David Fincher finally answers the biggest mystery of his career: “You don’t need to see”
Over the years, David Fincher has delighted in making some of the most bleak, nihilistic movies mainstream Hollywood has to offer. From Fight Club to Zodiac to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, Fincher rarely missed an opportunity to revel in the dark parts of humanity – in a highly entertaining way, of course. However, one particular example of depravity in a cruel, unforgiving world has defined Fincher for much of his career, and the exact ins and outs of its creation have been debated for the last 30 years. Thankfully, though, Fincher finally put paid to three decades of supposition and rumourmongering by clarifying just what exactly was in that godforsaken box.
When Seven was released in September 1995, it hit critics and audiences like a ton of particularly nasty bricks. It was only Fincher’s second movie, and no one had any real idea what to expect from the young director of the much-maligned Alien 3. To everyone’s surprise, Seven was one of the greatest serial killer thrillers ever made, with a razor-sharp script by Andrew Kevin Walker, an atmosphere of dread that pervaded every frame, and Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt at the top of their respective games. Indeed, Seven became such a water cooler film that it made $327million at the worldwide box office – and much of the discussion was centred around the movie’s brutal twist ending.
From the second Kevin Spacey’s dead-eyed John Doe surrenders himself to the police two-thirds of the way through Seven, the audience gets a feeling in the pit of their stomach. They know long before Freeman’s Detective Somerset and Pitt’s Detective Mills that something is wrong with this scenario, and Doe has something terrible up his sleeve. By the time he orchestrates events to take the two sleuths out into the desert, where a delivery man turns up with a mysterious package, that feeling in the audience’s stomach has turned into a knot of fear.
What follows is one of the most shocking endings in movie history, and it likely haunted the nightmares of countless viewers for months afterwards. Pitt’s anguished pleas of, “What’s in the box?!” seared themselves into people’s brains, and later birthed countless memes. In the film, of course, the box contains the severed head of Mills’ wife, played in the film by Gwyneth Paltrow, although Fincher chooses never to actually show the audience the interior of the package. It’s a masterstroke from the director, as the imagination is often so much more frightening than anything that can be depicted on-screen, but the ambiguity led to several rumours being propagated in the years after the film’s release.
Naturally, people wanted to know what was actually inside the box on the day of filming, and pretty soon stories began to spread that the production had placed a prosthetic Paltrow head inside. This rumour even extended in some quarters to an entire prosthetic body being created. When Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller Contagion was released, though, the rumour got a new lease of life thanks to a scene in which an autopsy is conducted on a character played by Paltrow. At one point, her head is sliced into by the coroner, and this made tinfoil hat-wearing viewers conclude that Paltrow’s prosthetic head from Seven had finally been put to good use.
In the leadup to the 30th anniversary 4K and IMAX re-release of Seven, though, Fincher finally put this mystery to bed for good. When Entertainment Weekly asked if the Paltrow prosthetic head rumours were true, the filmmaker laughed, “No, it’s entirely ridiculous.”
Instead, on that fateful day of filming, the box was filled with “a seven or eight-pound shot bag” that had been calculated to be the equivalent weight of Paltrow’s head. Fincher explained, “We had done the research to figure out if Gwyneth Paltrow’s body mass index was X, what portion of that would be attributable to her head.” However, Fincher did reveal that something extra was added to the box to help give the actors something more tangible to react to. He revealed, “We did put a wig in there,” and added, “I think the wig had a little bit of blood in it, so some of the hair would stick together.”
While filming the scene, the notoriously perfectionist Fincher estimated that Freeman opened around 16 or 17 different boxes to get the right shot. He was always convinced, though, that he never needed to show the grisly details of the package because “You don’t need to see what’s in the box if you have Morgan Freeman.” Good call.
