Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.
Interpretation
Movies are never truly complete; the process ends when creators decide to move on.
David Fincher's quote reflects the complex nature of film-making, emphasizing that a completed film is more a matter of the creators' decision to stop refining it than a definitive point of perfection. It highlights the reality faced by filmmakers that they must reconcile with the fact that their work will always have room for improvement and cannot be polished indefinitely.
In practice
When discussing the creative process at a film festival.
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.
In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.
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.
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.
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.
In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.
You know, I would say that songwriting is something about the expression of the heart, the intellect and the soul.
If you don't have anything to say, your photographs aren't going to say much.
What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer.
Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.
Now that the black experience isn't viewed as box-office death, people are catching up to untapped auteurs.
Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.