David Fincher Thinking Quotations

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.

You know, I don't think I've ever listened to someone's commentary. Ever.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the filmmakers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think: Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire. These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.

The simple-minded always look for something - if it's not pornography, it's DVDs or the Internet or video games - but I don't think there's anything inherently evil about Facebook.

If you read the good reviews you gotta read the bad reviews. I kind of think of it as like being a quarterback: you get way too much blame when it's bad and way too much credit when it's good.

If I see a movie for the first time on DVD, I watch it all the way through, the lights are down, I don't pick up the phone. The third or fourth time you see a movie, sometimes you just have them on and you check in every once in a while with things that you liked. I think it's a different expectations from that environment.

I have great appreciation for people who do anything well. I think that it's very difficult to do what you do well.

You can’t take everything on. That’s why when people ask how does this film fit into my oeuvre. I say 'I don’t know. I don’t think in those terms’. If I did, I might become incapacitated by fear . . . How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.