INTERVIEW BY STEPHEN REBELLO
THE PLAYBOY INTERVIEW | SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

PLAYBOY: You’ve made movies as different from each other as The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and earned best director Oscar nominations for both. But you’re better known for darker, more twisted films such as Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What frightens the guy whose movies provoke, scare and unsettle others?
FINCHER: Complacency. Also, I don’t like spiders, snakes, sharks, bears or anything that could make me part of the food chain. In our part of Los Angeles I’m usually okay, but when our daughter was three, this big fucking green garden spider as large as my palm built a gigantic web at about face height for a three-year-old. We were convinced that thing was thinking, If I can just get the tykester to come into my net, I could feed off that little one for two years. It would build this web every single night, and every single morning someone would walk through it. I was like, Dude, seriously? Give it a rest.

PLAYBOY: It’s interesting how even some fans of Seven swear they saw the severed and boxed head of Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays the wife of the detective played by Brad Pitt, at the end of the movie.
FINCHER: Exactly, but they never saw it. Because we had Andrew’s script and Brad and Morgan Freeman playing the detectives, we were in great shape and didn’t have to show the head in the box. Directors get far too much credit and far too much blame. But the fun of movie storytelling is when you know you have the audience’s attention and you can see or feel them working to figure out where the movie’s going. I’m interested in the psychology of not only leading the audience along but also being responsible for getting them there sooner than the characters, so the audience is watching things and going, “Oh no!” It’s an interesting relationship to have with 700 people, even if 200 of them miss it entirely.

PLAYBOY: You’ve cast Brad Pitt as the star of Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. What’s the dynamic between you?FINCHER: Brad fucks with me all the time. So does Ben Affleck. When we did Fight Club, the studio said, “This is awesome; this is going to be great,” because we were going to have a scene with Brad opening the door naked. When it came time to shoot it, being Brad, he said, “I should open the door and have a big yellow dishwasher scrub glove on.” I said, “Perfect.” When the studio executive saw it, she said, “You got him with his shirt off and then you fucked the whole thing up.” I was like, “Excavate that line from Animal House: ‘Hey, you fucked up—you trusted us.’ ”

PLAYBOY: Obviously a movie star of Pitt’s stature helps calm nervous investors so you can make the movie you want.
FINCHER: Yeah. 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.

PLAYBOY: Having lived with, raised a daughter with and worked closely with your wife, Ceán Chaffin, as your producer since the 1990s, do you ask her for advice when you’re on the fence about material?
FINCHER: Constantly. It’s a blessing and a curse, because she’s obviously someone who knows me, in some ways, better than I know myself. There are definitely things we disagree about. She was extremely vociferous, for instance, when she said, “Don’t make The Game.”

PLAYBOY: That’s the 1997 thriller in which Sean Penn gives his brother Michael Douglas a voucher for a live-action game that takes over his life.
FINCHER: Yeah, and in hindsight, my wife was right. We didn’t figure out the third act, and it was my fault, because I thought if you could just keep your foot on the throttle it would be liberating and funny. I know what I like, and one thing I definitely like is not knowing where a movie is going. These days, though, it’s hard to get audiences to give themselves over. They want to see the whole movie in a 90-second trailer.

PLAYBOY: Do you ever feel trapped by your own track record as a director?
FINCHER: I know that if a script has a serial killer—or any kind of killer—in it, I have to be sent it; I don’t have any choice. [laughs] My responsibility to myself is always, Am I going to be the commodity that people want me to be, or am I going to do the shit that interests me? I have a lot of trouble with material. I don’t like most comedies because I don’t like characters who try to win me over. I don’t like being ingratiated. I don’t like obsequiousness. I also have issues with movies where two people fall in love just because they’re the stars and their names are above the title. I could maybe do some gigantic mythological Hero With a Thousand Faces–type movie, but so many other people are doing that.

PLAYBOY: Superhero stuff?
FINCHER: I find it dull. I like to anticipate the energy of a movie audience that’s waiting for the curtain to come up and thinking, Well, one thing we don’t know about this guy is that we don’t know how bad it can get.

PLAYBOY: Given your relationship with Pitt and considering how many actresses’ names were floated to star in Gone Girl—including Charlize Theron, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon and Emily Blunt—why did you choose Affleck and Rosamund Pike?
FINCHER: I offer everything to Brad, not because I’m pathetic but because he’s good for so many things. Both Brad and Ben have a default “affable” setting. Neither wants you to be uncomfortable. You cast movies based on critical scenes. In Gone Girl there’s a smile the guy has to give when the local press asks him to stand next to a poster of his missing wife. I flipped through Google Images and found about 50 shots of Affleck giving that kind of smile in public situations. You look at them and know he’s trying to make people comfortable in the moment, but by doing that he’s making himself vulnerable to people having other perceptions about him.

PLAYBOY: What kind of perceptions?
FINCHER: In Ben’s case, what many people don’t know is that he’s crazy smart, but since he doesn’t want that to get awkward, he downplays it. I’m sure when he was a 23-year-old and all this career-success shit was happening for him, he was like, “I just want to go to the after-party and meet J. Lo.” I’m sure he said a lot of glib shit and people went, “Ugh, fake.” If you have a lot of success when you’re young and good-looking, you realize it’s okay to let people write you off. It’s the path of least resistance. You don’t want to be snowbound with them anyway. I think he learned how to skate on charm. I needed somebody who not only knew how to do that but also understood the riptide of perceived reality as opposed to actual reality.

PLAYBOY: In casting the “girl” of the title, how familiar were you with Pike, the British beauty people may know from An Education and Jack Reacher?
FINCHER: I wanted Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, where you think, This person has experienced avenues of pain that no one can articulate. Or Faye in Network, where it’s, You’re never going to get to the bottom of this, so just stop. It’s crazy how much Rosamund reminds me of Faye. I’d seen probably four or five things Rosamund had done, and I didn’t have a good take on her. I realized why when I met her. She’s odd. The role is really difficult and Rosamund was born to play it. There was a moment on the set when I overheard Rosamund asking Ben, “What do you think Fincher saw in me that he would cast me in this role?” Ben said, “Why don’t we ask him?” I, of course, turned to Ben and said, “You should be asking the question, What did Fincher see in me that he wanted me for this role?” Because what we asked him to do was “Open vise, insert testicles and turn” for the entire length of the movie. Ben and Rosamund are both great in it.

PLAYBOY: So far your Gone Girl cast has been mum, but other stars you’ve worked with, such as Daniel Craig, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal, have spoken about the experience as being tough but worth it, with you demanding many retakes of the same scene.
FINCHER: If you didn’t get hugged enough as a kid, you won’t find what you’re looking for from me. That’s not my gig and I’m not attuned to it. On Zodiac I had a conversation with Jake, and I said, “I guarantee I’m going to make a good movie out of this. You can decide if you want to be the weakest thing in it, or you can decide if you want to show up.”

PLAYBOY: Both Downey’s and Gyllenhaal’s complaints were about reshooting scenes over and over. What do you get on take 11, say, that you don’t on take five?
FINCHER: Part of the promise when I work with actors is that we may be on take 11 and I’ll say, “We certainly have a version that we can put in the movie that will make us all happy. But I want to do seven more and continue to push this idea. Let’s see where it goes.” Now, I may go back to them after those seven takes and say, “It was a complete fucking waste of effort, but I had to try because I feel there’s something to be mined from this. That’s a lot of extra work for an actor, and sometimes it pushes them out of their comfort zone. In some cases they’re not getting paid as much as they would on another movie. I go out on a limb, and people work harder for me than they do for other people. But I want them to be happy with the fact that we were able to do something singular, something unlike anything else in their or my filmography.

PLAYBOY: Do you know if any actors have backed away from working with you because of what they think you’re like?
FINCHER: I’m sure there are people who think I bite the heads off puppies. There’s nothing I can do about that. The relationships that matter to me are always with people who wouldn’t have preconceived notions based on somebody’s work. I gave up worrying about that years ago. I remember giving a quote, “I’ve got demons you can’t even imagine.” It was a joke. It was fun. It was out of context. My parents were always concerned about things I was quoted as saying. My dad thought for a time that I was playing into it.

CONTINUED…
FINCHER: ……Besides my mom’s work, I have too much of a work ethic to disappear into that space. I had a normal teenage life. The only difference was that by the time I was 19, I was working six days a week, 14 hours a day for Industrial Light & Magic.

PLAYBOY: What brought you to a place where you’d be working at the George Lucas–owned, premier visual effects company in the world?
FINCHER: I was the guy who waited in line to see The Empire Strikes Back. I was the kid who didn’t read the Time magazine article about Jaws because I was not going to let that fuck it up for me. My dad took me to movie matinees. Movies were all I wanted to do. And I grew up in a perfect time and a perfect place, with all this incredible stuff happening around me.

PLAYBOY: Like what?
FINCHER: George Lucas lived two doors down from my house. I saw American Graffiti being photographed on Fourth Street in San Rafael. They were making The Godfather on Shady Lane in Ross, California. Dirty Harry was being shot at Larkspur Landing. By the time I was 14 I was on my way to a high school that had film courses, 16-millimeter cameras and double-system sound recording. I couldn’t wait.

PLAYBOY: How do you assess The Social Network, a movie many people thought deserved to win the best picture Oscar over The King’s Speech?
FINCHER: It’s as close to a John Hughes movie as I can make. For me that was stepping outside my comfort zone by showing nerds in their natural habitat. People said, “Oh, you’re making a Facebook movie?” as if we were capitalizing on a trend or doing a Linda Blair Roller Boogie roller-disco movie after disco was dead. I was able to say to the studio, “There are no movie stars in this, just kids between 20 and 25.” It was incredibly fun and freeing to be able to just put the best people in those roles.

PLAYBOY: In the end, what do you most want people to know about you?FINCHER: 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.