David Fincher explains why ‘Alien 3’ was “just awful”
Although he has intermittently stepped out of the shade, David Fincher is best known for his work within the thriller genre. When taking a brief look at his filmography, it is easy to understand why Fincher is considered a master of intrigue and one of the modern era’s finest auteurs. His work carries a distinctly postmodern tone, one which has set him apart from other mainstream directors and imbued them with a rewatchable substance.
Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac and the criminally overlooked remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo all comprise Fincher’s oeuvre, with the majority of these titles often mentioned as must-watch nail-biters. Adding to his elevated status in Hollywood is that Fincher brought Gillian Flynn’s shocking hit novel Gone Girl to life in 2014, a project that added both significant commercial and critical success. Stylistically, Gone Girl made a lot of sense to Fincher’s fans, an undertaking that would tear up the established conventions of the thriller genre.
Of course, criticism can still be directed at Fincher. One of the most glaring examples is that the director is a notoriously hard taskmaster, with the cast of 2007’s Zodiac finding his perfectionism excruciating at times. He would sometimes shoot over 70 takes for a single scene, which led to one of the film’s stars, the mercurial Robert Downey Jr, urinating in jars in protest.
“Sometimes it’s really hard because it might not feel collaborative, but ultimately filmmaking is a director’s medium,” Downey later said. “I just decided, aside from several times I wanted to garrote him, that I was going to give him what he wanted. I think I’m a perfect person to work for him, because I understand gulags.”
Despite Fincher irking Downey Jr, the actor can rest safely knowing he also enacts this unrelenting perfectionism on himself. Due to this factor, Fincher detests one of his movies so much that even to this day, he claims that no one hates it as much as he does. The title in question is the third instalment in the sci-fi franchise that Fincher helmed when he was only 28 years of age. At the time, the producers decided to enlist Fincher – then a newcomer – on board. Despite getting his big break, it is not an experience that the director fondly remembers.
Fincher only had five weeks to prepare for production, and given that he was a relative beginner, the director did not command the respect that he does today. It meant that the movie was more painful to finish than it would have been for an established filmmaker. Ultimately, the project was a Herculean struggle. “Oh, it was just awful,” Fincher would recall. “This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
Elsewhere, when promoting 2008’s fantasy romance, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the auteur explained: “I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.”
