Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by David Fincher

There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch.

You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.

When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.

How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

You know, I don't think I've ever listened to someone's commentary. Ever.

A lot of people hated 'Alien 3.'

Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies.

I like characters who don't change, who don't learn from their mistakes.

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

I like the idea of R-rated franchises.

If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.

You won't see me on Barbara Walters; Oprah, that's not who I am.

It's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.

Yet as a director, I don't feel you have to identify with your characters as a requirement to make a movie.

I learn the most from making my own mistakes.

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

Again, a franchise to me doesn't have to be a billion dollar title.

Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.

The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.

Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.

I like studios. I just don't like bureaucracies.

For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.

I loved Luke Skywalker and I loved Darth Vader and I loved watching them work it out.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.

Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time.

I was a disinterested student.

And I love shooting football.

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

I don't know how to depict intelligence.

When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.

For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

We were working with this lousy print and it just wasn't going to be good enough. I said that we should get the original negative and do it from that. Well, a couple guys pointed out that the negative was locked up over at Deluxe.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.

Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.

It's based not only on what it played like in the theater, but it's also knowing that certain things play differently in a home theater environment. You have different expectations when you're sitting with 700 people than when you're sitting with your friends or family. It's just a different world.

Hire the right people and get the hell out of the way.

I was always interested in films that scar.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay.

I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think, "Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire". These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.

I want people to flourish. I want them to walk away from the experience going, "That's what it should be like."

Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.

I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

I learned just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise.

I have demons you can't even imagine.

People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.

People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.

The thing I always say to any writer that I'm working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.

It's a very American thing to hide away from death.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

I want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying "Oh, god, didn't we already do this 17 times?"

Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes of something. They start looking at you like, "What did I do wrong?", and its like "No. It's not wrong. It's just that we are going to try something different."