David Fincher on the lasting legacy of Se7en’s pervasive horror • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

You’re one of the modern kings of the opening credit sequence, and Se7en sets that tone immediately by putting us in the world of John Doe. What’s important for you in creating a title sequence as a mood setter?
Well, with Se7en, we had a hole to fill. We originally had this whole sequence, which was Morgan on a commuter train going to upstate New York someplace or up in Hudson Valley. The idea was that he was coming back from having visited a house that was for sale and this is where he was going to flee to after his usefulness was terminated. And we just ran out of money. We weren’t going to be able to do this. Movies evolve. They’re like Nickelodeon slime, initially. Before they’re ballistic, they’re nothing. So we tried to keep our wits about us as we were cutting the film, and I remember thinking, ‘We need some John Doe in this title sequence. We need to have some kind of idea. At least we know he’s out there doing his evil little shit.’

Because, remember, the promise of a thriller is that you will eventually cross paths or you’ll be able to get in front of the train. If the detectives are diligent enough and they’re wise and smart enough, they’ll be able to pick up on certain things. This is the delusion of the behavioral sciences, is that you will be able to be predictive of where this is all heading and you’ll be able to get in front of it. Well, what happens, obviously when Spacey comes wandering in, spattered with blood—that’s when all bets are off because the movie is a horror movie. The movie is about utter and total loss of control. The blood he is spattered with is absolutely 100 percent connected to two lines before that where one of the lieutenants says [to Brad Pitt], “Hey, your wife called, get yourself an answering machine.”

We knew that we had this powerful re-entry into the movie, which was Kevin coming in and going, “You’re looking for me.” But other than that, we have a phone conversation with him and we have a guy in, ironically, a hat and raincoat at the end of the hall firing a gun at us. That was all we had for 90 pages, 94 minutes or something like that. So we were tasked with this crevasse to bridge. We started to look at what assets we had that we could use to create something that would say, meanwhile, across town, this is how this guy’s thinking. It just kind of created a little bit of madness at the edges of these frames.