Se7en celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and to commemorate this anniversary, the director David Fincher oversaw the 4K remaster of the landmark crime drama.
The Serial Killer Mystery – which features Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth PaltrowAnd Kevin Spacey – first shook up the detective genre in 1995 with propulsive, precise crime scenes and crime scenes of unprecedented horror that influenced everything from Saw has The Batman. The film now has a high-resolution look that will debut on IMAX screens on January 3 before releasing on 4K UHD Blu-ray discs and digitally on January 7. Fincher and his team painstakingly recreated the film as it was originally printed in 1995, using some AI tools to enhance the image and correct visual errors that were not visible in previous scans of the film .
Weekly Entertainment chatted with Fincher to discuss the new version of Se7en and reflect on his memories of making his feature film 30 years later – including what’s really in the can.
courtesy of Warner Bros.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What it was like to revisit Se7en after three decades?
DAVID FINCHER: Well, as for the content of the film, I have seen it. I knew what it was. As for the digs, though… At first I thought, “Well, it’s 1995. We’ve done this twice already; we’ve done the DVD version and the high definition version.” But going back and digging it out from the negative on 8K was more of a restoration than I had convinced myself. So it was quite shocking.
I know there are a lot of people who tend to favor digital, but if you could see a 30 year old negative and what it looks like even when perfectly stored, that would be a huge amount of repair, just dig and scrape. and tighten. So we spent a few months getting things back to what I consider negative, and then we could start. It’s a bit of a stretch to say, “Well, it’s the 4K remaster.” This is truly the archival negative remaster. And in that regard, I don’t think any of us realized exactly what we were getting ourselves into.
What exactly happened in the process for you specifically? How do you spend your time overseeing this process?
Launching this new type of technological firepower was, for me, truly eye-opening. We came across things that had never been noticed until now. I mean, basically blurry shots that you couldn’t read on film and couldn’t play even in HD. And then you get to the 4K downsampling of the 8K scan. And we ended up going in there and doing little split screens and using AI to refine things so we could reestablish what was supposed to be watched. I think we probably took a little over a year – and left to my own devices it could have been double that.
We were really trying to go back to that first CCE check print that we saw 30 years ago when we were like, “Okay, this is the film. This is its contrast. This is its density. This are the colors. This is where they’re muted, and this is where they’re vibrant. And just try to remember what that first printing effect was – technologically and artistically. that we did it.
courtesy of Warner Bros.
Did you make any adjustments to the film in the remaster that were different from your original 1995 vision?
I honestly believe that films are as indebted to the technological artifacts of the time as they are to budget limitations and the like, so I tend to think that there are certain lines that can’t be crossed. That said, there was some color matching that we couldn’t do in 1995 during release prints. There were some things that we just couldn’t transition seamlessly from one to the other that we can now do. There’s more firepower. There is more ability to manipulate color, space and key elements. But no, we wanted to match that first CCE impression.
And I definitely did some things that I felt like I needed to do, especially focused things. There were some shots of Kevin in the back seat of the police car with the grill dividing the front of the police car from the back, and some shots were completely out of focus. We were able to use AI, create caches, extract the performance that was on the back end and return it. It’s still gentle, but it’s not as blatant as before. But yes, my real attitude is that I don’t want to change it. I want to make it the opening night, 1995, but the pristine version of that.
I know that the issue of AI is an important issue currently worrying the industry. What is your attitude towards this film as a potential tool or means of making films in the future?
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? For example, there was a shot that was done with the intention of having the characters lean towards the edge of the frame. The cameraman missed it. So he does a sort of offbeat pan with one of the characters. And some data was lost, irrecoverable. Now, on each side, we had the fullness of the character’s shoulder, and we were able to kind of recreate using the AI - recreate that shoulder and the kind of ripples or movements of the light on the surface of the leather. And we were able to kind of dial that in so that we didn’t have what I considered to be distracting, unnecessary movement. And so a lot of little things like that where you say, “Ugh, I wish I had the viewing room that I have now,” harvesting an 8K and then downsampling to 4K. I had some room because it’s Super 35, but I couldn’t look around…
I mean, look, you give me a tool, a powerful tool to do X, Y and Z, I may not be interested in Y and Z, but if I can use it for the good of X – all the tools, if they do what they say they’re going to do, are good tools. And it’s usually the tools that over-promise and under-deliver that bother me the most rather than saying “Oh, here’s this incredibly powerful new toolset; use it to make something ugly.”
I know you said you wanted to maintain the vision of the 1995 film, but looking back on yourself making this film in the mid-90s, is there anything you would say to yourself there? is 30 years old and would you like to do differently or change the manufacturing process?
No, I have the impression that the director’s job is to find that thing which is essential because we don’t necessarily have the time to capture everything we would like. So part of your process is to define for yourself, based on the text, what is the essential thing that you need to walk away with at the end of the day. And so I kind of stayed at that. And I treated it a bit like a historical document.
There are so many things I would do differently. I mean, I would do things differently that I finished three weeks ago. So you’re constantly in this process of “I know better now.” We kick ourselves a lot and say, “Yeah, I would do this so differently.” » But it wasn’t work. The job was to dig up this document and make it look like a blank copy of the CCE from September 1995.
courtesy of Warner Bros.
Going back to the original production of the film, there is a pervasive story that the crew made a prosthetic head or full body of Gwyneth Paltrow that you chose not to use in the final film. (Some versions of the story say that Fincher’s friend Steven Soderbergh ended up reusing this Paltrow-shaped prosthetic in Contagion in 2011). Is this true?
No, that’s completely ridiculous. I think we had a seven or eight pound shooting bag. We had done research to determine if Gwyneth Paltrow’s body mass index was X, how much of that index would be attributable to her head. And so we had an idea of what it would weigh, and I think there was a weight there.
And we put a wig in there, so that when Morgan ripped the box open, if there was some of that tape that was used to seal the box – I think it was a shooting bag and a wig, and I think the wig had a there was a little bit of blood in it, so some of the hair was stuck together. Remember, I think Morgan opened 16 or 17 of these things. But like I always say, you don’t need to see what’s in the box if you have Morgan Freeman.
Nine Inch Nails features prominently in the opening credits soundtrack. You continued to work with Trent Reznor as a composer on several of your later films. What was it about their music from that era that made you feel like it would fit into your work?
I had questioned Trent for years before Social Network to say, “You should think about it. »And he’s a busy guy, I mean, he’s even busier now that he has so many films! But we just thought the Flood mix of that song was pretty amazing for what we were trying to do.
Originally there was a title sequence that had nothing to do with John Doe and his fingers or any of his perversions in his composition book. So it was kind of a last minute thing as we were trying to figure out what the title sequence could be.
We were going to have to dump ourselves – we had shot a day of Morgan’s stuff, supposedly upstate. I think we shot it in Ventura, looking at a little empty house that he was going to buy. And then we were supposed to do this long train sequence, and we only shot the day at home. And then we were going to go back East and try to film the train arriving in New York or the second unit of a train arriving in New York. And then we would build a little set. And then it all became too problematic.
So I kind of asked Kyle Cooper, who was working at (design studio) Imaginary Forces, for the idea, “What else can we do here in this space?” Because I feel like we don’t get our villain until 90 minutes into the scene. movie. What can you think of? »And he went through it all. He came back and he said, “You have all these composition books. I said, “Oh, I know we have all these composition books. We have, I don’t know, $20,000 worth of composition books that are all filled out.” And he said, “Well, I’d like to try that.” » And I said, “Great.” Drawn a storyboard. And they did a storyboard. And that became the title sequence.
The 4K remaster of Se7en will debut on IMAX screens on January 3, then on 4K UHD Blu-ray and digital on January 7.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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