David Fincher developing a 4K re-release of ‘Seven’
Almost 30 years after its release, it has been confirmed that the seminal thriller Seven from director David Fincher will be getting a 4K remaster. The news came from the director himself, who will also be personally overseeing the redux, who made the announcement while speaking to an audience at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
“We’re going back and doing it in 4K from the original negative and we overscan it, oversample it, doing all of the due diligence and there’s a lot of shit that needs to be fixed,” Fincher explained. “Because there’s a lot of stuff that we now can add because of high dynamic range.”
Further detailing the technical logistics involved in the endeavour, the director added: “You know, streaming media is a very different thing than 35 mm motion picture negative in terms of what it can actually retain. So there are, you know, a lot of blown-out windows that we have to kind of go back and ghost in a little bit of cityscape out there.”
Fincher did, however, take pains to stress that the film wasn’t going to be altered. Perhaps as a reference to Spielberg’s “mistake” of changing a scene in E.T., Fincher joked: “I’m not gonna take all the guns out of people’s hands and replace them with flashlights”.
The director also confirmed that his upcoming film, The Killer, would be coming to Netflix on November 10th. Based on the graphic novel by Alexis Nolent and starring Michael Fassbender as a cold-hearted assassin who revolts against his employers, the film is written by Fincher’s Seven screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker.
Speaking on the strict Covid protocols that took place during the shoot, Fincher explained the difficulty of conveying emotions to the cast and crew – something he feels is fundamental as director: “Movies require you to impress upon people the amount that you’re sweating it and the amount that you care. They have to see it in your face and see it in your eyes.”
With masks and visors on, however, this proved challenging. The director added: “Working through a mask and the visor… I had no idea how much I was imparting with making faces and sound effects. It was a completely different experience.”
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