David Fincher's experience making Alien 3 was, by all accounts including his own, a nightmare. The studio interfered constantly. The final cut wasn't his. He disowned the film. When Se7en came to him in 1994 — a script by Andrew Kevin Walker about two detectives hunting a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as a blueprint — Fincher saw an opportunity to make exactly the movie he wanted, with exactly the ending he wanted, and to tell anyone who objected to go to hell.
New Line Cinema, to their credit, mostly let him. The studio's one major concern was the ending — the box, the head, Brad Pitt screaming "what's in the box" — which they considered too dark for a mainstream release. Pitt, who had star power New Line needed, reportedly threatened to walk if the ending was changed. The ending stayed. The movie made $327 million worldwide and established Fincher as the most important thriller director of his generation.
Se7en is a film about rain. It rains in every scene. Fincher and cinematographer Darius Khondji developed a photochemical process called "bleach bypass" that drained the color from the film and gave everything a greenish, decayed look. The city in Se7en has no name. It's just a city where it always rains and terrible things happen. The production design was meticulous: every set piece was built to look like it had been rotting for decades. The sloth victim's apartment took weeks to dress.
Brad Pitt was 31 when he made Se7en. He was already famous — Interview with the Vampire, Legends of the Fall — but Se7en was the film that proved he could act in a register that wasn't "beautiful man in a period piece." Detective Mills is impulsive, arrogant, and ultimately destroyed by exactly the flaws the killer identified in him. Pitt played the part with a rawness that he wouldn't return to for years.
This promo tee — Pitt's portrait with the red tally marks — is from the original 1995 campaign. Vintage. There's one.
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Header image: Photo: Egor Gordeev via Unsplash