this is just great stuff. you have to read it.

Mother From Another Planet - by John H. Richardson 1991

David Fincher, a 27-year-old first time director, was determined to fulfil his creative vision on ‘Alien 3’ despite intense efforts to hold him back.

“Push some smoke up,” says David Fincher, “Push it up!” “Stand by!” says the first assistant director through a megaphone. The crew trains hoses and funnels on a silvery monster that looks like the offspring of a giant praying mantis and the Antichrist. It takes a few minutes for the crew to get the steam and smoke up to full inferno. “Here we go!” “More fog!” cries Fincher.

The camera dollies in. The camera operator, lying on his belly, ducks under a flat pipe and curves around to shoot the alien through a scrim of chain link. The Alien whips its head from side to side and starts to howl. In the movie, this moment will come a few minutes before the climax, when the indomitable Lt. Ellen Ripley and a team of religious-fanatic convicts dump a vat of molten lead on its head. Yesterday they shot the scene ten times, using black paint for lead – 10,000 gallons of it over and over on the head of some poor guy in a rubber suit.

“Cut!” says Fincher, drawing a finger across his throat. The crew immediately starts to wet down the set for another shot.

It’s December 1991, and they are shooting Alien 3 on a soundstage on the Twentieth Century Fox lot. Principle photography began almost a year ago in London, but when shooting went 23 days over schedule and untold millions over budget, Fox pulled the plug and ordered the filmmakers home. Originally scheduled to debut in the summer of 1991, then put off till Christmas, the movie is now aimed at Memorial Day 1992.

For months Hollywood has been rife with Alien 3 rumours: that it’s a disaster, that it cost upwards of $60 million, that preview screenings were horrible, that Fox chairman Joe Roth hated it, that it really needed 6 weeks of reshootss and another $15 million and then maybe it would work. There is another side too – that it’s visually brilliant, daring, a work of art from an extraordinary young director.

If nothing else, the movie is certainly extraordinary for the choice of its director. David Fincher is probably the only 27-year-old first-time filmmaker ever hired to direct a $50 million movie (Fox’s official number, give or take a few million). Add to that the first director was let go while sets were being built, that the line producer was fired just before the start date, that the script wasn’t finished until two weeks into shooting, and you have a young man with his hands extremely full. As one of his friends puts it, “He was right out of Naval Academy School, and he got put at the helm of the Titanic”.

Today is the seventh day of reshoots – “Not reshoots,” Fincher corrects, a bit sharply, “stuff we didn’t get before” – and they have been working on this one five-second shot since 7:30 AM. It’s now 4:30 in the afternoon, and they are two hours behind. Fincher is dressed in jeans and sneakers, with a grey baseball cap and a trim beard. He is calm, ironic, and exceptionally self-possessed, with some sly humour of Bill Murray. When a crew member makes an adjustment and tells Fincher he thinks it’s good enough. Fincher calmly demurs: “This movie isn’t made for people who see a movie one time, it’s a movie for people who’re going to see it five times.”

Fox executive Michael London whispers “That’s where a lot of the friction comes. David wants it to be perfect every second.” He quickly adds, “Which is what he’s paid to do.” It comes out only a tiny bit grudging.

Now Fincher is trying to fix a new problem – the alien is shaking its head so much that the steam doesn’t seem to be coming off its body. “You know what it is,” he says, “As long as it’s straight up and down, it’s all right, but when he picks up that left knee….”

And he wants to make a lighting change. When someone asks what the change is, London shrugs: “I’m sure it’s infinitesimal.” We seem to be heading straight to the door marked CREATIVE DIFFERENCES.

It takes another hour before they’re ready to shoot again. “Bring up the steam,” says the AD through his megaphone. “here we go. Everybody man their stations. On your marks.” They shoot it. “Let’s do it again, right away.” Says Fincher. “Steam up,” says the AD. “Get the lead on…..and…….ACTION!” “Cut.”

Fincher orders more changes and dashes over to the editing room. As he walks, he talks about how tough the shoot has been and how he’s fighting to keep the film bleak. Although he’s often described as arrogant, he seems merely direct. But he occasionally drops a remark that would make a studio executive with millions of dollars on the line a tad nervous: “I’m not making this movie for 50 million people,” he says, “I’m making it for 8 people, my friends, people who know the cameras and lighting.” That works out to a budget of just over $6 million per friend.

Back on the set, Fincher has another go at the scene. “This shot is about five times more complicated than when we started out,” London says. The studio was expecting just 2 simple shots of the writhing alien, but Fincher has added dripping water, foreground pipes, and extra steam. Fox executive vice president Tom Jacobson and senior vice president Jon Landau have joined London and all three executives are looking over Fincher’s shoulder. “Action, action, action!” cries the AD. The steam guys blast the alien with thunderclap bursts of smoke. “Let’s go again while we’ve got steam!” the AD calls. “Save the steam,” Fincher says calmly. “Play it back for me.” He watches the playback intently. Finally he nods, satisfied. It’s 6:30, eleven hours after first call. He’s got his five seconds of film, his way, and it looks great.

Fincher: So what do you want to know about my movie?
Q: How you got involved, the production process, what happened in London. All that staff.
Fincher: Well, it’s weird, because when I got involved, it was, we have a movie to make. How do we solve these problems? How do we get this movie made? I’d love to just take the 50 million bucks and just f***in’ start over again.
Q: That’s worth talking about. Maybe we can save some young director…….
Fincher: What would you say? There’s no way a first-time director can make a $50 million movie in this town with the f***in’ recession on the eve of the millennium, you know, with the panic that exists in this business right now. There’s no way. You can’t do it, because in the end, if you can’t say, “I made Jaws, trust me,” why should they trust you? One time, (producer) David Giler, incredibly aggressive and p***ed off on a conference call with Fox, said, “Why are you listening to him for, he’s a shoe salesman!”.
Q: Meaning your Nike commercial.
Fincher: Exactly. And it’s perfectly valid. What do I know? I’m a shoe salesman.

*****The article then goes into detail on the scripts by Gibson, Red, Twohy, Ward and Fasano, Pruss and the arrival and departure of both previous directors, Renny Harlin and Vincent Ward*****

On their short list of potential saviours was David Fincher, a video director with a reputation of one hell of a shooter. The son of a Life magazine reporter, Fincher produced a local TV news show while still in high school. As a nineteen-year-old Industrial Light & Magic employee, he shot some of Return of the Jedi.

He was a founding member of the ultrahip Propaganda video house, which four years later was bringing in a $50 million annual gross. And he had moxie to spare – he tells of meeting Sid Ganis when Ganis was the president of Paramount and pitching him a complicated idea. “He said to me, ‘Fincher, nobody is going to give you $40 million for a first picture.’ And I said, ‘Sid, I know that. What would I do with a 40-minute movie?’ ”

Hill & Giler had discovered Ridley Scott and James Cameron when they were virtual unknowns, so they were well disposed to hiring beginners. They asked Pruss, who had worked on a screenplay for Fincher, for a reference. “I said, ‘Yeah, I know him (Fincher),’ ” Pruss recalls. “He wouldn’t direct the movie in a million f***ing years.”

Fincher, it turned out, considers the first Alien one of “the ten perfect movies of all time.” Pruss tried to tell Fincher he was making a mistake. “I said, ‘David, you’re f***ing nuts. Why are you doing this? Why don’t you direct your own movie?’ ” he recalls. “And he said, ‘I don’t know, there’s just something about it. It could be cool. Don’t you think it could be cool?’ ”

Q: So you’ve been depressed?
Fincher: I don’t know. It’s just…..I don’t get any sleep any more. At a certain point, I just start waking up. Wake up at two, three, four on the hour.
Q: Thinking of things you could have done differently?
Fincher: Why didn’t I do this, why didn’t I do that, how do I f***ing leave the country without you knowing.
Q: I can’t imagine what it’s like, having spent a year of your life…….
Fincher: Two years, my friend, two years…….