Very few people work forever. Why should they? We all head into a job or a career looking to do the best that we can for a designated amount of time, and we almost immediately start dreaming of retirement. We can move to a warmer climate. We can fish, and drink, and not worry about the responsibilities of the gig. Or, as The Social Network and Seven director David Fincher recently explained to CinemaBlend as part of an exclusive interview:
It kind of is a young man's game. This is a business that requires – and this job, especially – requires a kind of energy that 90 people have to feed off of, for any given day. And you do find yourself, at the end of a movie, you can be dependent. I've shot 150-day movies. You're running on fumes at the end of 150 days.
When all is said and done, David Fincher will go down as one of our greatest filmmakers. His meticulous attention to detail. His uncompromising approach to storytelling. His uncanny ability to draw the best from his actors. All of these skills have contributed to one of the most intoxicating bodies of work from a contemporary director, which I’d argue contains more than a few pristine masterpieces, including Zodiac, The Social Network, and the movie that he’s currently promoting, the 1995 thriller Seven. Warner Bros has given Fincher’s classic a 4K UHD release, available for purchase now.
I didn’t bring up retirement while speaking with David Fincher because I want him to hang up the camera. Quite the contrary. I hope Fincher keeps making movies until he’s old and more grey than he currently is. But while revisiting Seven for the purpose of the interview, it struck me how much I now related to Morgan Freeman’s Somerset character, who’s on the verge of retirement. The veteran detective comments that he just doesn’t understand the city he is sworn to protect, that it had gotten too ugly for him to process.
I posed the question to Fincher, asking if he might look at the film industry and feel the same way. The business has changed significantly since Fincher arrived on the scene. And he was fighting for the purity of his vision 30 years ago on Seven! But as he reflected, he told CinemaBlend:
I'm totally cool with… I mean, I just finished up a Love Death and Robots, and I’ve got some scripts coming in. My deal is up in a couple of years. I'm not the kind of – I'm not competitive to make more. For me, it has always been ‘Is there an itch to scratch in that direction? Is there an itch to scratch in this direction?’ And I also, let's be honest, your kids are in their thirties, and you start to go… you know, further to that, I feel like it kind of is a young man's game.
Fincher isn’t wrong. Directors like Martin Scorsese (82 years old) and Sir Ridley Scott (87 years old) are the exceptions that prove the rule. And Scott is such an anomaly, pumping out multiple movies in a year, and still aiming for massive epics like his most-recent adventure, Gladiator 2. For all of these storytellers, it comes down to material. For as Fincher explained to us:
I remember, I never wanted to make a movie about depositions. But then you read The Social Network, and you go, ‘Count me in!’ It's always about the material, or about the challenge.
And what bums me out is that one day, for directors like Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, James Cameron, Spike Lee, Chris Nolan, the Coen Brothers and more, they’re going to reach the end of their professional roads. It’s inevitable. Quentin Tarantino has been talking about it for a few years now. And as Fincher tells us:
If somebody said, ‘Hey, Dave, you can go to the South of France, and bicycle and drink Rose, I might go.
And I can’t blame him. Here’s our full conversation with David Fincher on behalf of Seven, now available on 4K UHD.
Now start planning your next trip to the movies by scanning our list of the upcoming 2025 theatrical releases, filled to the brim with exciting choices for movie lovers of all tastes.
