David Fincher People Quotations

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

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.

Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies.

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.

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

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

People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.

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.

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.

Hire the right people and get the hell out of the way.

What you learn from that first, and I don't call it 'trial by fire,' I call it 'baptism by fire,' is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There's nothing worse than hearing somebody say 'Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,' and you have to agree with them, you know?

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.

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.

I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.

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.

I want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying "Oh, god, didn't we already do this 17 times?"

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

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 like people that like to work the way that I like to work.