David Fincher has confirmed what many Internet sleuths have suspected in recent months, that he is in fact remastering Seven in 4K, which he said has required him to make some background tweaks.
The director made the revelation during a Tribeca Festival talk with Steven Soderbergh Thursday night, when in response to an audience question about whether he rewatches his old work (“I don’t; I’m not brave.”), he explained how he’s had to make adjustments while remastering Seven.
“We’re doing Seven right now. And we’re going back and doing it in 4K from the original negative and we overscan it, over sample it, doing all of the due diligence and there’s a lot there’s a lot of shit that needs to be fixed,” Fincher said. “Because there’s a lot of stuff that we now can add because high dynamic range. You know, streaming media is a very different thing than 35 mm 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.”
He indicated the issues largely aren’t noticeable but “on a 100-inch screen, you’ll look at it and go, ‘What the fuck, they only had money for white cardboard out there?’ 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 nits of what the fuck.’”
But he clarified, he’s “fundamentally against the idea of changing what [the film] is.”
“You can fix, you know, three percent, five percent. If something’s egregious, it needs to be addressed,” he said. “But, you know, I’m not gonna take all the guns out of people’s hands and replace them with flashlights.”
Steven Spielberg famously replaced guns with walkie talkies in the 20th century anniversary version of ET, which Spielberg recently revealed he regrets.
“That was a mistake,” Spielberg said at the Time 100 summit this spring of his change. “I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through … I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that.”
In Fincher’s defense, Soderbergh suggested that his friend and fellow director is slightly more detail-oriented than others.
“David sees things that not a lot of people see,” he said, recalling how Fincher invited him to a session while he was working on a film.
“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 recalled. “I walked out and laid down on a couch in the lobby because of what torture it is to see that.”
Hilary Lewis
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