Plenty of films want to sell us on the idea that sinning is fun. Se7en is not that film. Drenched in the cold city rain, grime coming out from the sewers and onto the streets, cockroaches scattering behind furniture and paint peeling off the walls, in the world of Se7en there’s not much fun about life at all. And yet, since its release thirty years ago, David Fincher’s neo-noir-tinged detective thriller/serial killer horror has been a fan favorite, pulling in more than $327 million worldwide and firmly cementing a place on the Letterboxd Top 250 with a whopping 4.3 average rating. Not bad for a movie that makes you want to take a shower the minute you finish watching.

Beneath all of the shocking moments of grotesquerie as Detectives Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman) track the meticulously orchestrated slaughters executed by John Doe (Kevin Spacey), Se7en’s resonance comes from how it invites us to question the futility of feeling good about anything in this life. It’s the ultimate glass half full or half empty story, as these men see some of the worst that humankind is capable of every day, and Mills somehow retains a positive outlook while Somerset has lost all hope for society. Over the course of a week, these two develop a natural bond while their worldviews continuously clash. Director Jim Cummings writes in a Letterboxd review of Se7en that “outside of the incredible craftsmanship displayed in its filmmaking, it’s an incredible character study with perfect fusion of character-comedy and detective-pornography.”

Cummings is one of many filmmakers who adore Fincher’s sophomore feature, which laid the foundation in 1995 for essentially every gnarly detective thriller that would come in the years to follow. “Easy to forget that this became the template for the genre it reinvented, but beyond that it’s a spectacular piece of provocation and confidence,” Matt writes, which Dirk echoes by saying, “The true star here is David Fincher. He has created an aesthetic that has been copied so many times, but has never really been equaled.” Dirk also opens his review by pondering, “It is always difficult to determine when you are ‘allowed’ to call a film a classic or a masterpiece,” then three paragraphs later ending with the declaration that Se7en is, indeed, both.

So that settles that. Here’s my conversation with David Fincher.

On Letterboxd, Se7en is currently the 108th highest-rated movie of all time—
David Fincher: What does that say about Letterboxd?

Well, you tell me. What do you think that says about the Letterboxd community?
That causes concern. I think you’re going to have to look into that. I used to get these updates from [producer] Arnold Kopelson, may he rest in peace, and Arnold would call and say, “We’re in week five and we’re still selling out matinées!” I was like, “Okay, by the time you get to week ten, tell the FBI to go in. Anybody who’s watching this movie at a matinée in its tenth week, just pick them up for questioning.”

Track the people who are seeing it more than once at matinées.
Exactly.

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 as we were cutting the film, and I 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, , 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.

One of my favorite details in Se7en that I wanted to touch on is Brad Pitt’s ties. You mention in one of the four commentaries on the physical release that those were actually Brad’s idea. How often do you let your actors weigh in on those kinds of specific costuming details? Are there other examples across your career that come to mind?
Oh, yeah, tons. I look at that stuff as their purview. Brad’s idea was that this is a guy who wears a leather jacket out in the rain. He wears a suit because he has to wear a suit and he wears a tie because he has to wear a tie. He doesn’t really know how to tie a tie. So he leaves them pre-tied on a hanger. The idea that one of them was all covered in soccer balls and one of them is covered in footballs, another one has basketballs on it, I thought was kind of hilarious. I think there was one that had a bowling ball and bowling pins, too. But there was something about it that was so kind of Granimals and childlike that I just thought it was hilarious.

Pitt came up with a lot of stuff. On Fight Club, [Se7en screenwriter] Andy Walker and I used to go to his house at seven in the morning to wake him up because he was always saying, “I think I need to do a little more work on the script.” So Andy and I would literally hop over the fence and go into his house and start rattling around in the kitchen and making coffee. Pitt came down one day in this ridiculous terry cloth pink robe that was covered with coffee cups, and he said, “I know you want one, but this is mine and Tyler Durden is wearing it.” It’s in the movie, and it’s just fantastic.

Morgan had that stuff, too. I saying to Morgan, “Here’s eight different switchblades, which one do you want?” He picked the tiniest one, and I was like, “Well, don’t you want to be able to do more damage?” He said, “It’s a tool, David, it’s not a knife.” You want anything that’s going to tell you that they’re thinking about it and that they’re infusing themselves in it. All that stuff I find to be super helpful. Also, it just gives you an idea of who they are.

We’re in the winter season right now, a time every year when we see a huge spike in watches for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on Letterboxd. How do you feel about that film becoming such a Feel Bad winter holiday staple for people?
Well, as the guy who coined the phrase “The Feel Bad movie of Christmas,” it’s a great honor to hear that is actually occurring. There’s probably a little too much sodomy in it for me to embrace it as a Christmas movie, but to each his own.

I’m one of many who was devastated that your plans to finish off the Lisbeth Salander trilogy never came to fruition. I read an interview where you mentioned that you spend a lot of time developing three or four things for every one thing you end up doing. Out of all your past projects that were in development that didn’t come together, from Rendezvous with Rama to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to World War Z 2 and beyond, are there any that stand out to you as like, “Damn, I really wish I had gotten to make that one”?
Movies fall apart for a reason, and I try to stay extremely even-keeled about this stuff. I learned from a great friend—and a lovely and talented man—named Joel Schumacher very early on in my career that you can’t want something more than the people who are going to finance it because then they got you. You want to keep your head above the fray. I say this all the time: when I presented the budget for Fight Club and it was $63 million, I wasn’t like buying a solid gold Bentley and putting a new wing on my house. I was making the same amount of money that I was contracted to make. We needed that money to crash planes and blow up buildings and do all that stuff, and we presented them with the storyboards and all that.

So I feel like you don’t want to be in a meeting going, “Come on, don’t you see, this is going to be…” I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be a harpy. I want to be the person who’s the voice of reason saying, if you do this and you do this, there’s no chance that if we spend $63 million on Fight Club, that it will be misconstrued as Trainspotting. It’s going to be a whole other thing, right? Because there’s going to be a scale. And by the way, Trainspotting is one of my favorite movies. But somebody could have done the $6 or $7 million version of Fight Club and there would not have been a lot of shooting at airports, and there would not have been a plane crash. You wouldn’t have had a CG penguin talking to him. I want to be able to articulate that to the person who’s going to be paying for it in an even-keel way. I don’t want to fail. I don’t want to get high on my own supply. So I look at it as having a ionate detachment.