David Fincher famous quotes

Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.
-- David Fincher

#School #Two #Drawing

Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.
-- David Fincher

#Way #Waste #Humans

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the filmmakers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think: Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire. These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.
-- David Fincher

#Fighting #Thinking #Fire

The simple-minded always look for something - if it's not pornography, it's DVDs or the Internet or video games - but I don't think there's anything inherently evil about Facebook.
-- David Fincher

#Simple #Thinking #Dvds

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.
-- David Fincher

#Simple #Cameras #Paper

I like people that like to work the way that I like to work.
-- David Fincher

#People #Way

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.
-- David Fincher

#Ideas #People #Professionalism

Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes of something. They start looking at you like, "What did I do wrong?", and its like "No. It's not wrong. It's just that we are going to try something different."
-- David Fincher

#People #Trying #Different

The thing I always say to any writer that I'm working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.
-- David Fincher

#Drama #Interesting #Want

I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.
-- David Fincher

#Opportunity #Thinking #People

When you cast somebody you cast them not only for... I look for an inherent kind of quality. You are going to be shooting 14 hour days and you are going to be tired. You are going to not necessarily be able to conjure armor or a façade every single moment.
-- David Fincher

#Single Mom #Tired #Quality

For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises.
-- David Fincher

#Running #Night #Doors

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.
-- David Fincher

#Responsibility #Want #Way

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.
-- David Fincher

#Psychology #Cameras #Actors

I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.
-- David Fincher

#People #Fans #Letters

You can’t take everything on. That’s why when people ask how does this film fit into my oeuvre. I say 'I don’t know. I don’t think in those terms’. If I did, I might become incapacitated by fear . . . How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.
-- David Fincher

#Thinking #Whales #People

I want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers ***** to.
-- David Fincher

#Impact #Serial Killer #Needs

When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.
-- David Fincher

#Believe #Mean #People

For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.
-- David Fincher

#Movie #Stupid #Ideas

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.
-- David Fincher

#Fighting #Shopping #Overcoming

Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time.
-- David Fincher

#Couple #Dvds #Yeah

If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.
-- David Fincher

#Would Be #Brad

I'm totally anti-commercialism.
-- David Fincher

#Commercialism

I was a disinterested student.
-- David Fincher

#Students

I loved Luke Skywalker and I loved Darth Vader and I loved watching them work it out.
-- David Fincher

#Vader #Working It

I learn the most from making my own mistakes.
-- David Fincher

#Mistake

And I love shooting football.
-- David Fincher

#Football #Shooting

I don't know how to depict intelligence.
-- David Fincher

I like characters who don't change, who don't learn from their mistakes.
-- David Fincher

#Mistake #Character

I like the idea of R-rated franchises.
-- David Fincher

#Ideas

Hire the right people and get the hell out of the way.
-- David Fincher

#People #Way #Hell

There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of.
-- David Fincher

#Movie #Sick #Watches

Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.
-- David Fincher

#Use #Faces #Perfume

People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.
-- David Fincher

#Independent #People #Sony

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.
-- David Fincher

#Light #Film #Behavior

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.
-- David Fincher

#Thinking #Two #People

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.
-- David Fincher

#Hands #Medicine #Littles

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.
-- David Fincher

#Thinking #Sexiness

You’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.
-- David Fincher

#Mean #Stories #Use

You know, I don't think I've ever listened to someone's commentary. Ever.
-- David Fincher

#Thinking

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay.
-- David Fincher

#Lying #Hands #Medicine

You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success.
-- David Fincher

#People #Lines #Want

I have demons you can't even imagine.
-- David Fincher

#Demon #Imagine

Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.
-- David Fincher

#Stupid #Thinking #Hollywood

I do agree you can't just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.
-- David Fincher

#Long #Three #Comedy

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.
-- David Fincher

#Technology #Thinking #Humanity

How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.
-- David Fincher

#One Day At A Time #One Day

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.
-- David Fincher

#Film #Makers #Made

It's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.
-- David Fincher

#Bad Day #Needs #Done

Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.
-- David Fincher

#Abandoned

People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.
-- David Fincher

#People #Radical #Call Me

I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.
-- David Fincher

#Ocean #Swimming #Gone