5 Film Making Tips from the Renowned Director, David Fincher!

Demanding. Perfect. Magnificent to work with. The man who has given us some exceptional movies like the Fight Club, Gone Girl is a man who hates his brand but is secure and proud of what he does. With a reputation like that, it is not easy for an extraordinary mind that works in an auteur way to be not so claustrophobic. Being the absolute genius, he is also accessible making him the best director from whom filmmakers can learn from. Therefore, he are few film making tips form the nightmarish wonder.

Make the calls all yourself:

“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?”

Says Fincher, in one of his interview when talking about Alien 3. It is known that he always chooses people knowing that they are best to work with “him” and the interview reveals his evolution from the start. Fincher says that a director is never a single man, but a team of gaffers, technicians and DPs and therefore, it is important to trust them more than gelling with them.

Give Everything:

Fincher says that he haven’t fallen in love with anything even after doing the best. He says it’s important to give what you have and also know that it won’t turn out to the best or in the way that you want it to be. Because, you always want it to be relatively better than how it turned out. Best of the film making tips, eh?

Directing is Ballet:

Turns out Fincher loves Black Swan. Therefore, with him the takes are going to be countless. His patience, goddammit!

Different Paradigm:

It is important to look at things in a different way as a director. While commentating on Se7en, Fincher says that he was taught to look into each scene of the film with each eye. While the left eye thinks about composition, the right eye for specifications and creativity.

Films are not Movies:

“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.”

In the last, remember that you can’t take everything on your shoulder, and that’s how people start fitting in the oeuvre. Don’t ever be incapacitated and captivated by fear and start eating the whale but only one bite, a time. Follow these film making tips and make yourself a better film maker.