How 1970s cinema shaped David Fincher’s life and career
The movies we watch as teens tend to stay with us forever. Whether it was the coming-of-age boom of the 1980s, the gritty independent cinema of the 1990s, or the warm rom-coms of the 2000s, it’s likely that there’s a little space in your heart reserved for those films that made up your first solo trips to the cinema. For those who grow up to make movies of their own, it can bleed into their own work, and for David Fincher, that era of cinema was the 1970s.
Born in 1962, Fincher saw out the entirety of his pre-adult teen years in the era of bell bottoms and disco. After testing out his directing skills in school plays, the budding director cemented his love of cinema during the 1970s, taking more trips to the theatre in a week than most of us do in a year. The impact of those cinema trips would extend far beyond the bottom of his popcorn bucket into his life and career decades later.
“I have no ‘top five’,” the director declared when A.frame asked him to pick out a selection of movies that changed his life, “but here are five from a particularly fertile span of moviegoing (thrice a week, religiously) during the 1970s.”
The list that followed included some classics of the era, including William Friedkin’s thrilling The French Connection and Steven Spielberg’s iconic sci-fi Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which Fincher admitted changed the way he looked at the night sky. He also shared his love for John Carpenter’s iconic horror Halloween, commending the “murky sense of culpability [that] imbues every thrilling steadicam P.O.V. with heretofore unknown DREAD”.
When Fincher retreated from the theatre and took his first steps into the film industry in the early 1980s with assistant camera roles and music video projects, the influence of that era of cinema would spill into his work. Elements of these beloved 1970s cinema viewings can be seen in Fincher’s own feature filmography, in his own penchant for thrill and dread.
From the terrifyingly thrilling end to Seven to the chilling Zodiac, Fincher invokes similar feelings in his own filmmaking. The latter, in particular, seems like an ode to the director’s formative love of 1970s cinema, finding its setting firmly in that era. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr, the film tells the story of the real-life Zodiac killer who committed his crimes and delivered his communications. in the ’60s and ’70s. The killer’s identity has still never been confirmed.
The movie takes literal influence from the 1970s, with settings and style true to its origin story, but the influence of the cinema of the era can be felt, too. Over the course of two hours and 40 minutes, Fincher calls back to those themes and feelings of ’70s neo-noir crime flicks. The dread is never-ending, as we already know there will be no real resolution to the story. The dark and murky visual style, too, seems to pay homage to the cinema-going of his youth.
Fincher’s work is often rooted in a time and place – Fight Club finds its home in the grit and toxic masculinity of the ’90s, while The Social Network charts backstabbing and billionaires in an undeniably 2000s setting with nods to Napster and MySpace – but Zodiac is some of his best work in this realm. Perhaps it’s because of just how well he knows the era that inspired it.