David Fincher on ALIEN 3...A few words.

[img]http://fcdn.filmonic.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/alien3.jpg[/img] [i]An Interview with David Fincher by "Ain't It Cool News" in 2008[/i] Quint: Not your fault at all. Now one thing that I think everybody, at least all of the big guys at the site and all of the readers, they love the stuff that you have done and there is an argument starting with ALIEN 3, which I know you had a notoriously hard experience for you, because of the studio interference, but do you think having had that as kind of a trial by fire, do you think that shaped how you approached building a project and were you able to negotiate more creative freedom after that? David Fincher: Well, certainly through no desire of the studios to give me anymore creative freedom, but I mean look… yeah I walked naively into this spinning propeller of Hollywood, but what I learned was… The thing is is that the creative executives at studios are not really in a position to tell you who the best cinematographer is to work with and the editors or those things. They all have opinions about that stuff, but ultimately those are the decisions you have to make for yourself and I sort of… on my first movie… I would have been much better off making a movie with all of the guys I had been making commercials and music videos with for years, because they would have been invested. Now, I worked with some amazing people and you know Norman Reynolds is fantastic and Terry Rawlings was amazing and I got to work with Jordan Cronenweth at least for a short period of time on that movie, but what you learn from that first and I don’t call it “trial by fire,” I call it “baptism by fire,” is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There’s nothing worse than hearing somebody say “Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,” and you have to agree with them, you know? Quint: Yeah. David Fincher: So it was kind of a… if nothing else, it was a situation where I got to see first hand that if I wasn’t going to make the decisions myself, there are plenty of people who are going to line up to chime in and almost no one was going to be there when the shit hit the fan and the movie is judged. You just learn from that situation. You just say “If I do this again, I’m going down with the ship, so I’m going to make those decisions and I’m going to work with the people that I want to work with and I’m going to be involved in everything.” I sort of did that on SE7EN. We were incredibly instrumental all the way down into getting Darius Khondji his work visas and there were a lot of people at the studio who just didn’t want to go through the trouble. They were like “Why do you want a French perfume commercial photographer to do this serial killer movie? You should get the guy who did SILENCE OF THE LAMBS” and so you learn from that. It’s like “No, I want to do this and I think taking somebody out of this milieu and moving them into this other one is going to bring this whole other thing to it and here’s this costume designer that I worked with on commercials and here’s the editor that I think is best suited” and so that process on ALIEN 3 probably made me more of a belligerent asshole than I otherwise would have been, but we’re only talking about percentage points here. (laughs) Quint: I got to know Gino Acevado (special effects guy, now one of the higher ups at WETA) pretty well and… David Fincher: Oh, yeah! Gino! Quint: … and he was showing me all of these pictures of his work on ALIEN and how he was talking… He showed me something that he did for a webbed face hugger… David Fincher: Yes! Quint: I don’t think even made it into the work print, did it? David Fincher: No, I mean again there were about six months on that movie where things were really exciting and we were going to do all of this different stuff and then the studio took over and that is sort of where things took a nose dive. It was like things were mandated, like blueprints for sets were cut in half and they just said, “This is the half of the set you get.” It all comes down to script. That’s the thing you fight over the hardest and the longest and fight for first, but I mean yeah the stupidity of it was of course… I mean we had a lot of great ideas for a lot of really great stuff. Jake Scott did some amazing designs for a bunch of stuff that I brought to London and flipped everybody out with. They were like, “This guy’s bringing in his own set design.” But there was a lot of really interesting stuff and we just never got to explore it, because we were chasing a start date. Quint: So he was able to build that kind of aquatic face hugger, but you guys were never able to shoot it? David Fincher: You know I don’t know if it was built. I don’t really recall. It’s sort of like if you’ve been in a massive car accident where you just kind of remember the aftermath. Quint: I remember when he showed me that, it was like “Wow, that is so badass.” And when he showed me that, it was before the work print and so I was really looking for it in the quadrilogy that came out and… David Fincher: Never saw it. Quint: Never saw it… but no, I love the idea of it adapting to the environment and everything, but I am an ALIEN nerd. David Fincher: I love the first one, it’s amazing. Quint: I love Scott’s and I love Cameron’s sequel and I love… I don’t know, it’s just a great and fantastically designed universe and so I just love that stuff. ALIENS was always my childhood thing. [i]An Interview with David Fincher by Guardian in 2009[/i] "No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me," he said noting that his struggles and labors on the film were an uphill climb adding to his detest for the project (and plus it's the first film he didn't have final cut on -- you know he hates that)." Guardian: Have you grown to like it since then, "Alien 3"? Fincher: God, no! And get this: the "director's cut" version of the film that came out on DVD a few years back, that fans proclaim is solid proof of Fincher's genius when he's working unencumbered from studio meddling? Well, it's not even his work. Guardian: So that alternate cut on the DVD special edition whatever it is – that's not yours? Fincher: I don't know who did it, I've never seen it, I can't comment on it. Guardian: What did you do when they pulled the plug? Fincher: As upset as I was, I was so exhausted, I was glad to get back on the plane. We were told they were going to hold the sets until Joe Roth could take a look at the picture, but they decided it was more cost effective to cut the film and see exactly what was needed – what’s laughingly known as the surgical strike. So we assembled it – and it was like two hours and seventeen minutes – and we showed it to them. It was quite a sobering experience. Guardian: I saw a list of your reshoots that was seven pages long. Fincher: No, no. You must have seen the wish list….. Guardian: So to this day there’s still a dispute over how to handle the ending? Fincher: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. In my most depressed moments, people say, “You know, they didn’t know how they wanted to end Casablanca.” Hopefully this is Casablanca. [i]An Interview with David Fincher by Independent in 1992[/i] Fincher: 'As I always say, things don't get clearer when you take the camera out of the box, they just get more confused.' Independent: So negative has been the response in America that Fincher has, until now, refused to speak on the subject. What was to be a short phone conversation about the more esoteric aspects of the alien turns into a long confessional, full of irony and punctuated with sad laughter. When I said I liked the film the response was a long sigh. Fincher: 'Well I'm glad somebody likes it, it's good to hear. The idea was not to make a whizz bang, shoot 'em up, but to deal with this character. Let's put a 40-year-old woman in outer space, not an underwear clad victim like in the first Alien. In a way we had to rationalise it. Here is this woman waking up again and facing the same damn monster. Please] We decided the reason it keeps happening is because that's what she is cursed to do. She is cursed to fight this thing until it's over.' Independent: Sigourney Weaver has called this the most existential of the three films, which is probably not the best way to sell the film to an audience of 16-year-olds. The two previous films catapulted their respective directors, Ridley Scott and James Cameron, into the blockbuster league. Not so David Fincher. The story of his involvement with Alien 3 is a fairy tale without a fairy tale ending. Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien was the first film to rattle 17-year-old Fincher's brains and send him hurtling towards Hollywood. Fincher: 'It just seemed so real to me. I was aware of being told things about people and story through the art direction rather than exposition. I always thought Ridley was brilliant and I never appreciated how brilliant he was until I tried to make this movie. Actually he came down to the set once when we were setting fire to something. In he walked with his silk suit and one of his big Cuban cigars, looking fabulous. 'Ridley asked how it was going and I said, 'Really bad.' And he said 'It never goes well . . . this is not the way to make movies, make sure you make a little film where you have some control whilst they're beating you up.' ' 'Oh it was just hellish. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me. It would be stupid for me to say that I didn't know what I was getting into. It has taken me five years to decide on a first film and I always held out for something like this. 'The lesson to be learned is that you can't take on an enterprise of this size and scope if you don't have a movie like The Terminator or Jaws behind you. Because when everybody's wringing their handkerchiefs and sweating and puking blood over the money, it's very nice to be able to say, 'This is the guy who directed the biggest grossing movie of all time, sit down, shut up and feel lucky that you've got him.' It's another thing when you are there and you're going 'Trust me, this is really what I believe in,' and they turn round and say 'Well, who the hell is this guy?' 'There are people, who shall remain nameless, that I was bumping into as I was trying to put this thing together who put the whole experience into a really interesting perspective. They would say 'Look, you could have somebody piss against the wall for two hours and call it Alien 3 and it would still do dollars 30m-worth of business.' That's the impetus to make these movies, you can't keep the people away.' 'If we failed to do one thing in this film, and we failed to do many things, it was to take people out of their everyday lives. It's not a scary scare movie but a queasy scare movie and I think people resent that. Actually, my dentist, as he was drilling my teeth, was giving me his thesis on the things wrong with this film and he said, 'When you go out of this movie you haven't gotten away from Aids, you haven't gotten away from race riots, you haven't gotten away from fear of other cultures.' We tried to make a movie about now and I just think in terms of the world box office we may have chosen wrong.' Independent: David Fincher sighs again. Struggling with the alien has been a bloody and expensive learning experience. A dollars 50m learning experience to be precise. Fincher: 'You know,' he concludes, 'if I make 10 shitty movies, I'll deserve the flak and if I go on to make 10 great ones, this'll probably be looked upon as my first bungled masterpiece.'