Most
of the making-of documentaries and featurettes you find on DVDs and Blu-rays
are worthless, and are usually nothing more than wholly artificial products of
the public relations department. The film's production is made out to be
nothing more than a labor of love; the actors, crew and filmmakers have nothing
but glowing things to say about the project and the interviews seem more like
official statements than genuine human moments. These days I will only watch
DVD documentaries if I have an unusual affection for the film being discussed,
or if I hear from other sources that a particular featurette or documentary is
worth my time. I’m not always pumped to spend 45 minutes of my life watching
what is essentially a video press release.
There
are still plenty of ways to do them right. At their best, such documentaries
can be an honest chronicling of the highs and lows of film production; with all
the frustration and potential satisfaction that this implies. Intentionally or
otherwise, this has been the case with most of the films of David Fincher. (As
if I needed another reason to swoon over the man.) The special editions of his
DVDs not only have a satisfying quantity of special features and commentaries,
but their quality is also superb. However, one of the most telling making-of
documentaries in his career is the one for his first film: Alien 3. (Or Alien3
for the purists.) This documentary is notable not just for the notoriously bad
film it’s discussing, but also because it works wonderfully as a David Fincher
origin story. Based on some of the evidence we see, there’s reason to believe
that Fincher would not be THE David Fincher we know today if it weren’t for
this one nightmarish production.
The
Alien 3 documentary—which, for our purposes, I will henceforth refer to simply
as The Making of Alien 3—winds up working quite well as a companion piece to
How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook?, the documentary that accompanies
the DVD for The Social Network. How Did They… was praised by many when it was released
for being a making-of documentary that actually, y’know, showed people how a
movie was made. The camera was there as Fincher, writer Aaron Sorkin and the
cast rehearsed the film in a small room, the camera was there on set as the
film was shot, and it never backs down from showing the process to be exactly
what it is. As great as the movie turned out to be, How Did They Ever Make a
Movie of Facebook? still makes the whole process look like work. Which it is,
despite what other making-of documentaries might tell you.
How
Did They… is full of terrific moments that take you further inside a film
production than most documentaries would dare. There's a couple bits in which
Sorkin and Fincher argue in a professional manner about removing lines of
dialogue—at one point Fincher calls one of Sorkin’s lines “cutesy”—and a few
seconds of Fincher giving the boom operator an earful when the microphone winds
up in the shot. It’s a brief moment, and one that probably happens dozens of
times in every film production, but it’s not the kind of thing one normally
sees in a making-of documentary. If you’ve gotten tired of the usual formula,
it’s pretty darn refreshing.
Fincher
has come to be known for his perfectionist and exacting style of filmmaking.
Everything needs to be perfectly planned out and rehearsed, and when it comes
time to roll the camera he will frequently require an absurd amount of takes.
He knows what he wants when he gets to the set, and he will make sure that he
gets it a hundred times over. According to one of Jesse Eisenberg’s
testimonials in How Did They…, the opening scene of The Social Network—in which
Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica Albright breaks up with him amid a rainstorm
of Sorkinian dialogue—required 99 takes. However, he goes about it in a fashion
that the actors quite clearly respect. He engages with them between takes and
works with them to get the desired result. Eisenberg in particular is over the
moon about Fincher’s directing style, at one point saying that he wished the
opening scene went over 100 takes.
Contrast
this with The Making of Alien 3, in which Fincher is depicted as a man with
virtually no control over the film he’s making. According to a couple
testimonials, Fincher was likely brought in because the studio thought they
could push him around more than a seasoned veteran. They weren’t entirely
correct, but at the end of the day Fincher couldn’t do a whole lot about it.
When he began production on Alien 3, the script wasn’t completed and all he had
to work with was the cast and the sets. He knew the basic gist of where the
movie was going, but the production had an improvised feel to it that
ultimately doomed the film’s quality. There are still Fincherian touches—like
the striking visual style and the occasional attempts to make it about
something more than the titular beast—but it is never enough to elevate the
experience as a whole.
The
Making of Alien 3 is shockingly honest in its depiction of how everything
around the film went wrong. Fincher never makes an appearance as a talking
head, but there’s plenty of on-set footage that shows his frustration with the
circumstances. Fincher’s emotional state is mostly communicated through
interviews with the actors, all of whom seemed to adore working with him. He
had no power to do anything except make the exact movie that the Fox executives
wanted him to make, which is a bad enough situation. The real trouble came
because he didn’t know what movie that was on any particular day. Contrast that
with How Did They…, which shows us a Fincher who has complete control over the
movie he’s making. Not only does he have creative control, but he has the whole
thing planned out down to the second. One of my favorite moments in How Did
They… is when Fincher is staring at a monitor and he instructs the cameraman to
“pan right a micron.” If you’ve ever wanted the modern Fincher in a nutshell,
there it is.
In
fact, all of the documentaries in the Alien Quadrilogy box set are wonderfully
frank about how the movies came to be. The filmmakers talk quite honestly about
how the final story of Ridley Scott’s original film was the result of heavy
studio tampering with Dan O’Bannon’s original script. (When interviewed,
O’Bannon says he considered not even seeing the movie because he felt his
original vision had been bastardized. He eventually came around.) Based on
these documentaries, all of the Alien films were incredibly hard, long
productions that took a heavy toll on the director. In the case of Alien and
Aliens, the struggle was more than worth it. It wasn’t for Fincher and Alien 3,
and that had to be crushing.
When
watching The Making of Alien 3 and How Did They… back to back, it’s easy to see
how one Fincher eventually became the other Fincher. The complete control he
exerts over his recent productions like The Social Network feels like a direct
result of his experiences making Alien 3. After suffering through that project,
Fincher left feature filmmaking altogether until he was eventually roped back
in with Se7en, and thank the film gods he was. It’s logical to infer that the
horror of Alien 3 was what forced him to adopt his more perfectionist style,
and he’s used it to give us some of the most striking films of the last several
years. If David Fincher hadn’t made Alien 3, it’s very likely that he’d still
become a great, successful filmmaker. Would he still be the elite director that
we know him as today? Of that I’m less sure.
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