Explore Quotes by David Fincher

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

You’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 do agree you can't just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

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

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.

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.

I want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers masturbate to.

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.