David Fincher is an unrepentant prick and hardass. He knows, we know it, all of Hollywood knows it. He’s notoriously difficult to work with, pushes Paramount execs around physically, mouth off at every turn, doesn’t suffer fools gladly and sometimes even makes his stars cry (Jake Gyllenhaal) by shooting digitally and then saying aloud to the whole crew in front of the actor, “delete those last 10 takes.”
Nice. Well, Fincher isn’t hiding the fact that he’s rough around the edges and in a recent interview with The Guardian, he reflected on his jerkish ways and fondly recalled and pinpointed the exact moment he realized his “asshole”
“I’d always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid. So I learned on this movie that nobody really knows, so therefore no one has to care, so it’s always going to be your fault.
I’d always thought, “Well, surely you don’t want to have the Twentieth Century Fox logo over a shitty movie.” And they were like, “Well, as long as it opens.” So I learned then just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: “You have to get what you need to get out of it.” You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don’t just become white noise. On that movie, I was the guy who was constantly the voice of “we need to do this better, we need to do this, this doesn’t make sense”. And pretty soon, it was like in “Peanuts”: WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP! They’d go, “He’s doing that again, he’s frothing at the mouth, he seems so passionate.” They didn’t care.
So cut through the noise with intelligent and biting verbal abuse, gotcha. We appreciate his candor. Now if only the Fincherfanatics would get over and realize, “yes, he’s an asshole and he’s proud of it.”