The filmmaker says the rumor that the infamous box contained a prosthetic head is “entirely ridiculous.”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was it like to revisitSe7enafter three decades?
DAVID FINCHER: Well, as far as the content of the movie, I’ve seen it.
Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in ‘Se7en’.Credit:courtesy of Warner Bros
I knew what it was.
As far as the excavation, though…
Originally, I thought, “Well, it’s 1995.
David Fincher directing Morgan Freeman on the set of ‘Se7en’.courtesy of Warner Bros
We’ve done this twice before; we did the DVD version and the high-def version.”
So that was kind of shocking.
It’s really the archival negative remaster.
Morgan Freeman in ‘Se7en’.courtesy of Warner Bros
And in that respect, I don’t think any of us realized exactly what we were getting into.
What exactly went into the process for you in particular?
How are you spending your time as you’re overseeing this process?
Brad Pitt and David Fincher on the set of ‘Se7en’.courtesy of Warner Bros
Throwing this new kind of technological firepower at stuff was, for me, really revelatory.
We ran into things that heretofore had never been noted.
And then you get to 4K downsampling of the 8K scan.
That’s the contrast of it.
That’s the density of it.
Those are the colors.
This is where they’re muted, and here’s where they’re vibrant."
And really just make a run at remember what technologically and artistically that first print effect was.
And I think we did it.
Having said that, there was color matching that we couldn’t do in 1995 making release prints.
There’s more firepower.
There’s more ability to manipulate color, space, and key things.
But no, we were going for matching that first CCE print.
And I definitely did some things that I felt I had to do, especially in-focus stuff.
It’s still soft, but it’s not as egregious as it was.
But yeah, my real attitude is I don’t want to change it.
I want to make it opening night, 1995, but the pristine version of that.
I know the AI question is a big one that’s ringing around in the industry right now.
It’s probably a little too open-ended to say, “Are you for it or against it?”
It’s like, what exactly are we talking about?
The camera operator missed it.
And so he makes a sort of staggered pan with one of the characters.
And there was data that was lost, that was irretrievable.
I had the headroom because it’s Super 35, but I didn’t have the look-around room…. And so I sort of stayed to that.
And I did treat it a little bit as a historical document.
There are so many things that I would do differently.
I mean, I would do things differently that I completed three weeks ago.
So you’re constantly in that process of “I know better now.”
But that wasn’t the job.
The job was to exhume this and make it look like a pristine CCE print from September of 1995.
No, it’s entirely ridiculous.
I think we had a seven- or eight-pound shot bag.
Remember, I think Morgan opened 16 or 17 of those things.
Nine Inch Nails has a prominent place in the soundtrack of the opening credits.
You’ve gone on to work withTrent Reznoras a composer on many of your subsequent films.
I had canvassed Trent for years beforeSocial Networkto say, “You should think about this.”
We were going to have to jettison we’d shot a day of stuff of Morgan, supposedly upstate.
And then we would build a little bit of a set.
And then that all became too much of a problem.
Because I feel like we don’t have our villain until 90 minutes into the movie.
What can you think about?"
And he went through everything.
He came back, and he goes, “You have all these composition books.”
I said, “Oh, I know we have all these composition books.
We have, I dunno, $20,000 worth of composition books that are all filled.”
And he said, “Well, I would like to take a stab at that.”
And I said, “Great.”
And they did a storyboard.
And that became the title sequence.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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