‘Se7en’: A Rain-Drenched, Somber, Gut-Wrenching Thriller that Restored David Fincher’s Faith in Filmmaking

Se7en poster art by Krzysztof Domaradzki

 

By Sven Mikulec

 
“The movie is a horror movie. The movie is about utter and total loss of control.”
David Fincher on Se7en

 
Slightly more than 22 years ago, David Fincher, a talented filmmaker who made music videos and commercials and was left by his directorial stint on his first feature Alien 3 so disillusioned and bitter he felt “he’d rather die of colon cancer than do another movie,” stumbled upon a script that would renew his faith in the filmmaking business. This particular piece was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, and was deemed too dark and bleak to succeed. The story was largely shaped by Walker’s experience of living in New York City for a couple of years, where he felt alienated, lonely and unhappy. Desperately trying to get his story made, Walker agreed to rewrite the screenplay on the demand of director Jeremiah Chechik (Christmas Vacation), and it was this altered version that should have ended up in Fincher’s hands. But the studio made a mistake, delivering Walker’s original piece to Fincher, who was immediately intrigued and, even when the mistake was explained, chose to insist on the utter darkness Walker envisioned. By mere happenstance, therefore, Se7en found its director and made the first, crucial step on its way to cinematic immortality.

The story of two detectives trying to solve a series of murders inspired by the seven deadly sins might have ended up as your gimmicky, run-of-the-mill predictable thriller. Even the two protagonists—a seasoned veteran cop with decades of experience and a sense of serene disillusionment with the darkness he witnesses on a daily basis, agrees to take a young, hot-tempered, optimistic detective under his wing, a man naively convinced he can make a real difference in a world of depressing indifference—are a certain kind of trope that had been explored countless times in a variety of genres, especially in buddy cop action comedies. But if this formulaic plot and predetermined, plainly distinguishable characters are put in the hands of a filmmaker who acknowledges that the true power of this particular story lies not so much in the action but the psychology and atmosphere, and great actors—Freeman, Spacey and Pitt—capable of making even cardboard cutouts seem alive, deep and believable, then magic can indeed happen.

And it did: Se7en still stands out as of the most exciting, most devastating and definitely most memorable thrillers Hollywood has produced in the last half a century. For such a hauntingly terrifying and gut-wrenching piece of mainstream entertainment, it’s surprising to note the film even garnered an Academy Award nomination (for best editing—lost to Apollo 13), as well as almost universal critical acclaim. A solid marketing campaign and exceptional word-of-mouth promotion led Se7en to become, funnily enough, the seventh highest-grossing film of the year, earning 327 million dollars on a ten times smaller budget. Needless to say, the film opened doors for Fincher, who allegedly told his main stars this film probably wasn’t the one they would be remembered for, but might be the one they would be proud of. It turned out he was only partially right, as Se7en stands tall in all of these great actors’ filmographies.

The film impresses with its visuals: the darkness was accentuated by a chemical process applied to the film stock, in which the silver wasn’t removed and hence deepened the shadows and helped set the unique visual tone. The master behind the camera was the Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children). Fincher stated the camerawork was inspired by the 1988 TV series C.O.P.S., where the camera also took the role of a bystander lurking behind the characters’ shoulders. The Academy Award-nominated editing was provided by Richard Francis-Bruce (The Shawshank Redemption, The Rock), while Howard Shore composed the original score. Solid supporting roles came from John C. McGinley, R. Lee Ermey (who originally auditioned for the role of John Doe) and Richard Roundtree. It’s interesting to note that Se7en would have had a whole other sort of a dynamic and feel to it had the two lead parts gone to the original choices: Morgan Freeman’s Somerset was offered to Al Pacino, who passed on the offer due to scheduling conflicts, while Brad Pitt’s Mills was rejected by Denzel Washington, who considered the picture just too dark for his taste, later regretting the decision.

With my first movie, ‘Alien 3,’ I had to get permission for everything, but my second movie, ‘Seven,’ was my movie, Andy Walker’s movie, Brad Pitt’s, Morgan Freeman’s and Kevin Spacey’s movie. I didn’t look to anyone for permission. I made a pact with [studio boss] Michael De Luca and just said, “Dude, the audience wants a revelation. I’m going deep. It’s $34 million and fuck it.” He was a thousand percent there, even when push came to shove and we went $3 million over budget. We gave the audience a revelation with Brad and Morgan and by throwing in Gwyneth Paltrow, whom people had seen a bit of. It was the alchemy of those faces, those careers and the ascendance of different talents in that period. I’d direct ‘Seven’ in a different way today. I would have a lot more fun. It was only by the time I did ‘Zodiac’ or ‘Benjamin Button’ that I knew what I was doing. —David Fincher

 
Despite the fact Se7en is elevated by supreme acting performances and Fincher’s masterful direction which builds up the tension, as well as expert storytelling, where the filmmaker manages to almost effortlessly disgust and disturb us with only a single murder actually occurring on screen (and, as all of you who’ve seen the film know, this killing is all but gruesome), what makes Se7en one of our favorites is the way the location of the plot plays a crucial role in the story as a whole. The setting, a purposefully unnamed metropolis immersed into darkness and drenched in constant, relentless drizzle, is just as vivid a character in this film as are the detectives or the serial killer. The overall bleakness of the huge city superbly connects with the notions of moral decay and the complete indifference of the society. This leads us to the other reason Se7en is so loved here at C&B: the character of John Doe, whose screen time is disproportional to his overall significance for the story. The sadistic murderer portrayed brilliantly subtly by Kevin Spacey is a brutal, uncompromising but highly intelligent and placid man who voluntarily takes on the assignment of purging the city of sin, carrying out a number of hideous killings as if they are the integral part of a mission handed to him by God of the Old Testament: unforgiving, merciless, eager to teach humanity a lesson. In some way, the whole weight of the film lies on Spacey’s shoulders, and had a lesser actor been given this kind of a responsibility, Se7en would have probably crumbled to pieces.

The much-discussed “what’s in the box” scene should be a topic of a completely separate article. The scene where the serial killer reveals to Detective Mills who the victim of the penultimate murder really was is one of the most quoted ones in cinema history, but it took a little miracle for it to be shot in the first place. This gloomy, petrifying sequence—executed without a hint of gore—was, in fact, the main obstacle on Andrew Kevin Walker’s script’s path to the silver screen. Producer Arnold Kopelson (Platoon, The Fugitive) wanted it out, insisted on a happier ending, wanted positive emotions, optimism, at least some sort of justice. But Fincher, Pitt and Freeman held their ground, agreeing only to shoot an ending with Freeman’s narration that holds at least a fraction of hope, serving as nothing more than a small consolation to the devastated audience. As we stated earlier, Fincher was determined not to let Alien 3 happen again: he wanted complete creative control and a zero amount of studio interventionism. That he was right with sticking with Walker’s original ending can be seen today in the stature of Se7en, a movie hailed as one of the best thrillers of the period. The truth is, it would have definitely been only a shadow of itself had the ending been any different.

A monumentally important screenplay. Screenwriter/filmmaker must-read: Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay for Seven [PDF1, PDF2, PDF3, PDF4]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.

 

ANDREW KEVIN WALKER

One of our favorite screenwriters, Andrew Kevin Walker, dissects his bleak thriller masterpiece, Se7en and working with director David Fincher to create the cult classic film.

 

‘SEVENTH HELL’

The following is an excerpt from Empire 80 (February 1996), written by Mark Salisbury, ‘Seventh Hell.’

~ ~ ~

“I didn’t know what was going to happen at the end” he recalls of reading Andrew Kevin Walker’s script, “or I kind of thought to myself, ‘Well maybe this could happen but they’ll never do that, they’ll never do that to these guys in this movie, it’s just not the Hollywood way to do it…’ I like the fact that the movie was so ruthless. I got twenty pages into it and I thought, ‘Oh God, it’s just a buddy movie, and it’s like I’m the last person in the world to do one, because I don’t understand them, but them all of the sudden it took this turn, and I found myself getting more and more trapped in this kind of evil, and although I felt uncomfortable about being there, I had to keep going.”

“The icing on the cake was when John Doe (the killer) gives himself up. I was holding the script so I knew how many pages were left in the movie and I thought, ‘Holy shit, if I’m sitting in a theater, this movie could go on for another hour, this could be the middle of the movie.’ It made me very uncomfortable.” Indeed, Se7en has probably the most depressing ending to any mainstream Hollywood film. Fincher hoots with laughter when I mention this. “Excellent,” he trills, “most movies these days don’t make you feel anything so if you can make people feel something… I just felt so much at the end, and I also felt the movie hearkened to these kind of weird movies of the early seventies, it just sort of reminded me of Klute and Vanishing Point and to have this sort of we-don’t-know-exactly-what-we’re-doing-but-it-could-be-a-movie kind of attitude to it.”

It’s an ending that very nearly didn’t make it to the screen at all. “I called my agent and said, ‘This movie, are they going to make this? I mean, have you read this thing?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I read it.’ And I said, ‘There’s this fucking head in the box at the end, it’s just amazing. Are they really going to do this?’ And he said, ‘No, you’ve got the wrong draft.’ So they sent me the right draft and there was this big chase at the end to get to the bathroom where the wife’s taking a shower and the serial killer’s crawling through the window.” Fincher, you can tell, wasn’t much impressed with ending number two. “I said, ‘This is just crap, the first one is much better.’” And so Fincher went to bat for the script’s original climax. The one with the head in the box. “I went in to talk to (Michael) De Luca (from New Line) and said, ‘The head in the box, that’s the cool ending,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I thought so too, let’s go make that version.’”

Having convinced the studio, the only other person left to persuade was the film’s producer, Arnold Kopelson. “He said, ‘There’s no way that there will be a head in the box at the end of this movie, there is absolutely no way that that will ever happen, don’t even talk to me about that,’” laughs Fincher, “and I said, ‘Arnold in fifty years from now, there’s going to be a bunch of twenty-five-to- thirty-year-olds at a party and one of them is going to say, ‘Remember when you were like fifteen and that movie was on TV, I don’t even know who was in it, but at the end there’s this head in the box and the guy drives up in the middle of the desert,’ and everybody’s going to go, ‘Oh yeah, I loved that movie.’ That’s how this movie is going to be remembered, so how can you cut the head in the box?’ And he said, ‘You’re right.’ He thinks in terms of like immorality.”

 

Listen to out-of-print Criterion Collection laserdisc commentary with director David Fincher, actors Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, production designer Arthur Max, and special makeup effects artist Rob Bottin. This commentary is only available on the Criterion Collection laserdisc release of Se7en.

 

The second installment of The Directors Series goes into the films and career of director David Fincher, covering his major early commercial works and his breakout as a successful feature director with 1995’s Se7en.

 

DARIUS KHONDJI

Recalling how David Fincher first described his approach to Se7en, cinematographer Darius Khondji, AFC excitedly echoes the director’s whispered words: “It’s got to be frightening.” —The Sins of a Serial Killer

“We watched several films, including Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, which was one of David’s favorite movies at the time, and also The French Connection, whose grittiness you can definitely see at times in Se7en. Another movie we looked at was Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, which had been made a few years before and which posed a problem since it had placed the bar so high. I remember thinking: ‘How can you shoot a story about a serial killer after The Silence of the Lambs?’ There was something so real about that film, the way the skies were always overcast and how the interiors looked very simple and mundane, like in a news report. Something David really liked was how factually the horror was described, and so he thought we should start from there: Lambs had been done and we had to go somewhere else. Another important film—and one that would be important for me for the rest of my career—I even watched it again recently before shooting Woody Allen’s Irrational Man—was Alan Pakula’s Klute. Back when we were doing Se7en it was a major discovery for me since Gordon Willis’ work on that movie has everything in it: the use of toplight, using widescreen compositions for intimacy rather than big vistas, the way that vertical strips of the city are shown in horizontal mode, the fragments of faces and bodies…” —Conversations with Darius Khondji

 

REN KLYCE

Ren Klyce is David Fincher’s go-to person for sound on practically all films he’s ever made and most likely will make. Ren Klyce along with Howard Shore and David Fincher (in brief bits) discuss the importance of sound mixing and sound design of a film. You may have the prettiest composition, but if sound isn’t right—if it’s not supplementing the image—the image will fall flat. Listen to the men discuss its importance. —Ren Klyce on sound

A look at the hidden visual effects work within David Fincher’s filmography.

 

Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou has published a video you simply have to see. In his eight-minute analysis of David Fincher’s filmmaking technique, Tony created a brilliant insight into the craft of one of the most distinguished directors in contemporary cinema, opening a window for us to peek into the mind of a modern master. For sheer directorial craft, there are few people working today who can match David Fincher. And yet he describes his own process as “not what I do, but what I don’t do.” Join us today in answering the question: What does David Fincher not do?

 

David Fincher discussed his craft and career. From the BAFTA Archives. Recorded on 19 September 2014.

 

“Studios treat audiences like lemmings, like cattle in a stockyard. I don’t want to ask actors or anyone else on a movie to work so hard with me if the studios treat us as though we’re making Big Macs. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is not a Big Mac. Gone Girl is not a Big Mac. This TV show I’m doing about music videos in the 1980s and the crew members who worked on them, or this other show, a Sunset Boulevard set in the world of soaps—they’re not Big Macs. I don’t make Big Macs.” —David Fincher

Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of David Fincher’s Se7en. Production still photographers: Peter Sorel & Darren Michaels © New Line Cinema, Cecchi Gori Pictures, Juno Pix. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.

 

 

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