow Nick, thanks so much man. That really means a lot. So happy you like the post. I honestly hadn't thought about Mann in this way, but you're so right. He makes the act of opening a bottle of beer a grim extension of violence in Heat, and The Insider... man, that's his magnum opus of masterful mundane. I rewatched that movie two weeks ago and it's just perfect. One of my favorite Mann's, for sure.
Delete*cries* I want to be David Fincher. He has such a cool style, it is just so fluid and yes, he does make the mundane very cool. The Henley regatta scene is probably one of my favourite scenes from The Social Network. That was such a masterfully made film, the camera just glides through it so effortlessly. And the scene you pointed out from Fight Club...that's pretty much the scene that describes most people's lives. So perfect. Great post!
ReplyDeleteThanks! I wouldn't mind being him either, ha. Although I would NEVER have the stones to make an actor do 90 takes of one scene. But hey, the man knows what he wants and he gets it, and we're all better off for it! That Henley scene in TSN is so perfect. And considering he did it in such a crunch for time... it makes it even more remarkable.
DeleteI love this post! Fincher is god. I think visually, he's my favourite filmmaker. I love how "cool" his movies are. Like these shots almost seem effortless but there's obviously a great amount of thought put into it. This is why when people bitch about his numerous takes, I just want them to shut up because he clearly has a vision in his head, without which none of these can work.
ReplyDeleteI remember listening to The Social Network's cast commentary and Eisenberg said something like he couldn't believe he was in a film that had a sequence like the Henley Reggata one.
And of course, I adore everything Fight Club. That scene is so funny and so revealing.
I've always loved the Se7en scene. As untidy as I am in real life, I just love it when things are all ordered in movies and those lamps are so beautiful.
The Panic Room scene is uber creepy. I really like that film. I don't get why others don't.
I just realised the word "cool" is in your title. Clearly, I'm still asleep.
DeleteHa, it's all good. The man is super cool.
DeleteYeah, it's hard to bitch about the number of takes he requires because, you know, a Fincher film looks like a Fincher film, and that's a goddamn beautiful thing.
I love that you're such a Fincher fan. The man is cool personified.
Alex, you're so right on with this post. Fincher uses this approach to such great effect, which is a main reason he's films feel differently than you'd expect. Zodiac in particular really benefits from his stylistic moves. It rarely seems like it's such designed to look cool, and you don't always notice it consciously either.
ReplyDeleteExactly! Zodiac is so stylized, but all of its stylizations are restrained. Watching the Making Of docs on the DVD really shows you how much the man put into that film. So exquisitely detailed. Thanks so much for reading, Dan.
DeleteIn a world of "go, go, go", fast cuts and flashing frames, Fincher is amazing at bringing it all back down to the details. You really used some great examples here, Alex, of how he makes us slow down and pay attention to the particulars. "Se7en" was always a personal favorite though all of his work has such a distinct feel to it. Makes me think it wouldn't be a bad idea for all of us to do a real-life David Fincher take every now and then....just to see what we're missing.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE that Fincher so often neglects the "go, go, go" attitude of filmmaking. He really does allow for time, which is so rare for modern, somewhat big budget films. And I love your notion of us in real life slowing down a little bit. Really, what do we miss?
DeleteI think the rowing scene from The Social Network is the most interesting scene of the entire film. And it's just some guys… rowing. I absolutely agree with every word here, and good health to our best man David Fincher!
ReplyDeleteIt's definitely a visual stunner, isn't it? And yeah... just guys rowing. Insane how compelling he made it!
DeleteExcellent write-up man! I really need to rewatch some of these, and I haven't even seen The Game yet.
ReplyDeleteThanks buddy! The Game is so damn good. Overlooked only because it was sandwiched between two massive sensations. But a very, very fine film indeed.
DeleteLove the Social Network! A truly excellent film.
ReplyDelete