David Fincher: The Procedural as Obsession

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000

David Fincher shoots dozens of takes of the same shot — the legends say fifty, seventy, a hundred — until the actors stop performing and simply are. That obsessive process is not a quirk sitting beside his films; it is the subject of them. Almost every Fincher picture is about a person who cannot stop working the problem: a detective who will not let the case go, a programmer who will not stop until the site is perfect, a hitman who has built an entire philosophy of discipline around the act of waiting. The man who does a hundred takes makes films about people who do a hundred takes at life, and it usually costs them everything they have.

Zodiac: Fincher's Procedural About the Cost of Obsession

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

David Fincher made his name on Se7en, a film that ends with the worst thing in a box and a killer who wins by design. So the first surprise of Zodiac, released in 2007, is how completely it refuses that machinery. Here is the same director, working in the same genre — a hunt for a serial murderer who taunts the press — and he strips out almost everything an audience expects a serial-killer film to deliver. No cathartic capture. No final confrontation. No music swelling to tell you the horror is over. What Fincher gives you instead is the truest film ever made about the actual texture of a criminal investigation: the phone calls, the handwriting samples, the jurisdictional squabbles, the years.

David Fincher - vo.rs

David Fincher: The Procedural as Obsession

Zodiac: Fincher's Procedural About the Cost of Obsession