Brow Beat

The Early Work of David Fincher, Explained

A young Fincher with Sigourney Weaver.

Still from Vimeo

Due to having hits like Fight Club, Seven, and The Social Network under his belt, David Fincher is an especially secure auteur, one with enough commercial clout to pursue big-budget projects with near-total artistic freedom.

Before those hits, though, Fincher spent decades fine-tuning his craft in music videos and commercials, and in the above video the folks of Raccord collective take a deep, half-hour dive into the director’s early work. Their analysis may overstate the novelty of Fincher’s career arc—Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Zack Snyder took similar paths to feature filmmaking—but there’s some very interesting stuff on how the director’s short-form output influenced his later style. In the “cool, steely palette” of his Rick Springfield music videos or the Kubrickian horror of his “smoking fetus” advertisement, one can see the beginnings of Fincher’s aesthetic, which would be put to the test in the “baptism by fire” that was his first feature film, Aliens 3.

(via Indiewire.)