David Fincher's Psychology of Directing

For Fincher, the director's ultimate job isn't about simply recording actors, it's about actively controlling the viewer's experience. It all begins with the exact placement of the camera, which is a massive responsibility that dictates the audience's entire reality. My responsibility is to is to place your eyes where I think is the best place to and I they're usually in any given situation there aren't two places for that there's usually one good place and then there's one compromised place you know where you go well I can look like I got another setup you know I start from from a third-party omniscient place you know like where in the scene can we uh where can we begin that shows you what's going on by starting from an omniscient third-party perspective the director establishes the geography of the scene but once you start moving in for close-ups or cutting to specific objects you are no longer an objective observer you're explicitly telling the audience what matters Fincher warns filmmakers to be incredibly precise with these choices because the audience is subconsciously storing every visual cue to solve a puzzle of your narrative there's a there's something behind it there's a reason whatever the reason is if it's not clear at the moment it'll be made clear later so it puts this importance on it you have to be very careful about how much importance you put on anything because everything is going to add up everything is the audience cataloging because the audience catalogs everything a director cannot afford to get lost solely in the visuals a beautiful shot means nothing the overarching narrative Fincher insists that a filmmaker must be obsessed with every single discipline on set from the wardrobe down to the audio recording if it helps convey the truth of the moment i'm looking for anything that's going to help me tell my story you know people go oh well you know are you all caught up in the costuming and the photography and all it's like i'm caught up in the micing this obsessive level of detail inevitably leads to a massive amount of pressure when you are constantly scanning for the perfect camera angle tracking every prop and listening to every microphone the psychological toll on a director is immense Fincher has learned the part of mastering the craft he's learning how to edit out the unnecessary noise on set while forgiving yourself for inevitable mistakes and i think that you know i find the process over time is trying to mitigate against the stuff that you want to take out of your uh of your work you know and and try not to punish yourself ultimately a director must accept that a film is never going to be perfectly flawless you can prepare for months and obsess over every frame but eventually you just have to accept the reality of the footage you captured and move forward the mark of a veteran filmmaker is knowing how to shoulder the immense burden of production and then knowing exactly when to walk away i take as much responsibility as i can for my actions why i'm actually doing it and then try to let it go as quickly and as completely as possible letting go of the perfect ideal is essential for surviving the edit in production a director uses the camera to meticulously dictate an audience's reality once you've established that reality your next job is to actively betray it a great director conditions the audience you teach them how to watch your movie by establishing a comfortable rhythm and then you weaponize that rhythm against them to pull the rug out they bring the clown and you laugh at him they bring the clown and you laugh at him and the third time the clown has some kind of problem and you can't solve it when you intentionally break that established pattern the audience is left reeling but executing a massive narrative twist requires incredibly delicate timing if you reveal the deception too early the tension deflates if you wait too long the audience feels cheated a filmmaker must lay down subtle breadcrumbs that only make sense in retrospect carefully masking the truth behind the layers of misdirection the trap must be custom built for the protagonist specific psychology the audience views the world through the hero's eyes if you want to fool the audience you first have to flawlessly fool the protagonist you have to design an illusion that perfectly appears to the character's ego making them feel like they are completely in control he needs to feel powerful in this you know he needs to feel like he's worthy of being impressed you know that they're trying to sort of impress him and or not that they're trying to impress him but that the thing is impressive to somebody who is impressive he can't figure it out and and you're still sort of looking up at him like mount rushmore you know when the illusion finally drops and the protagonist loses control the director's true power is revealed advanced filmmaking is not about giving the audience what they want it's about making them deeply uncomfortable with what they thought they wanted you lure the viewer in with the promise of fun entertaining genre film and then you confront them with the brutal ugly reality of the violence they were just cheering for when the narrator's kind of position with tyler's is challenged by somebody else he out of jealousy he beats this guy beats this guy's face off and i really thought that it should be a moment i mean it made audiences very uncomfortable but it's supposed to it's supposed to be that scene where you realize the fight club isn't the answer it's gone too far ultimately the purpose of this relentless psychological manipulation isn't just for shock value the goal of building and breaking tension is to completely dismantle the protagonist's world view by forcing the character through a repetitive cycle of trauma and misdirection the director systematically strips away their false presentation to expose their true vulnerable core but um but yeah the idea was if you have a thing that you believe in a core belief something that is the repetition of it is very important and hopefully people will see that as the repetition goes on every brick that he's put in this wall begins to crumble when the final brick falls the real movie begins before you can manipulate the audience you have to wrangle the sheer physical inertia of a massive crew when a director steps onto a set they're faced with dozens of technicians waiting for instructions fincher admits that overcoming this morning sluggishness requires him to be an incredibly demanding leader i'll never be a soft cushion to land on but i i try to be at least um understanding there's a certain amount of inertia that that 90 90 people have and getting the whole getting the whole thing on its feet in the morning is always for me that i want to get out of the gates fast once the crew is finally moving at a demanding pace the director's next battle is with the cast actors often arrive on set having meticulously rehearsed their lines ready to deliver a high polished pre-planned performance but for fincher that rehearsed perfection is the enemy of authenticity fincher views this artificial readiness as a psychological barrier that must be aggressively dismantled to shatter that polished facade fincher relentlessly pushes his cast past their rehearsed muscle memory until the artificial control drops away as the director you are hunting for the raw uncalculated reality hidden beneath the performance while you are encouraging that behavioral freedom you must remain ruthlessly vigilant about the physical frame if an accidental detail distracts the audience the cinematic illusion immediately falls apart it is your responsibility to edit out those things that people are going to see that take their eye off the ball while constantly filtering out visual distractions on the stage you must also learn to financiers will inevitably push back offering notes designed to make the film safer or more conventional fincher believes that a director shouldn't rely on screaming matches or contract clauses to win these battles true creative power comes from dismantling bad notes with logical precision that is more important i mean i i feel like more important than the than the legal ability to be able to say i don't have to listen to you um is the ability to say i hear what you're saying and i understand exactly what it is that you're saying and it has no place in this film for the following reasons by maintaining this iron grip on the crew the cast and the studio executives a director builds a protective fortress around the story inside that fortress you aren't actually looking for sterile mechanical perfection by removing the pressure of the hollywood machine you allow the messy lived in reality of the characters to take over you have to realize that it's going to be imperfect that you know best laid plans but that imperfection is ultimately the thing that's going to make it personal features notoriously high take counts are not meant to punish the cast instead he uses speed to eliminate the agonizing pauses where actors overthink their craft by removing traditional interruptions between takes he creates a continuous rolling momentum that bypasses the actor's intellect entirely it's really for my money how quickly you get to the next take and how quickly you can uh dispense with thoughts and musings on what it is that you've just seen so it's not so what what i really sort of resist is this idea of um the actor now going and processing it you know that's why i don't like slates i don't i don't like putting something on somebody's face and making noise i just want to go and so we will do a nine minute take and then his shirt will get tucked in and his tie and his hair will be combed and he'll sit back down and we're rolling eight seconds later and start all over again once that raw behavior is captured the director retreats to the editing bay and the relationship between the filmmaker and the actor shifts drastically on set the actor is the fierce protector of their character but in the edit they are simply an instrument in the director's orchestra you must be ruthlessly objective harvesting only the specific micro actions that serve the overarching narrative michael does this great thing where he puts all the stuff back into the envelope and he he's kind of talking to him without really looking at him and and you go yeah that's great that helps tell my story you're helping me tell my story but you're not telling my story i'm telling my story you know and that's how that's you know you're the oboe and this is a part written for the oboe but i'm the conductor as the film is meticulously assembled piece by piece a profound psychological shift happens to the director the pristine ideal vision you had when you first read the script is systematically destroyed and replaced by the physical reality of the footage you have to mourn that original fantasy and accept the living breathing organism that the movie is actually becoming you read a script and it becomes a it becomes a film for you and your fault and then and then you cast the movie and you go into rehearsals and then it becomes takes on a different life takes on the the reality of well you've got to tell the story you have this much time and you have to do this and this and this and that mutation doesn't stop with the picture edit the film undergoes several more dramatic transformations before it's truly finished adding the musical score completely rewrites the emotional subtext of the scenes and finally presenting the cut to a crowd injects a terrifying uncontrollable new energy into the room permanently altering how the director perceives their own work every time it's become this different thing then you put the music on it and becomes a different movie it evolves into this other thing and then you put it in front of an audience you know premiere audience in front of it and these are all agents and producers and and other actors and other film directors and and they all watch it but they're watching it from this whole you know they got off work early to come to go see your thing and they had to walk past all these people who took their pictures so there's all these weird kind of tensions that go into that so this movie has this whole other life as a filmmaker realizes that a movie is never truly locked its meaning constantly shifts depending on the era the theater and the individual viewer your goal isn't simply to survive the stress of opening night it is to craft an enduring experience that continues to provoke and manipulate audiences decades after the cameras stop rolling and all of a sudden they're watching the movie they're finally 10 years later watching the movie the way you first read the script which is with zero expectation and with no understanding movies never stop having a life whereas i used to think i'm working towards premiere night i'm working towards that showing it's like now i just kind of i'm feeling more like you do what you think's right you're trying to to make something that's the truest expression of what it is and then get out of the way and get back and stop worrying about it sound is not simply an afterthought used to fill the silence it is the invisible architecture of the film fincher believes that the rhythm of your visual edit is inherently tied to the audio track when studying pioneers like orson wells fincher realized that true mastery of pace comes from treating sound as the primary driving force of a sequence he came at these ideas of montage not from the kind of eisenstein he came at it from an off from an oral perspective you know he was able to take the pace of this thing up to 11 because he understood once you've said that we're going to move on to here and then the music comes in by leading with the audio you subconsciously guide the audience's emotional reactions before they even fully process the image but beyond just pacing advanced sound design requires placing the viewer into a highly specific physical space for his film mank fincher didn't just want the movie to look like the 1940s he wanted the audience to physically feel like they were standing in the back of a massive vintage movie palace absorbing the complex bouncing echoes of the room i was a kid and i would walk into the rafale theater and you would push the back door open it's that sound that you first hear of a movie theater and the screen is way over there and it's doing its job it's emanating but it's what the balcony is catching it's what the exit signs are reflecting it's it's you know over by the drinking fountain it's that it's that thing that you used to get when you walk through those back doors that you know make everybody in the back of the theater trying to look at you it's that sense of that to trap the audience inside the vintage auditory illusion fincher and his sound designer ren class had to actively destroy the pristine modern audio they captured on set they needed to perfectly mimic the technological limitations of the past as class explains they began by artificially stripping away the high fidelity frequencies to force the audio into a much smaller cruder box figuring out what what uh citizen kane's soundtrack was which was basically a really limited dynamic range and frequency range and with some sort of weird spikes of uh you know mid-ranges sort of poking through and we built a filter sort of as a quick fix however a filmmaker quickly learns that you cannot apply a single blanket audio filter to fix an entire movie human voices are incredibly complex instruments and when you start aggressively manipulating audio frequencies the dialogue can easily become an unintelligible mess fincher realized that to maintain the period illusion without sacrificing story every single actor's dialogue track had to be surgically individually reconstructed that every person's voice responds differently to this to this envelope that you put it in there were people's voices who just cut right through it and required no no labor intensive rethinking at any point and there was and then there was gary's voice and there was a couple of other voices and gary's voice is critical because he has 98 of the dialogue and what we learned this is going to be harder than you think a garment that has to be tailored for every single body by agonizing over every frequency and echo the director ensures that the sonic landscape perfectly traps the viewer's subconscious for david fincher it all comes down to the ultimate goal of the medium complete immersion he understands that you aren't simply providing a distraction your job is to make the viewer completely forget that the distraction is manufactured achieving that level of deep immersion requires you to constantly fight against the audience's natural cynicism modern viewers are incredibly savvy they recognize standard hollywood tropes and artificial setups immediately to truly transport them a filmmaker must actively dismantle those expected presentations and inject a raw relatable truth into the fiction you're trying to sort of find new clues as to or ways to sort of blur the lines between um between what is something that's so presentational it's so silly in itself and give it a little fair similitude so that people can kind of connect it to them building that connection to the real world means acknowledging that real life doesn't always tie itself up in a neat perfect bow while an amateur director might strive for absolute pristine perfection an advanced filmmaker understands that reality is inherently messy instead of trying to sanitize your story you must design a film that actively embraces the decay the unpredictability and the fundamental disorder of the world but you know there's only kind of two constants entropy and chaos and i always wanted the film to embody that there's entropy and then cut to marla there's chaos embracing that chaos while managing a massive incredibly expensive production is the ultimate paradox of directing you are utilizing cold heavy highly technical industrial tools lenses cranes digital sensors and lighting grids but you're using them for a purely psychological purpose you are wielding an army of machines just to create a synchronized human connection i used to think that cinema was 50 picture whatever that is however you get to it digitally or cg animation or whatever and 50 sound but i'm now fairly convinced that cinema is 25 picture 25 sound and 50 audience if you take anything away from david finch's obsessive methodology let it be this you can pre-visualize every shot shoot 100 takes and engineer the perfect soundscape but at its core you must accept the vulnerable reality of the art form you are using a mechanical industrial process to capture something beautifully fragile if you like this video subscribe and we'll see you in the next one