David Fincher has confirmed what many internet sleuths have suspected in recent months, that he is in fact remastering Seven in 4K, which he said he needed to make some background adjustments.
The director made the revelation during a Tribeca Festival talk with Steven Soderbergh Thursday night, when in response to an audience question about whether he’s revisiting his old work (“I won’t; I’m not brave.”) , explained how to make adjustments while remastering Seven.
“Were doing Seven straight away. And we go back and do it in 4K from the original negative and we overscan it, oversample it, do all the due diligence and there’s a lot that needs fixing,” Fincher said. “Because there are a lot of things we can add now because of the high dynamic range. You know, streaming media is very different from 35mm film negative in terms of what it can actually hold. So there’s, you know, a lot of blown-out windows that we have to go back a little bit and haunt a little piece of the cityscape out there.
He said the issues are largely unnoticeable, but “on a 100-inch screen you look at it and you think, ‘What the fuck, they only had money for white cardboard?’ So that’s the print stock kind of thing, it’s just blown away by being there. And now you’re looking at it and thinking, ‘I can see, you know, 500 nits of what the fuck.'”
But he clarified that he is “fundamentally against the idea of changing what (the movie) is.”
“You can fix, you know, three percent, five percent. If there’s something serious, it needs to be addressed,” he said. “But you know, I’m not going to take all the guns out of people’s hands and replace them with flashlights.”
Steven Spielberg famously replaced guns with walkie-talkies in the 20th-century anniversary version of ETwhich Spielberg recently revealed he regrets doing.
“That was a mistake,” Spielberg said at the Time 100 summit this spring about his change. “I should never have done that. ET is a product of its time. No film should be reviewed according to the lenses we are now, whether voluntarily or forced to look through… I should never have messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t advise anyone to do so.
In defense of Fincher, Soderbergh suggested that his friend and fellow director is a little more detail oriented than others.
“David sees things not many people see,” he recalls Fincher inviting him to a session while he was working on a movie.
“David has a laser pointer and it’s frozen on the shot and you’re like, ‘I want that part of the wall a quarter darker,'” Soderbergh recalled. “I walked out and lay down on a couch in the lobby because of what torture it is to watch that.”
