David Fincher

David Andrew Leo Fincher (born August 28, 1962) is an American film director and producer. Known for his psychological thrillers, his work has received multiple nominations in the Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards. Born in Denver, Colorado, Fincher developed a passion for filmmaking at an early age. He first gained recognition from directing numerous music videos.

Fincher was raised in San Anselmo, California, where he became interested in movies at a young age, in part because he was a neighbour of filmmaker George Lucas. Fincher was still a teenager when he became an assistant cameraman at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas’s special-effects studio. In the mid-1980s Fincher began directing commercials, which quickly led to a successful career as a music video director. He made some of the most iconic music videos of the 1980s and ’90s—including those for Madonna’s “Express Yourself” (1989) and “Vogue” (1990), as well as Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” (1989)—which were noted for their pronounced cinematic qualities, such as elaborate sets and deft camerawork.

David Fincher’s Filmography:

David Fincher, who began taking film classes as far back as elementary school—which was also right around the time he discovered an aversion to bureaucracy. And authority. And unquestioned rules of any kind.

In the early eighties, Fincher skipped college and went to work for the rich guy up the street, taking a job at the Lucas-owned Industrial Light & Magic — where he helped out on Return of the Jedi — before directing an incendiary commercial for the American Cancer Society featuring a lifelike puppet fetal puffing on a cigarette. Made for just a few thousand dollars, the ad was a black-humored homage to the spectral “Star Child” of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it brought on the first controversy of Fincher’s career: major networks refused to run the spot, while tobacco companies objected to its bluntness.

David has several Oscar nominations to his name, and feature credits include Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl.  He is executive producer and directed the first two episodes of the multi award winning Netflix series, House of Cards and Mindhunter.

In 1992 Fincher made his feature-film directorial debut with Alien 3. The movie had a troubled production, and it did poorly both critically and commercially. The experience soured Fincher on big-budget film franchises, and his next movie was the relatively small-scale thriller Se7en (1995), which revolves around two detectives (played by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt) searching for a serial killer (played by Kevin Spacey) who bases his murders on the seven deadly sins. The moody Se7en earned positive reviews and was a box-office success, establishing Fincher as an up-and-coming director in Hollywood circles. He then made The Game (1997), in which a financier (Michael Douglas) gets caught up in a dangerous game of cat and mouse after receiving a mysterious birthday present from his wayward brother (Sean Penn).

A perfectionist behind the camera, Fincher became known for his proclivity to shoot a scene numerous times—sometimes more than 50 takes even for a relatively minor shot. His demanding nature resulted in films with great visual flair, including his 1999 work, Fight Club (starring Pitt and Edward Norton), which centres on a disaffected white-collar worker who establishes a series of underground fighting organizations. That film doubles as a sardonic exploration of self-identity and masculinity. A box-office disappointment in its theatrical run, Fight Club became a cult sensation on home video, where it developed a devoted following. Fincher then made Panic Room (2002), the tale of a mother (Jodie Foster) and daughter (Kristen Stewart) who fight off a harrowing home invasion.

It was five years until Fincher’s next feature film, Zodiac (2007), which recounted the murders of the Zodiac killer and the ultimately futile attempt to capture him. A marked departure from his previous films, Zodiac contains little of his signature dark colour palette, gloomy urban settings, and disorienting camera angles. Instead, the film is a stylish and tense procedural told in a straightforward manner that evokes the classic paranoid “whodunits” of the 1970s.

Fincher continued to broaden his range, directing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), an adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about a man (played by Pitt) who ages backward. Although it was not as widely critically acclaimed as Zodiac, the film did earn Fincher his first Academy Award nomination for best director. He then helmed The Social Network (2010), a portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to power. The film was hailed by many critics as a 21st-century analogue to Citizen Kane, and Fincher won the best director Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Fincher returned to a focus on sordid crime with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), a sleek adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel about the investigation of an unsolved murder. He then served as an executive producer of the political drama House of Cards (2013–18), an episodic series that was created for Netflix and distributed via the company’s online streaming-video service. Fincher also directed the program’s first two hour-long episodes and won an Emmy Award for his work on the opening episode. He then directed a big-screen adaptation of author Gillian Flynn’s best-selling thriller novel Gone Girl (2014), about the mysterious circumstances surrounding a woman’s disappearance. His next project was the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017– ), about the first criminal profilers at the FBI; Fincher directed several episodes of the show and served as executive producer.

Tim Walker of The Independent praised Fincher’s work, stating “His portrayals of the modern psyche have a power and precision that few film-makers can match.” In 2003, Fincher was ranked 39th in The Guardian‘s 40 best directors. In 2012, The Guardian listed him again in their ranking of 23 best film directors in the world, applauding “his ability to sustain tone and tension”. In 2016, Zodiac and The Social Network appeared in the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century list. In addition to films, Fincher has often been admired for producing some of the most creative music videos.

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