For a director who’s made movies about psychotic killers, David Fincher crafts some relatively bloodless affairs. This speaks to his obsession with psyche and behavior over guts and gore, and somehow this makes his films creepier. Cinema has no shortage of psychopathic portrayals and this breed below ought to give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money. Continue reading
Love is blind. So is hatred. There’s no denying the beauty of romance. But when the flowers begin to die and the moon rises high in the night, slowly we start to see the ugly side of love: the lies, the selfishness, the need to control. Thing is, sometimes we want to remain blind to these things, so we dress it up to maintain the fiction of our lives. Director David Fincher understands this perhaps even better than most relationship counselors do. Gone Girl is a frighteningly accurate depiction of a love that’s self-sustaining in its self-destruction, a film that captures what it means for two people to truly deserve each other, where both are out to tear each other’s throats. It’s a film about marriage. Continue reading
With Gone Girl finally hitting theaters this weekend, director David Fincher has been making the press rounds, something quite unlike of him to do. Then again, when you’re adapting Gillian Flynn’s bestseller, it’s hard to stay out of the limelight. Fincher usually tries to avoid over-exposure, but his directorial methods are very well known. His reputation precedes him, and with good reason. Whereas most directors settle for a few takes per scene, Fincher aims above and beyond, shooting as many takes as he needs. While this sounds obscene on the surface, I’d like to dig a little deeper into his process to show why he’s the hardest-working and the most misunderstood director in the business.
