Steven Soderbergh’s favourite David Fincher movie: “It makes my knees buckle”
Even though they make completely different kinds of movies, Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher have become regular sounding boards for each other during a friendship that began when the latter thought his career was over before it had even gotten started.
Fincher likes to think of the classic noir thriller Seven as his feature-length directorial debut, which is fair enough when he’s completely disowned Alien 3. During his constant battles against the studio while in production on the sci-fi sequel, the filmmaker was fired no less than three times from his position, but somehow still held on to drag it across the finish line before washing his hands of it completely.
He first met Soderbergh following his second dismissal from Alien 3, when they were both being lined up to direct episodes of the short-lived anthology series Fallen Angels. The former carried through on his plans to helm a standalone instalment, but Fincher was forced to bail when Seven was given the green light, and he sought to bounce back from his Xenomorph debacle as quickly as possible.
Since then, they’ve remained on good terms, and Soderbergh is someone Fincher can always turn to when he needs a second set of eyes on an in-development project. As an Academy Award-winning auteur who’s never met a genre he wasn’t willing to take a crack at, it certainly comes in handy to have somebody so experienced – as well as someone who can perform almost any duty on set – on call.
30 years later, the bond remains as strong as ever, with Soderbergh watching assembly cuts of Fincher’s work on The Killer, re-editing them to his satisfaction, and sending them back over to his peer to try and find a middle ground. Based on their closeness, it might be rude for the Ocean’s orchestrator to have a favourite of his friend’s work, but he does.
For Soderbergh, Fincher has never been any better than he was when helming Panic Room, the razor-sharp home invasion thriller that deftly balanced technical virtuosity with nerve-shredding tension. It was another display of the director’s ever-evolving mastery of his craft, and his counterpart could barely even think about it without his palms getting sweaty.
“I don’t know anybody else who would imagine executing something like that and then actually have the fortitude to do it,” Soderbergh marvelled to The New York Times. “It makes my head hurt watching it. It makes my knees buckle.” Of course, that level of immersion and investment was Fincher’s intention, and even one of the most notable directors in the business was sucked into its riveting narrative from the first minute.
Soderbergh has made plenty of thrillers in his time, covering such disparate bases as Out of Sight, Contagion, Haywire, Logan Lucky, Unsane, and No Sudden Move, but he couldn’t even begin to comprehend how Fincher managed to pull off Panic Room exactly the way he’d envisioned it in his head.
