David Fincher Quotes

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.

Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay.

People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.

I don't know how much movies should entertain.

To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

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.

Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes of something.

They start looking at you like, "What did I do wrong?", and its like "No. It's not wrong. It's just that we are going to try something different."

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

I learned just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise.

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping.

There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.

You have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom.

You can do whatever you want in your own home. It's a much more relaxed thing. It's more like a book, it seems to me. That's kind of the way I watch movies.

If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.

It's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.

We live in a silly time, and people go to the movies to see something that they haven't seen before, and you have to promise to show them that. In a horrible way, you have to promise them a special effect.

People always ask why I don't make independent movies.

I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.

Take ownership of every decision you make because you will be hold responsible for the film, whether good or bad.

I've never been to Harvard, I've never been to college, so I don't know what dorm life is like.

How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

When you go and you tell a studio and that it's an ensemble, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.

When you cast somebody you cast them not only for.

.. I look for an inherent kind of quality. You are going to be shooting 14 hour days and you are going to be tired. You are going to not necessarily be able to conjure armor or a façade every single moment.

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

You’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies.

The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.

It's based not only on what it played like in the theater, but it's also knowing that certain things play differently in a home theater environment. You have different expectations when you're sitting with 700 people than when you're sitting with your friends or family. It's just a different world.

Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time.

Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.

Look, it's nice. I like the fact that critics liked this movie, but most of the movies that I've made, you'll find a handful of people that love it and more than a few other handfuls of people hate it. If I was invested in that, I would've given up long ago.

For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises.

I have great appreciation for people who do anything well.

I think that it's very difficult to do what you do well.

And I love shooting football.

It's a very American thing to hide away from death.

I was a disinterested student.

Every child is different. Every child responds in a different way.

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.

Our Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever.

You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story.

Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.

I want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers masturbate to.

Awards movies are normally sort of... life-affirming and noble. It's probably too much of an intellectual conceit and, you know, people don't like it when you don't lead the bad guy off in cuffs.

I have demons you can't even imagine.

When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.

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.

You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them.

You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them.

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

I learn the most from making my own mistakes.

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.

There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of.

I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

I want people to flourish. I want them to walk away from the experience going, "That's what it should be like."

You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success.

Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.