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.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
I have always wanted my art to service my people - to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life.
I really don't care that much about "Beauties." What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love. The word itself shows why I like Talkers better than Beauties, why I tape more than I film. It's not "talkies." Talkers are doing something.
My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.
It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new.
If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.
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