By Alex Hudson

May 9, 2002

As the wielder of the camera, the maker of images, and the creator of worlds, the visionary-as-director has a unique and God-like power to influence and inspire, and implicit with this power is a responsibility to respect one’s vision. Since the dawn of commerciality, the artist has grappled between adhering to his own personal vision or modifying his vision to adhere to the vision of others. Two questions arise from this incessant, ongoing struggle of the artistic soul. Can the artist be a salesman? Can the salesman be an artist? Director David Fincher is both.

David Fincher began his career as a salesman. He sold product for Nike, Coca-Cola and Levi’s with his innovative television commercials, including the Budweiser "Ginger or Marianne?" campaign. Blessed with an unusually keen eye for visuals, Fincher progressed to music videos, helming "Cradle of Love" for Billy Idol, "Janie’s Got a Gun" for Aerosmith, and "Vogue" and "Express Yourself" for Madonna. Armed with a resume full of sufficiently-memorable, glossily-filmed commercials and videos, David Fincher made the inevitable leap to film.

With Ridley Scott’s suspense-filled Alien and James Cameron’s action-packed Aliens, the Alien franchise quickly established itself as the preeminent action series going, and 20th Century Fox wanted an equally thrilling - and money making - actioner for the third installment. Fincher was their man and things seemed primed for a third consecutive winner.

Inauspicious Start

The first film for a director is critical; a non-troublesome debut will ease the director’s integration into the machine of moviemaking but a troublesome debut will sour the director’s integration, sometimes cripplingly so. Unfortunately for Fincher, Alien³ proved to be the latter. Fans of the series were more than unhappy with Fincher’s vision, which suffered from studio interference from Fox, and critics almost unanimously loathed it, all combining to result in the film barely breaking even at the boxoffice. By contrast, in 1979, Alien had made a then-shocking 50 million profit and Aliens grossed 60 million in profit domestically seven years later.

In retrospect, the two primary faults of the film were beyond Fincher’s control. First, Fox created an imposing environment whereas Fincher was not granted the creative freedom necessary to tame an unwieldy script. Second, Alien³ had the misfortune to follow two enormously popular and successful films. Expectations were sky-high, and there was virtually no way for Fincher to surpass or even meet expectations. Further, Alien³ is basically a mishmashed rehash of the first two films in the series; themselves rehashes (group of disparate individuals getting picked-off, one-by-one, by an incomprehensibly efficient and relentless killing machine until only the protagonist remains - the staple plot for countless science-fiction and horror films.)

Despite these obvious failings of Alien³, the film deserves a second look. Above all, Alien³ presents a bleak and harrowing nightmarish world where light is sin and man is doomed. Fincher’s fatalistic visuals entrap his characters and enshroud them with a preordained sense of misery, despair from the misery and depression from the despair and misery. Beyond this, Alien³ sets the precedent for the arc of the Fincher protagonist. Lt. Ripley in this case - Sigourney Weaver again portraying the under-sized and beleaguered nemesis of the namesake - like all the Fincher protagonists, is stripped of her identity, individuality, societal markings - basically, everything - and is forced to fight with nothing but guile, instinct and pure intellect in a life-or-death struggle (a literal chase) for salvation. Every subsequent Fincher protagonist follows this arc.

Civilization as Inferno

Great directors redefine genres. The first film with which Fincher had considerable power, Se7en did to the serial-killer-on-the-prowl film what Fritz Lang’s M and Michael Mann’s Manhunter had previously done - it raised the cinematic stakes by one-upping the grisliness and heinousness of the killer’s deeds. But more than that, it placed the killer in a societal landscape whereby the madness of the killer is very nearly justified by the socially-sanctioned madness of life around him.

Se7en boasts the impressive cinematographic touch of Darius Khondji. Khondji, who previously shot Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s staggeringly breathtaking City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, merged his own foreboding and awe-inspiring visual sense with that of Fincher’s to create a contemporary nightmarish world every bit as bleak as Fiorina 161, the hellish penal planetary world of Alien³.

Se7en proved to be Fincher’s first success. It made over 300 million worldwide on a 30 million budget. David Fincher had arrived.

Name of the Game

Where you run will be darker than from whence you came. With Michael Douglas cast as Nicholas Van Orton (Gordon Gekko-lite), Fincher revisits the theme which dominated Alien³ and resurfaced in Se7en, that is salvation from the fall. Where Se7en had Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) reduced to nothing after 'the chase' (to apprehend the grisly killer), The Game has Nicholas Van Orton thrust into the chase after his identity and wealth - that which matters most to him - is stripped of him. He’s even left for dead in México.

Knowingly or not, most filmmakers spend their careers essentially reshuffling and reworking the same basic themes within different plots in different settings with different characters. But, at the core, the same ideas are present. That Fincher reworks his ideas with such flair and creativity is a testament to his virtuosity as a director. Fincher’s masterpiece awaited him.

The Beauty of Ugliness

Reminiscent of what Scorsese did to boxing with Raging Bull and what Kubrick did to thugery with A Clockwork Orange, Fincher beautified the horrific with his fourth film, Fight Club. Producer Josh Donen talked Fincher into reading the taut, layered Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name, and the artist in Fincher knew instantly that he had to make Fight Club - a story full of detail and overflowing with dark humor - into a film.

Fight Club is a film. The Game is a movie. Se7en is a film. Alien³ is a movie. The fundamental difference between a movie and a film is that, in the words of Fincher, "a movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the filmmakers." This is the struggle. Appease movie audiences or try to appease the artist within you. The solution for Fincher, is to consciously alternate between making films and movies while applying the same passion and visual transcendence to both.

Room for Panic

Following the pattern of making a movie after a film, Fincher followed Fight Club with the high-concept, high-thrills Panic Room. A movie, Panic Room is the ultimate and purest reworking of the core Fincher idea. Like Ripley, David Mills and Nicholas Van Orton before her, Meg Altman (Jodie Foster in her usual intense-but-measured mode) is reduced to the basic and primal struggle to survive. The variations here being her need to save her diabetic daughter while being confined to the claustrophobic panic room.

Never a director to shy away from a challenge (Fight Club, for instance, was shot at 150 separate locations), Panic Room occurs nearly entirely within the studio-recreated Manhattan brownstone. While harking back to the John Sturges thriller Kind Lady and Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark, Panic Room is mostly Hitchcockian in the sense that nearly every shot is carefully planned and pre-composed for maximum effect.

Tarkovsky’s Heir

More so than any other contemporary director, Fincher is the visualistic successor to the late Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky. Like Tarkovsky, Fincher uses his visuals to inform character, place and story. Not merely for aesthetic beauty, though it is that, Fincher's visuals are everything; they create an otherworldliness that is requisite in transporting us to his world, which is similar to our own, yet not similar at all. Fincher's obsession with extreme greenish/blue tinting and lighting - similar to Tarkovsky's preoccuption with bizarre, unnatural lighting - creates a palpable yet almost subliminal relationship between character and place that is perpetually jarring and disquieting. We know that evil will befall the Fincher protagonist, it’s simply a matter of when and how.

Horizon

Already David Fincher has made two everlasting films and three less lasting but equally well sculpted movies. With two of his efforts commercial successes - Se7en and now Panic Room - Fincher has the luxury of making the film or movie of his choice.

For better or worse, that movie appears to be Mission Impossible 3.

Also on Fincher’s ever-expanding slate are Rendezvous with Rama, the Arthur C. Clarke penned sci-fi story; Hard Boiled, based on Frank Miller’s comic mini-series, with Nicholas Cage; Seared, a loose adaptation of the 1999 culinary expose book by Anthony Bourdainntial; Squids, from screenwriter David Ayer, (writer of Training Day, U-571, The Fast and the Furious) about the coming-of-age of a young sailor on a nuclear submarine; and Black Dahlia, the James Elroy (L.A. Confidential) scripted neo-noir.

The range of these projects, and the fact that any of these endeavors could result in a film speak volumes about Fincher’s willingness to tackle unconventional and directorially-challenging subjects.

Artist or Salesman?

More than ever, directors are faced with the daunting task of pleasing volatile and hostile studio employers, finicky and critical moviegoers and, most importantly, the artist within them.

When Alfred Hitchcock - Fincher’s role model - was at his creative peak in the 1950s, high-brow critics condescendingly belittled his work as popcorn fare. They claimed his work was too popular and slick to be art. What they failed to realize then, and what they sometimes fail to realize now, is that it takes the true artist to bestow a complex vision in a tidy and neat package that is accessible to all.

Lacking the timidity and visual blandness that plague many of his peers, David Fincher, whether as a filmmaker or moviemaker, will continue to impress, will continue to disturb, and he will continue to show us humanity at the absolute breaking point, and we as the audience, will continue to be unable to look away.

View other columns by Alex Hudson