The 2023 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival closed out last night with a conversation between two of the best filmmakers of their generation, David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh. The Q&A covered all sorts of topics, but Fincher dropped an intriguing nugget in the midst of it. IndieWire reports that Fincher revealed he’s working on a 4K remaster of his 1995 film “Seven.”
That news should surprise Fincher fans, as the director dislikes revisiting his older work. “We’re doing “Seven” right now, and we’re going back and doing it in 4K from the original negative, and we overscan it, oversample it, doing all of the due diligence, and there’s a lot of shit that needs to be fixed,” Fincher told Soderbergh and the crowd during the Q&A. “Because there’s a lot of stuff that we now can add because of high-dynamic range. You know, streaming media is a very different thing than a 35-millimeter motion picture negative in terms of what it can actually retain. So there are, you know, a lot of blown-out windows that we have to kind of go back and ghost in a little bit of cityscape out there.”
The most glaring issues so far in the process? It’s obvious in some shots how cheaply Fincher and his crew built out their sets. Granted, it’s not obvious unless one watches “Seven” on a gigantic screen. “On a 100-inch screen, you’ll look at it and go, ‘What the fuck, they only had money for white cardboard out there?’” joked Fincher. “So that’s the kind of stuff on print stock. It just gets blown out of being there. And now you’re looking at it, going ‘I can see, you know, 500 units of what the fuck.’”
Fincher is the latest director to return to an older film of his and change things around in a remaster. But Fincher doesn’t plan to do anything too drastic, like how Steven Spielberg edited the guns out of “E.T.” for its 20th-anniversary re-release. The director said he’s “fundamentally against the idea of changing what “‘Seven”] is,” but he also think there’s little infinitesimal things a remaster may spruce up. “You can fix, you know, three percent, five percent,” Fincher continued. “If something’s egregious, it needs to be addressed. But, you know, I’m not gonna take all the guns out of people’s hands and replace them with flashlights.”
For Fincher, that’s his perfectionist tendencies talking. But for Soderbergh, that sounds like “torture.” “David’s got a laser pointer, and it’s frozen on the shot, and you’re like, ‘I want that part of the wall a quarter of a stock darker,’” Soderbergh ribbed to Fincher about his work ethic. “I walked out and laid down on a couch in the lobby because of what torture it is to see that.”
What’s next for David Fincher? He has “The Killer” with Michael Fassbender arriving on Netflix later this year. As for Soderbergh, he was at Tribeca to premiere his upcoming limited series “Full Circle,” which debuts on Max soon. The prolific director also had “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” in theaters in February. As for what either of these guys have coming up next, who knows?
