David Fincher Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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."

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 was always interested in films that scar.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

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.

I was a disinterested student.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.