David Fincher Quotes

When you go and you tell a studio and that it's an ensemble, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.

I like studios. I just don't like bureaucracies.

Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes of something. They start looking at you like, "What did I do wrong?", and its like "No. It's not wrong. It's just that we are going to try something different."

The thing is, that great actors are everywhere. They're everywhere. They're doing good parts on television. They're doing television commercials. They're doing local theater. There are so few opportunities.

For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.

The thing I always say to any writer that I'm working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.

We were working with this lousy print and it just wasn't going to be good enough. I said that we should get the original negative and do it from that. Well, a couple guys pointed out that the negative was locked up over at Deluxe.

You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them. You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them.

Yet as a director, I don't feel you have to identify with your characters as a requirement to make a movie.

I want stuff to play as wide as possible. I want to be able to see ... if I could play the whole thing in a master and it could be compelling enough, that'd be great. Then it simplifies my day, it simplifies life for the actors when you could just focus on that. But by the same token I don't want to be forced into coverage. So I want it to be as good from every angle and I need to get as many of the kind of shadings that I want from every angle.

I loved Luke Skywalker and I loved Darth Vader and I loved watching them work it out.

Filmmaking isn't if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it's about. It's not just about getting a performance. It's also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

Awards movies are normally sort of ... life-affirming and noble. It's probably too much of an intellectual conceit and, you know, people don't like it when you don't lead the bad guy off in cuffs.

How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

I have great appreciation for people who do anything well. I think that it's very difficult to do what you do well.

Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

We live in a silly time, and people go to the movies to see something that they haven't seen before, and you have to promise to show them that. In a horrible way, you have to promise them a special effect.

I learned just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise.

If you read the good reviews you gotta read the bad reviews. I kind of think of it as like being a quarterback: you get way too much blame when it's bad and way too much credit when it's good.

You have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom. You can do whatever you want in your own home. It's a much more relaxed thing. It's more like a book, it seems to me. That's kind of the way I watch movies.

Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.

Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.

For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

A lot of people hated 'Alien 3.'

And I love shooting football.

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

I like people that like to work the way that I like to work.

For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.

I always say everyone was lucky enough to be in a Cate Blanchett movie.

I thought that the behavioral and some of the profiling stuff was interesting. The thing that I was most interested in, and the thing that we were really adament about, was let's get these guys who were there on tape, or in some kind of way, telling what happened. No one has really talked to them all.

You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success.

It's a very American thing to hide away from death.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.

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 is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

I like the idea of R-rated franchises.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.

I want people to flourish. I want them to walk away from the experience going, "That's what it should be like."

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.

People are perverts...that's pretty much been the basis of my career anyway.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time.

I want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying "Oh, god, didn't we already do this 17 times?"

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

It's based not only on what it played like in the theater, but it's also knowing that certain things play differently in a home theater environment. You have different expectations when you're sitting with 700 people than when you're sitting with your friends or family. It's just a different world.

If I see a movie for the first time on DVD, I watch it all the way through, the lights are down, I don't pick up the phone. The third or fourth time you see a movie, sometimes you just have them on and you check in every once in a while with things that you liked. I think it's a different expectations from that environment.