David Fincher talks AI and what’s really in the ‘Se7en’ box

se7en turns 30 this year, and to commemorate the anniversary, director David Fincher has overseen the 4K remastering of the seminal crime drama.

The mystery of the serial killer, which stars Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrowand Kevin Spacey – first revolutionized the crime genre in 1995 with propulsive, precise art and unprecedented crime scenes that have influenced everything from Saw to the batman. The film now has a higher resolution look that will debut on IMAX screens on January 3 before its release on 4K UHD Blu-ray discs and digital on January 7. Fincher and his team painstakingly recreated the film as it was originally printed in 1995, using some artificial intelligence tools to enhance the image and correct visual errors that were not visible in previous scans of the film.

Entertainment Weekly chatted with Fincher to discuss the new version of se7en and reflect on your memories of directing your directorial smash hit 30 years later, including what’s really in the box.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was it like revisiting? 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 excavation, though… At first I thought, “Well, it’s 1995. We’ve done this twice before; “We made the DVD version and the high definition version.” But going back and exhuming it from the 8K negative was a bigger restoration than I had convinced myself it would be. That was something shocking.

I know there are a lot of people who tend to stick with digital, but if you could look at a 30-year-old negative and what it looks like even when it’s immaculately stored, it was a huge amount of fixing, just gouging and scratching. and cinch. So we spent a couple of months getting the situation back to what I would consider negative, and then we were able to get started. It’s a bit of a misnomer to say, “Well, it’s the 4K remaster.” It’s really the negative archive remastering. And in that sense, I don’t think any of us realized exactly what we were getting into.

What exactly happened in the process for you in particular? How do you spend your time while overseeing this process?

Throwing this new kind of technological firepower at things was, to me, really eye-opening. We came across things that had never been noticed until then. I mean, shots that were fundamentally out of focus and couldn’t be read on film and not even in HD. And then you get to the 4K downsampling of the 8K scan. And we ended up going in and doing little split screens and using AI to fine-tune things so we could reset what was intended to be watched. I think it probably took us a little over a year and, if I’d left it to my own devices, it could have been twice as long.

We were really trying to go back to that first CCE check impression that we saw 30 years ago when we said, “Okay, that’s the movie. That’s the contrast. That’s the density. Those are the colors. “This is where they are silenced and this is where they are vibrant.” And really try to remember what that first printing effect was, technologically and artistically. And I think we achieved it.

Did you make any adjustments to the film in the remastering that were different from your original vision in 1995?

Honestly, I think movies are as beholden to the technological gadgets of the time as they are to the limitations of budget and whatever, so I tend to feel like there are certain lines that can’t be crossed. That said, there was one color scheme we couldn’t achieve in 1995 when making release prints. There were certain things that we just couldn’t get to flow smoothly from one to the other that we can now do. There is more firepower. There is more ability to manipulate color, space and key elements. But no, we were going to match that first CCE impression.

And I definitely did some things that I felt I had to do, especially focused things. There were some shots of Kevin in the back seat of the police car with the fence dividing the front of the police car and there were shots that were completely out of focus. We were able to use AI and do mattes and extract the performance that was in the backseat and render it. It’s still mild, but not as egregious as it was. But yeah, my real attitude is that I don’t want to change it. I want it to be opening night in 1995, but the pristine version of that.

I know that the question of AI is very important and is making rounds in the industry right now. What is your attitude towards it as a tool or as a potential way to make films in the future?

It is probably too open to say, “Are you for or against?” It’s like, what exactly are we talking about? For example, there was a shot that had been made with the intention of having the characters lean towards the edge of the frame. The cameraman missed it. And then he does a kind of staggered panning with one of the characters. And there was data that was lost, that was irrecoverable. Now, on either side, we had the fullness of the character’s shoulder, and we were able to recreate that using AI: recreate that shoulder and the kind of waves or movements of the light on the surface of the leather. And we were able to combine that so that we didn’t have what I considered unnecessary and distracting movement. And a lot of little things like that where you’re like, “Ugh, I wish I had the space to look around that I have now,” collecting 8K and then downsampling to 4K. I had head room because it’s Super 35, but I didn’t have room to 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 sake of X, all the tools, if they do what they say What are they going to do, they are good tools. And it’s usually the tools that overpromise and underdeliver that bother me more than saying, “Oh, here’s this tremendously powerful new set of tools; use it to do something ugly.”

I know you said you wanted to keep the vision of the 1995 film, but thinking about yourself making this film in the mid-’90s, is there anything you would tell yourself 30 years ago that you’d like to do differently or does it change the filmmaking process? elaboration?

No. I feel like the director’s job is to find what’s essential because you don’t have time to necessarily capture everything you want. So part of your process is to define for yourself, based on the text, what is the essential thing that you should be left with at the end of the day. And then I stayed at that. And I treated it a little bit like a historical document.

There are so many things I would do differently. I mean, I would do things differently than what I completed three weeks ago. So you’re constantly in that process of “now I know better.” There are a lot of things that kick you and you say, “Yeah, I would do this very differently.” But that wasn’t the job. The job was to exhume it and make it look like an impeccable copy of the CCE of September 1995.

Going back to the original production of the film, there is a widespread 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 repurposing that Paltrow-shaped prosthetic in Contagion in 2011]. Is that true?

No, it’s completely ridiculous. I think we had a seven or eight pound bag of shot. We had done research to determine, if Gwyneth Paltrow’s body mass index was X, how much of that would be attributable to her head. So we had an idea of ​​how much that would weigh, and I think there was a weight to it.

And we put a wig in there, so when Morgan opens the box, if there was any of this tape that was used to seal the box, I think it was a bag of shot and a wig, and I think the wig had a little bit of blood on it, so some of the hair would stick. Remember, I think Morgan opened 16 or 17 of those things. But as I always say, you don’t need to see what’s in the box if you have Morgan Freeman.

Nine Inch Nails features prominently on the opening credits soundtrack. You have gone to work with Trent Reznor as a composer in many of his later films. What was it about his music from that era that made you feel like it would fit into your work?

He had sounded out Trent for years before. Social Network say, “You should think about this.” And he’s a busy guy, I mean, he’s even busier now that he has so many movies! But we thought Flood’s mix of that song was amazing for what we were trying to do.

Originally, there was a title sequence that had nothing to do with John Doe and his fingertips or any of the perversions in his composition book. So it was a last minute thing while we were trying to figure out what the title sequence could be.

We were going to have to ditch: we had filmed one day of Morgan’s stuff, supposedly upstate. I think we shot it in Ventura, looking at a little empty house that I was going to buy. And then we were supposed to do this long train sequence, and we just filmed the day at the house. And then we were going to go back east and try to photograph the train coming into New York City or the second unit of a train coming into New York City. And then we would build a little set. And then all that became too big of a problem.

So I commissioned Kyle Cooper, who was in [design studio] Imaginary Forces, with the idea of: “What else can we do here in this space? Because I feel like we don’t get our villain until 90 minutes into the movie. What can you think of?” And he went through everything. He came back and 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 full.” And he said, “Well, I’d like to try it.” And I said, “Great.” He drew a storyboard. And they made a storyboard. And that became the title sequence.

The 4K remastering of se7en will debut on IMAX screens on January 3 and will then be released on 4K UHD Blu-ray and digital on January 7.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length..

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