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When he came onto Se7en, I had vastly rewritten it for [director] Jeremiah Chechick who was attached before David. The story that’s out there is a true story—that they came to David with Se7en and they accidentally gave him the first draft. When he was talking to them later down the line, he said, “blah, blah, blah, head in the box.” And they said, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait—we sent you the wrong one.” He insisted on going back to the first draft.
When I sat down with him and met him, I kind of dutifully got my little composition book out—it’s weird, but I do write in John Doe composition books. And I was kind of licking my pencil and getting ready and he was just like, No, no—go ahead and close the notebook, and let’s just talk about the script from the very beginning.
I keep waiting for the moment where I write a script and he just reads it and he goes, “Oh my God, this is so disappointing. I hate it.”
After he gave you the beats of The Killer, did you go back to the original material at all?
I did revisit the comics. The biggest thing for me in adapting the literal kind of voice that’s in the comics is: I was concerned about not making the Killer seem like he was doing this morally reprehensible stuff, but at the same time in his mind feeling morally superior. I read The Stranger, the Camus book. A lot of Nietzsche. There’s an alien kind of quality, in my opinion, to the Killer, where he’s almost kind of in a spaceship hovering low. A nicely edited, stripped-down-by-Fincher version of that exists early on, when he’s saying, “It’s not that I feel superior, I just feel apart.” The [character description] in the script was kind of, “If you’re really paying attention, you’ll see that he never blinks, but who would pay attention to that?” And I just love that they, and especially Fassbender, ran with that.
What was your process in writing the voiceover monologue that opens the film?
Hopefully the first act, or the first 20 or so minutes, is going to do something that I really like to try to do, which is subvert the audience’s expectations. The process was to rigorously show process. At a certain point, Steven Soderbergh weighed in on one of the cuts, while Fincher was processing and reorganizing some things. And one of the results of him weighing in on it was [Fincher] moving the line “If you can’t stand boredom, then this isn’t the work for you.” It was a nice way to kind of warn the audience like, This ain’t going to start at a breakneck pace. I love making the audience experience the same kind of tedium and meticulousness that this person doing this job would need to have acquired.
Esther Zuckerman
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