Panic Room is peak David Fincher — and it marked a key change in his career
“My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people’s idea of obsessive.”- David Fincher
One of the most acclaimed directors of his generation David Fincher has made 10 feature films. His 5th feature Panic Room changed him — for the better.
After cutting his teeth directing TV commercials and music videos the director got his break in 1990 when he was offered Alien3 but production was a miserable experience.
Hampered by studio interference and abandoned scripts he has since disowned the film, saying in 2009:
“No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.”
His follow-up feature Se7en however was acclaimed, The Game was warmly received and Fight Club — initially mis-marketed and misunderstood — has undergone such a major critical reassessment it frequently tops ‘best films ever’ lists.
Fight Club follow up Panic Room, released in 2002, is Fincher’s simplest film at its core .
The 112 minute film takes place almost entirely in a brownstone house in New York where a mother and daughter are the victims of a home invasion. They hole-up in a panic room as the invaders try to break in.
The $48m film is not frequently mentioned as part of Fincher’s oeuvre but it is probably the most Fincher David Fincher film and marked a key turning point for his career.
All of his subsequent films; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl have been showered in praise with the harshest criticism aimed at Button’s script and not Fincher’s direction.
What did Panic Room change?
The production of Fight Club had felt infuriatingly stop-start for the director with 400 scenes across 100 locations ( “I definitely felt after Fight Club that I had just spent two years of my life waiting for trucks to be unloaded”) and in 2000 he was attracted to the Panic Room script, by David Koepp, due to its b-movie simplicity.
It allowed the director the chance to plan out every shot on computer and hand pick every single piece of equipment. “I wanted to make what (Francis Ford) Coppola called ‘a composed movie’,” he told The Guardian in 2002.
Fincher has frequently said the planning part of movie making is what he enjoys the most:
I enjoy reading a script that you can see in your head, and then I enjoy the casting and I enjoy the rehearsal, and I enjoy all the meetings about what it should be, what it could be, what it might be. And then from that point on I hate every single thing about it.
But his attempts to make a ‘composed’ movie backfired and the simplicity allowed Fincher to indulge his meticulous habits — to the point where it wasn’t simple anymore and the production was every bit as miserable as Fight Club.
And for his first 5 features Fincher was a self-confessed control freak.
It was this single-mindedness which saw Panic Room’s original cinematographer Darius Khondji, whom he had worked with on Se7en, quit the production two weeks into the shoot.
In the press run for Panic Room he admitted his determination to micro-manage every aspect of the production forced Khondji out:
“Darius is not a light-meter jockey. He wants to be part of the decision-making process. This movie did not allow that, and it was incredibly frustrating for him.”
One of Fincher’s most infamous habits is his insistence on shooting multiple takes.
The Zodiac cast were required to do an upward of 70 takes for certain scenes. Rooney Mara had to endure 99 takes for a scene in The Social Network, and Gone Girl averaged 50 takes per scene.
One scene in Panic Room, where Jodie Foster drops a bag, was filmed roughly 100 times.
Despite Fincher knowing exactly what he wants.
A single-take walk-through scene of Jodie Foster’s Meg touring the home was meticulously conceived with pre-viz storyboarding that even included where the mirrors would be.
Fincher, afforded the opportunity to pre-viz and storyboard so much of the film, went over the top and wound himself so tightly there was no space for spontaneity.
Speaking on the director’s commentary he says pre-viz requires “a degree of intestinal fortitude” that he’s not even sure he has anymore.
Any hope for an easy shoot evaporated. It ran for 120 days, the longest of Jodie Foster’s career. Zodiac, for comparison, was 115 days.
He shot 1.2 million feet of film on Panic Room (Panic Room, it is worth noting, is the last time Fincher shot on film) and admits in the DVD commentary: “It was more involved than it needed to be.”
Editor Angus Wall said there were 2,073 camera set-ups for the film with a lot of those requiring the camera to have an ‘omniscience’ — something he has since moved away from.
Speaking about his use of the camera Fincher said:
I just love the idea of this omniscience, like the camera it just goes over here perfectly then it kind of goes over there perfectly and it doesn’t have any personality to it, it’s very much like what’s happening is doomed to happen.
Speaking to The Art of the Title he said:
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.
Although there are flashes of this in Fincher’s films prior to Panic Room — the camera flying between bomb vans in underground parking lots beneath skyscrapers in Fight Club — and subsequently — the fixed camera above the taxi in Zodiac — it is Panic Room where Fincher plays with the camera the most, putting it into impossible positions.
It flies across the kitchen when the criminals first try to break in, it follows a hosepipe through ventilation grates, it is actually in the wall to show the split of inside and outside the elevator at the same time.
Filmmaker Cameron Beyl wrote in his Directors Series:
We first see them (the home invaders) arrive, and swoop through the house as they try various entry points, all the while taking the time to show us Meg and Sarah asleep and unaware of the impending danger. This shot would have been impossible to achieve before the rise of digital effects, a revolution that Fincher helped usher in due to his familiarity with the process from his days at ILM (Industrial Light & Magic). Because of his natural grasp on digital filmmaking tech, he is able to turn this incredibly complicated shot into a “thesis” money shot that condenses his entire visual approach to the film into a single moment while effortlessly establishing the geography of the house and orienting us for what’s to come.
The repeated takes soaked up a lot of shoot time.
In one scene a plaster ceiling is hammered out with a sledge hammer. The plaster took 45 minutes to replace, so combined with repeated takes, a scene that was an eighth of a page in the script took two days to film.
Fincher did not enjoy filming Panic Room
When Entertainment Weekly asked him in 2004 what lessons he learned from making Panic Room, Fincher said: “Don’t shoot for 100 days in one place, that’s what’s to be learned from that. Figure out ways not to.”
He added: “They probably had that same kind of problem on The Shining — that’s all in one house. [But] at least they get out, they get to run through a maze.”
He told The New York Times of his frustration with the Panic Room shoot.
“It just felt wrong, like I didn’t get the most out of the actors, because I was so rigid in my thinking,” he said.
“I was kind of impatiently waiting for everybody to get where I’d already been a year and a half ago. And I’ve been trying to nip that in the bud. I felt like I needed to be more attentive to watching the actors.”
Five years went by between Panic Room and his next feature film Zodiac — and technology had finally caught up with his perfectionist nature.
And although Fincher has not lost his ravenous desire for multiple takes of every set up he has loosened his directorial style with less pre-viz.
His more relaxed nature on Zodiac paid off with his finest work.
Shot almost entirely on digital Fincher filmed barely a frame of blood — it was all added in post-production.
To some directors the lack of practical effects would be akin to sacrilege but for Fincher it’s a requirement. All that blood take after take would require either dozens of costumes or to have them thoroughly cleaned.
Visual effects supervisor Eric Barba said:
“David didn’t want to shoot the blood with practical effects because he planned to do a number of takes. But he didn’t want to reset and wipe everything down for every take, so all the murder sequences are done with CG blood.”
Fincher also used blue screen for some scenes, specifically the murder of cab driver Paul Stine. CGI gives him total control over the scene. And his continued success has relied on the subtle but widespread use of CGI.
The Social Network contains more digital shots than Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla.
Even totally inconsequential things — gummy bears bouncing off of Ben Affleck in Gone Girl or Rooney Mara’s hair part in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — were digitally created after the fact.
He is still a perfectionist with actors though, Panic Room didn’t stop that.
But his increasing trust in CGI, his own abilities and his own crew has seen him relax and dial down his Fincher-ness.
Mank, slated to be released this autumn, was reportedly filmed in 95 days.
Star Amanda Seyfried said:
I can’t tell you how many takes we did, but I would guess 200, maybe I could be wrong and could be way off. Um, I could be underestimating by five days of one scene when I didn’t have one line… ‘You think I can just relax?’ No, because there are probably about nine or 10 different camera angles that had been on me at one point.
Panic Room is yet to be released on Blu-ray and is currently streaming on Netflix.
Mank is expected to be released on Netflix this autumn, possibly October.
Post script: It is worth noting that R Lee Ermey loathed Fincher’s insistence on multiple takes during the filming of Se7en.
“He’s afraid to take chances. He’s afraid to let anybody change one word in the script,” he told UnderGround-Online.
“He wants puppets. He doesn’t want actors that are creative. If you’re not worth a shit at acting and you’re not creative, then I would recommend that you go work with David Fincher, because he won’t let you act, even if you are a fucking good actor.”
Ermey previously worked with Stanley Kubrick, also renowned for his insistence on dozens of takes, on Full Metal Jacket but had no such issues.
Ermey, it is said, is one of the few whom Kubrick would allow to do less than 10.
Also, Panic Room’s ending, with the villain allowing the money to bluster in the wind is a direct homage to Kubrick’s early directorial effort The Killing which ends with similar imagery.
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