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.
But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.
With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.
It took, for me, a long time to develop this idea of what to do on the radio. But from the beginning of my time in radio, I had pretty non-traditional tasks.
If you make your living writing, and you can't write anything, it's over. It's very frightening.
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.