Filmmakers David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh closed out this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with a Q&A covering a number of topics where Fincher also revealed he’s working on a 4K remaster of his 1995 film “Se7en” according to IndieWire.
That news is a surprise as Fincher famously dislikes revisiting his older work. That said, “Se7en” may be an exception. Whilst the film was released on VHS and Laserdisc in 1996, Fincher was involved in a major two-disc special edition DVD in 2000 which used then still fairly new digital color correction with the help of colorist Stephen Nakamura.
With the new disc, Fincher says the plan is to go back to the original negative and use modern technology to fix some of the more blatantly problematic stuff that will unflatteringly show up on a 4K image.
However he’s pretty clear this won’t be an “E.T.” or “Star Wars” style special edition with drastic changes. Rather it’s going to be the same film, but with a couple of background elements getting a digital touchup:
“We’re doing ‘Se7en’ right now, and we’re going back and doing it in 4K from the original negative, and we overscan it, oversample it, doing all of the due diligence, and there’s a lot of s— that needs to be fixed.
Because there’s a lot of stuff that we now can add because of high-dynamic range. You know, streaming media is a very different thing than a 35-millimeter motion picture negative in terms of what it can actually retain. So there are, you know, a lot of blown-out windows that we have to kind of go back and ghost in a little bit of cityscape out there.”
He adds that the biggest issue is the cheapness of the sets become obvious on a massive screen at such high resolution:
“On a 100-inch screen, you’ll look at it and go, ‘What the f—, they only had money for white cardboard out there?’. So that’s the kind of stuff on print stock. It just gets blown out of being there. And now you’re looking at it, going ‘I can see, you know, 500 units of what the f—.'”
From the sounds it, we’re getting something more akin to “Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Director’s Edition” where it’s about correcting shortcomings at the time as opposed to adding anything new.
Fincher adds that he’s “fundamentally against the idea of changing what ‘Se7en’ is” but a remaster can spruce up some small things:
“You can fix, you know, three percent, five percent. If something’s egregious, it needs to be addressed. But, you know, I’m not gonna take all the guns out of people’s hands and replace them with flashlights.”
Fincher next has “The Killer” starring Michael Fassbender arriving on Netflix later this year whilst Soderbergh has the upcoming limited series “Full Circle” debuting on Max soon.
