David Fincher learned filmmaking by directing 53 music videos
At eight, David Fincher saw a behind-the-scenes film about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and realised a film could take months to shoot. He grew up with George Lucas as a neighbour, worked at Industrial Light and Magic, and then spent nearly a decade making music videos he called his own film school.
Born in Denver in 1962 to a mental health nurse and a Life magazine reporter, Fincher moved at two to San Anselmo, California, and began shooting on an 8mm camera. As a teenager in Ashland, Oregon, he directed school plays, ran a cinema projector and worked at a local TV news station, while paying his way as a busboy and fry cook. Industrial Light and Magic hired him in 1983 as an assistant cameraman, and he worked on Return of the Jedi.
A startling anti-smoking commercial for the American Cancer Society caught Los Angeles producers' eyes. He co-founded Propaganda Films in 1986, a company that also trained directors like Michael Bay and Spike Jonze. Between 1984 and 1993 he directed 53 music videos, including Madonna's Vogue, whose black-and-white look borrowed from 1920s and 1930s cinema, and George Michael's Freedom 90. The work taught him to move fast on small budgets.
His film debut went badly. Fox brought him in to replace Vincent Ward on Alien 3, a production crippled by studio meddling and abandoned scripts; Fincher later disowned it, saying nobody hated it more than he did. He backed away from features until Andrew Kevin Walker's script for Seven arrived, and he agreed only if New Line kept the original ending. The 1995 thriller took more than 320 million dollars worldwide.
Fight Club followed in 1999, earning 100.9 million dollars on a 63 million budget and a divided reception before becoming a cult favourite. Later work includes Zodiac, The Social Network and Mank, the last two bringing Best Director nominations, and on television the Netflix series House of Cards, whose pilot won him an Emmy for directing.
Source: David Fincher
