David Fincher (*1962)
He has been the master of intelligent thrillers since the mid-’90s, when his film Se7en first made filmgoers the world over realize that there is an heir to the throne of Hitchcock, though with a much darker side to it and barely a modicum of humor.
A director obsessed with details, David Fincher’s films are a very smart balancing act between spectacle and smart screenplays, and though he has sometimes been outsmarted by his own technology, so advanced that it drowns out any appreciation of the film itself, as in Panic Room and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, his most recent film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, re-established him as a master of the dark arts who can hint at evil without overpowering his story with its depiction.
His next film is more adventure than thriller, but he will continue on the path of using the best technology to render his vision. The project is based on Jules Verne’s classic novel, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, and to shoot the film in 3-D. This will be a big departure for the filmmaker, who certainly has the capability to execute the project successfully and is taking on subject matter (in line with all the other projects recently that have used multidimentional rendering) that would seem to fit this kind of technology.
Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote the screenplay for Fincher’s first big hit, Se7en, is adapting the novel in collaboration with Scott Z. Burns, who was recently responsible for the very intelligent Steven Soderbergh film, Contagion. The film, currently titled 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo, is tentatively scheduled for release some time in 2013 (though this could easily be pushed back to 2014, given Fincher’s history of time-consuming post-production work). The Nemo in the title refers to the captain of the Nautilus, a submarine first mistaken for a sea monster, which he commandeers through the waters of the Pacific in the 19th century. This won’t be a flippant-minded Life Aquatic, but it ought to be worth the wait nonetheless. Stay tuned.
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