David Fincher talks remastering “Se7en” with AI — and reveals what was really in the box

Se7en turns 30 this year, and to commemorate the anniversary, director David Fincher has overseen the 4K remaster of the seminal crime drama.

The serial killer mystery — which stars Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey — first shook up the crime genre in 1995 with propulsive, precise craft and unprecedentedly nasty crime scenes that have influenced everything from Saw to The Batman. The film now has a higher-resolution look that will debut on IMAX screens on Jan. 3 before releasing on 4K UHD Blu-ray Discs and on digital Jan. 7. Fincher and his team painstakingly recreated the film as it was originally printed in 1995, utilizing some AI tools to enhance the image and fix visual mistakes that weren't visible in previous scans of the film.

Entertainment Weekly chatted with Fincher to discuss the new version of Se7en and reflect on his memories of helming his feature directorial breakout 30 years later — including what's really in the box.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was it like to revisit Se7en after three decades?

DAVID FINCHER: Well, as far as the content of the movie, I've seen it. I knew what it was. As far as the excavation, though... Originally, I thought, "Well, it's 1995. We've done this twice before; we did the DVD version and the high-def version." But going back and exhuming it from the negative on 8K was more restoration than I had convinced myself it would be. So that was kind of shocking.

I know that there are a lot of people who tend to bag on digital, but if you could see a 30-year-old negative and what it looks like even when immaculately stored — it was an enormous amount of fixing, just digs and scratches and cinch. So a good couple of months were just devoted to bringing the thing back to what I would consider to be a negative, and then we could begin. It's a little bit of a misnomer to say, "Well, it's the 4K remaster." It's really the archival negative remaster. And in that respect, I don't think any of us realized exactly what we were getting into.

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What exactly went into the process for you in particular? How are you spending your time as you're overseeing this process?

Throwing this new kind of technological firepower at stuff was, for me, really revelatory. We ran into things that heretofore had never been noted. I mean, shots that were fundamentally out of focus that you couldn't read on film and couldn't read even in HD. And then you get to 4K downsampling of the 8K scan. And we did end up going in and doing little split screens and using AI to sharpen things so that we could reestablish what was intended to be looked at. I think we probably took a little over a year — and left to my own devices, it could have been twice that.

We were really trying to get back to that first CCE check print that we saw 30 years ago when we were like, "Okay, that's the movie. That's the contrast of it. That's the density of it. Those are the colors. This is where they're muted, and here's where they're vibrant." And really just try to remember what — technologically and artistically — that first print effect was. And I think we did it.

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Did you make any adjustments to the film in the remaster that was different from your original vision for it back in 1995?

I honestly believe that films are as beholden to the technological artifacts of the time as they are to the limitations of budget and whatever, so I tend to feel like there are certain lines that can't be crossed. Having said that, there was color matching that we couldn't do in 1995 making release prints. There were certain things that we just couldn't get to flow seamlessly from one to the other that we now can do. There's more firepower. There's more ability to manipulate color, space, and key things. But no, we were going for matching that first CCE print.

And I definitely did some things that I felt I had to do, especially in-focus stuff. There were some shots of Kevin in the backseat of the police car with the grate that divides the front of the police car to the back, and there were shots that were completely out of focus. We were able to use AI and make mattes and extract the performance that was in the backseat and render it. It's still soft, but it's not as egregious as it was. But yeah, my real attitude is I don't want to change it. I want to make it opening night, 1995, but the pristine version of that.

I know the AI question is a big one that's ringing around in the industry right now. What's your attitude toward it as a tool or as a potential way of making films in the future? 

It's probably a little too open-ended to say, "Are you for it or against it?" It's like, what exactly are we talking about? For instance, there was a shot that had been operated with the intention of the characters leaning toward the edge of the frame. The camera operator missed it. And so he makes a sort of staggered pan with one of the characters. And there was data that was lost, that was irretrievable. Now, on either side of it, we had the fullness of the character's shoulder, and we were able to kind of recreate using AI — recreate that shoulder and the kind of ripples or motions of the light on the surface of the leather. And we were able to sort of composite that so that we didn't have what I considered to be distracting and unnecessary movement. And so a lot of little stuff like that where you go, "Ugh, I wish I had the look-around room that I have now," harvesting an 8K and then down-sampling to 4K. I had the headroom because it's Super 35, but I didn't have the look-around room....

I mean, look, you give me a tool, a powerful tool to do X, Y, and Z, I may not be interested in Y and Z, but if I can use it for the sake of X — all tools, if they do what they say they're going to do, are good tools. And it's usually the tools that overpromise and underdeliver that I take more umbrage with than, "Oh, here's this wildly powerful new toolset; use it to make something ugly."

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I know you said that you want to maintain the vision of the 1995 print, but thinking back to yourself making this movie in the mid-'90s, is there anything that you would tell yourself 30 years ago that you would want to do differently or change about the process of making it?

No. I feel like the director's job is to find that thing that's essential because you don't have time to necessarily capture everything that you would want. So, part of your process is to define for yourself, based on the text, what is the essential thing that you must walk away with at the end of the day. And so I sort of stayed to that. And I did treat it a little bit as a historical document.

There are so many things that I would do differently. I mean, I would do things differently that I completed three weeks ago. So you're constantly in that process of "I know better now." There's a lot of kicking yourself and going, "Yeah, I would do this so differently." But that wasn't the job. The job was to exhume this and make it look like a pristine CCE print from September of 1995.

Moving back to the original production of the movie — there's a pervasive story that the crew made a prosthetic head or entire body of Gwyneth Paltrow that you opted against using in the final film. [Some versions of the story say that Fincher's friend, Steven Soderbergh, ended up repurposing that Paltrow-shaped prosthetic in Contagion in 2011]. Is that true?

No, it's entirely ridiculous. I think we had a seven- or eight-pound shot bag. We had done the research to figure out, if Gwyneth Paltrow's body mass index was X, what portion of that would be attributable to her head. And so we had an idea of what that would weigh, and I think there was a weight in it.

And we did put a wig in there, so that when Morgan rips the box open if there were some of this tape that was used to seal the box — I think it was a shot bag and a wig, and I think the wig had a little bit of blood in it, so some of the hair would stick together. Remember, I think Morgan opened 16 or 17 of those things.  But as I always say, you don't need to see what's in the box if you have Morgan Freeman.

Nine Inch Nails has a prominent place in the soundtrack of the opening credits. You've gone on to work with Trent Reznor as a composer on many of your subsequent films. What was it about their music from that era that made you feel like it would fit into your work?

I had canvassed Trent for years before Social Network to say, "You should think about this." And he's a busy guy, I mean, he's even busier now that he has so many movies! But we just thought that the Flood mix of that song was kind of amazing for what we were trying to do.

Originally, there was a title sequence that had nothing to do with John Doe and his fingertips or any of his composition book perversions. So that was a kind of last-minute thing as we were trying to figure out what the title sequence could be.

We were going to have to jettison — we'd shot a day of stuff of Morgan, supposedly upstate. I think we shot it in Ventura, looking at an empty little house that he was going to buy. And then we were supposed to do this long train sequence, and we only shot the day at the house. And then we were going to go back east and try and shoot the train coming into New York City or second unit stuff of a train coming into New York City. And then we would build a little bit of a set. And then that all became too much of a problem.

So I kind of tasked Kyle Cooper, who was at [design studio] Imaginary Forces, with the idea of, "What else can we do here in this space? Because I feel like we don't have our villain until 90 minutes into the movie. What can you think about?" And he went through everything. He came back, and he goes, "You have all these composition books." I said, "Oh, I know we have all these composition books. We have, I dunno, $20,000 worth of composition books that are all filled." And he said, "Well, I would like to take a stab at that." And I said, "Great." Drew a storyboard. And they did a storyboard. And that became the title sequence.

The 4K remaster of Se7en will debut on IMAX screens Jan. 3., then release on 4K UHD Blu-ray and digital Jan. 7.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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