David Fincher Quotations

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.

When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.

There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch.

When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.

Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.

Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies.

You know, I don't think I've ever listened to someone's commentary. Ever.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.

If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.

It's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.

I loved Luke Skywalker and I loved Darth Vader and I loved watching them work it out.

Yet as a director, I don't feel you have to identify with your characters as a requirement to make a movie.

I like characters who don't change, who don't learn from their mistakes.

For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.

How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the filmmakers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think: Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire. These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.

For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.

I learn the most from making my own mistakes.

I like studios. I just don't like bureaucracies.

I always feel ill-prepared for commentaries and it had been so long I was afraid I'd forget everything that happened on the film.

I like people that like to work the way that I like to work.

The simple-minded always look for something - if it's not pornography, it's DVDs or the Internet or video games - but I don't think there's anything inherently evil about Facebook.

If you read the good reviews you gotta read the bad reviews. I kind of think of it as like being a quarterback: you get way too much blame when it's bad and way too much credit when it's good.

If I see a movie for the first time on DVD, I watch it all the way through, the lights are down, I don't pick up the phone. The third or fourth time you see a movie, sometimes you just have them on and you check in every once in a while with things that you liked. I think it's a different expectations from that environment.

The thing is, that great actors are everywhere. They're everywhere. They're doing good parts on television. They're doing television commercials. They're doing local theater. There are so few opportunities.

Awards movies are normally sort of... life-affirming and noble. It's probably too much of an intellectual conceit and, you know, people don't like it when you don't lead the bad guy off in cuffs.

I have great appreciation for people who do anything well. I think that it's very difficult to do what you do well.

I want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying "Oh, god, didn't we already do this 17 times?"

Every child is different. Every child responds in a different way.

It's based not only on what it played like in the theater, but it's also knowing that certain things play differently in a home theater environment. You have different expectations when you're sitting with 700 people than when you're sitting with your friends or family. It's just a different world.

We live in a silly time, and people go to the movies to see something that they haven't seen before, and you have to promise to show them that. In a horrible way, you have to promise them a special effect.

I thought that the behavioral and some of the profiling stuff was interesting. The thing that I was most interested in, and the thing that we were really adament about, was let's get these guys who were there on tape, or in some kind of way, telling what happened. No one has really talked to them all.

I want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers masturbate to.

I was always interested in films that scar.

I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.

I have demons you can't even imagine.

You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success.

You can’t take everything on. That’s why when people ask how does this film fit into my oeuvre. I say 'I don’t know. I don’t think in those terms’. If I did, I might become incapacitated by fear . . . How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.

I was a disinterested student.

Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time.

I don't know how to depict intelligence.

I like the idea of R-rated franchises.

There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of.

And I love shooting football.

Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.

I always say everyone was lucky enough to be in a Cate Blanchett movie.

Take ownership of every decision you make because you will be hold responsible for the film, whether good or bad.

It's a very American thing to hide away from death.

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?

Hire the right people and get the hell out of the way.

I want stuff to play as wide as possible. I want to be able to see... if I could play the whole thing in a master and it could be compelling enough, that'd be great. Then it simplifies my day, it simplifies life for the actors when you could just focus on that. But by the same token I don't want to be forced into coverage. So I want it to be as good from every angle and I need to get as many of the kind of shadings that I want from every angle.

I've never been to Harvard, I've never been to college, so I don't know what dorm life is like.

You’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.

Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.

Look, it's nice. I like the fact that critics liked this movie, but most of the movies that I've made, you'll find a handful of people that love it and more than a few other handfuls of people hate it. If I was invested in that, I would've given up long ago.

When you go and you tell a studio and that it's an ensemble, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.

When you cast somebody you cast them not only for... I look for an inherent kind of quality. You are going to be shooting 14 hour days and you are going to be tired. You are going to not necessarily be able to conjure armor or a façade every single moment.

I do agree you can't just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.

For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises.

Our Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever. You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story.

The thing I always say to any writer that I'm working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.

People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.

I want people to flourish. I want them to walk away from the experience going, "That's what it should be like."

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

I learned just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise.

You have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom. You can do whatever you want in your own home. It's a much more relaxed thing. It's more like a book, it seems to me. That's kind of the way I watch movies.

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes of something. They start looking at you like, "What did I do wrong?", and its like "No. It's not wrong. It's just that we are going to try something different."

People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.

Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.

We were working with this lousy print and it just wasn't going to be good enough. I said that we should get the original negative and do it from that. Well, a couple guys pointed out that the negative was locked up over at Deluxe.

You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them. You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them.

Again, a franchise to me doesn't have to be a billion dollar title.

You won't see me on Barbara Walters; Oprah, that's not who I am.