David Fincher has lots of ideas — Panic Room
In December David Fincher’s new film Mank is released on Netflix. The period drama about the creation of Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane was written by Fincher’s late father Jack, and marks the director’s return to film-making.
Fincher has enjoyed a six-year hiatus following the release of Gone Girl in 2014.
The 58-year-old made his film-making debut in 1992 with Alien3 however due to consistent meddling from executives he disavowed the finished product.
Since then he has made 9 feature length films, each one released with a director’s commentary.
Listening to Fincher’s commentaries one thing is clear — he loves his films bristling with ideas. With almost every scene, even with some specific shots, he is trying to present an idea. And he loves to talk about it.
Panic Room is Fincher’s first attempt at a ‘date movie’ and was released in 2002 following a tumultuous production.
Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart play mother and daughter Meg and Sarah Altman who hole up in a panic room when three men break into their new New York brownstone house in pursuit of a fortune.
Here are David Fincher’s ideas in Panic Room (spoilers ahead, obviously):
Title sequence superimposed into New York city
“I sort of liked the idea, you know, is this supposed to be real or is this supposed to be a thought superimposed on the city.”
Lydia Lynch (Ann Magnuson) is helping Meg and Sarah Altman find a home
“We had this sort of idea of Ann Magnuson by way of Anna Wintour. We had this special piece of jewellery made for her that’s round her neck this entire scene, it’s a little bit of gold script that says ‘in escrow’ and of course (laughs) it never gets seen.”
Introducing the idea of the ‘omniscient’ camera early on
“The camera can go anywhere. Obviously, to get that angle you’d have to be in the neighbour’s basement, the notion is to begin to underline this idea that the camera is free of the constraints that the characters in the movie have to deal with.”
Writer David Koepp ‘designed an idea’ with the script
“The set was designed by Arthur Max who I worked with on a lot of commercials and had done Se7en with, I called him and gave him the script. I think initially he was expecting more…
“He had just finished Gladiator… He is such an architecture nut and storytelling through architecture, supporting the characters through the surroundings, I think he really kind of warmed to the idea of what Koepp (writer David Koepp) had designed.”
The ‘big shot’ as the criminals gain entrance to the home
“It was one of the first things that sort of interested me in the movie was the notion of being inside a fishbowl, looking out and seeing the cats.
“I liked the idea of setting up a burglary sequence not by showing the exterior of the street and being down the street and seeing the guys, I liked the discipline, the rigour of what David Koepp was doing when he just decided to show you the guys on the outside breaking in from the inside, exclusively from the inside.”
Forest Whitaker’s blue collar character Burnham
“It seemed to me if he works for a safe company or a security company and he knows specifically about this one… I like the idea of a guy who doesn’t own his own business, I like the idea of a guy pulling himself up by his bootstraps going ‘well if I could just turn my head for one evening I can make a couple million bucks and get out’.”
Meg going to the toilet in the middle of the night
“This was something that made people really, really uncomfortable in test screenings. I guess the idea of people urinating in the middle of the night is something that only I’m familiar with but it seemed to make audiences… this was where they started to squirm believe it or not.”
The home invaders try to gas the panic room with propane
“One of the things that makes this sequence so nice is the notion that when he does finally get the whole gas thing hooked up you see from the feathers being sucked in the hole left in the ventilation you see… there’s a connection between the hole in the sheet metal and what’s happening inside the panic room and then you go to the propane being hooked up and you see them pumping the propane in.”
Panic Room ‘not the film that defines him’
“I sort of feel like all movies you have to kind of go in with the idea that this isn’t the one that defines you, because I think people get too caught up in the legacy that they’re leaving… and that’s why I like thrillers.”
Andy Walker’s cameo and Morse code
“Andy Walker,who is a dear friend of mine, agreed to do the cameo as the Prince of Porn across the alley from Jodie Foster’s new house and I liked the idea, David Koepp’s notion, that you could flash a flashlight with Morse code in the eyes of somebody in the city and that instead of them deciphering what it meant and trying to come to your rescue they would just shut the blinds.”
Flickering light effect in the panic room after the propane explosion
“We had this flickering light effect because we wanted after the explosion we wanted one of the fluorescents to be screwed up in some way and it ended up being such a hard thing to cut around because you wanted it to be erratic but sometimes it just felt like when you cut the lights had been off for too long or were flickering too fast or something it was one of these things that you think is gonna be a really good idea but it ends up screwing everything up.”
Meg leaves the panic room to make a dash for a mobile phone
“There was a lot of effects work and just and trying to split screen and trying to get the lighting to match. The film, we shot on high-speed stock and we shot it at 84 fps instead of 24 fps and for some reason things just didn’t look the same so we ended up kind of colour-correcting things and using split screens and trying to put it back together. It’s still a bit of a hodge-podge but I think the idea of it works.”
Wrestling with the phone line in the panic room
“One of the most kind of fun things to watch in the early screenings of the movie was how people reacted to this, such a simple idea, they’re upstairs and they’ve got to run downstairs and we don’t really know what Burnham is up to, we don’t really know that he knows anything about phones but he is off and running somewhere and we follow him blindly.”
Jodie Foster ‘can’t play stupid’
“Jodie Foster can play a lot of things, stupid ain’t one of them. Actually there was a movie we were talking about doing at one point when I wanted her to play Marion Davies, someone who is generally thought to have been sort of ditzy and not particularly bright but all the people who knew her thought she was really sharp and insightful.
“And I loved the idea of somebody really smart playing somebody… and let her try to cover up the fact that she’s really smart and then as we get in closer and closer we’re going to go ‘oh wow she’s really… there’s really something going on in there’. I think each actor is a buffet and the things you’re going to ask them to do, in most cases it’s on display, you’re just editing.”
Three burglars arguing among each other
“This was an interesting scene because we have the cutaway of… we’re setting up this notion that we’re going to pay off later that she is some way able to keep tabs on what they’re doing and they’re bickering amongst themselves and it’s going to become necessary later on when ‘Raoul’ is overpowered and dragged down the stairs and we find out that’s it not Raoul it’s Stephen.”
Patrick Bauchau plays Stephen Altman
“I met Patrick, I’d seen photos and videotape of him reading certain scenes, and his wonderful voice and wonderful face and I liked the idea of somebody who , Patrick seems like he’s got everything together, he seems like the kinda guy if he said ‘look wait right here’ and you would kinda go ‘well alright, I’ll be right here if you need me’. And yet he literally walks into a shovel when he walks into the movie.”
Casting Mel Gibson as the ex-husband
“There was a point in time where we discussed the idea of having like Mel Gibson show up as the ex-husband and you go ‘oh my god Mel Gibson is here, everything is going to be okay’ and he just progressively gets more and more beat.”
Speaking about the ‘disembodied camera’ during Sarah’s fit
“One of the things that was interesting to me about Panic Room was the idea of the disembodied camera movement that sets up the night when they move in. It’s important to me that the camera can go under a door or through a keyhole because that sort of says that there aren’t 80 people here. There isn’t a whole crew. It’s effortless to go between floors, to go through a wall to find out what’s happening inside a room.”
Raoul gets his hand caught in the panic room door
“And the hand getting caught in the door was a fake one that was made by Amalgamated Dynamics. And this idea, the notion of this, stemmed from a conversation I had with David Koepp I was talking about, I said if you’re going to have as much exposition in this movie about how the door is impenetrable and how the door is foolproof then you’ve got to do something with that door, you’ve got to maim somebody.”
Burnham ‘pays the price for doing what is right’
“I could have told you before we ever screened the movie for an audience that they wanted to see Jodie shoot Dwight (Raoul) but that wasn’t the story we’d written and ultimately I don’t think it’s as potent a story, I liked the notion of Burnham doing what’s right and paying a price for doing it and I liked how sloppy it was.”
Family don’t get back together at the end
“And I liked the fact the family doesn’t get bak together at the end, they go through this horrible thing and then they’re on their own. I thought that was potent.”
Total number of ideas: 21
Film length: 112 minutes
Ratio of minutes to ideas: 5.3
Next up: Gone Girl
Read my previous pieces in this series:
