Kiri2l

FINCHER: It was offensive to me on a certain level that when Saw and those other movies came out, people said, “Well, torture porn really started with Seven.” Fuck you. There’s enough pervy shit going on in Seven that I don’t have to get on my high horse to defend its artistic sensibilities. It was lurid. It was supposed to be lurid. But the thing I appreciated about it and what I thought Andrew Kevin Walker’s script did so well was that it got your mind in overdrive. It worked on your imagination. We were extremely conscious of the fact that we were talking about torture, but we never actually showed it.

PLAYBOY: You’ve cast Brad Pitt as the star of Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. What’s the dynamic between you?

FINCHER: Brad fucks with me all the time. So does Ben Affleck. When we did Fight Club, the studio said, “This is awesome; this is going to be great,” because we were going to have a scene with Brad opening the door naked. When it came time to shoot it, being Brad, he said, “I should open the door and have a big yellow dishwasher scrub glove on.” I said, “Perfect.” When the studio executive saw it, she said, “You got him with his shirt off and then you fucked the whole thing up.” I was like, “Excavate that line from Animal House: ‘Hey, you fucked up—you trusted us.’ ”

FINCHER: I’d direct Seven in a different way today. I would have a lot more fun. It was only by the time I did Zodiac or Benjamin Button that I knew what I was doing.

PLAYBOY: Do you ever feel trapped by your own track record as a director?

FINCHER: I know that if a script has a serial killer—or any kind of killer—in it, I have to be sent it; I don’t have any choice. [laughs]

FINCHER: Both Brad and Ben have a default “affable” setting. Neither wants you to be uncomfortable. You cast movies based on critical scenes. In Gone Girl there’s a smile the guy has to give when the local press asks him to stand next to a poster of his missing wife. I flipped through Google Images and found about 50 shots of Affleck giving that kind of smile in public situations. You look at them and know he’s trying to make people comfortable in the moment, but by doing that he’s making himself vulnerable to people having other perceptions about him.

PLAYBOY: Both Downey’s and Gyllenhaal’s complaints were about reshooting scenes over and over. What do you get on take 11, say, that you don’t on take five?

FINCHER: Part of the promise when I work with actors is that we may be on take 11 and I’ll say, “We certainly have a version that we can put in the movie that will make us all happy. But I want to do seven more and continue to push this idea. Let’s see where it goes.” Now, I may go back to them after those seven takes and say, “It was a complete fucking waste of effort, but I had to try because I feel there’s something to be mined from this.” That’s a lot of extra work for an actor, and sometimes it pushes them out of their comfort zone. In some cases they’re not getting paid as much as they would on another movie. I go out on a limb, and people work harder for me than they do for other people. But I want them to be happy with the fact that we were able to do something singular, something unlike anything else in their or my filmography.

PLAYBOY: Do you know if any actors have backed away from working with you because of what they think you’re like?

FINCHER: I’m sure there are people who think I bite the heads off puppies. There’s nothing I can do about that. The relationships that matter to me are always with people who wouldn’t have preconceived notions based on somebody’s work. I gave up worrying about that years ago.

PLAYBOY: How do you look back on directing your first feature movie, Alien 3?

FINCHER: I was a 27-year-old rube trying to navigate an impervious bureaucracy. It was an absurd and obscene daily battle to do anything interesting with what we were allowed to do. It was the same studio but very different players when I made Fight Club. There were 80 corporate people who, for all the right reasons, became terrified of what the movie became. The biggest tipping point was, “God, the movie’s so homoerotic,” and that was a real problem for them. At the time, it was incendiary, but I look back on it now and it’s so fucking tame, it’s almost a TV movie.

PLAYBOY: Whose death has most affected you?

FINCHER: My father died in 2003, and I’d never been with someone when they died before. Almost all the decision-making I’d done in my life was in hopes of pleasing him or reacting against the things I felt he was shortsighted about. All of a sudden there was no north anymore, only south, east and west. When I read Eric Roth’s draft of the script, it felt as though it was talking about an experience I’d had. Everybody kept saying the character was a little passive, and I was like, “My dad was a little passive. People do go through their entire lives being passive.” Benjamin Button is a bit of a dirge. I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was an accomplishment.

FINCHER: I’ve never been a religious person. I’ve always felt that the responsibility we have to one another should transcend punishment, that you should do what you feel is right because it’s right, not because you’re going to be scalded forevermore.

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