Three decades after the release of SevenDavid Fincher re-explained the truth about the ending and the legend surrounding it.
With its sadistic killer imagined by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, its twilight atmosphere thanks to the photography of Darius Khondji, the masterful direction of David Fincher, or even this memorable credits to the rhythm of Nine Inch Nails, Seven established itself as a cult thriller since its release in 1995.
With a budget of around $30 million, the film led by Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey and Gwyneth Paltrow experienced a huge commercial successgrossing over 328 million at the worldwide box office. It has established itself in the pantheon of pop-culture, the film being regularly cited or parodied, both by How I Met Your Mother only by Rammstein (the clip shark).
Seven left its mark with the staging of murders until its final sequence, marked by a relentless twist which has sparked much speculation and urban legend over the years (and created an avalanche of Internet memes). For the 30th anniversary of the film and the release in 4K version, David Fincher returned to a persistent rumor.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR SEVEN (AND THE CONTAGION MOVIE)
I got seven days to live my life…
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of SevenDavid Fincher oversaw a 4K remastering of his film, giving it a new lease of life. And during an interview given to Entertainment Weekly in January 2024, the director of The Social Network et Zodiac came back to the famous final scene of the film.
In this sequence, Brad Pitt's character, Detective David Mills, discovers a box delivered by serial killer John Doe, played by Kevin Spacey. Although the contents of the box are never explicitly shown on screen, it is clear that it contains the head of Tracy Mills, the detective's pregnant wife, played by Gwyneth Paltrow.
But according to rumor, it wasn't planned that way. The team had created a fake head of Gwyneth Paltrow, or even an entire replica of her body, but David Fincher ultimately decided not to use it. Legend even has it that his friend Steven Soderbergh reused it years later in the film Contagionwhere it still ends very badly for the actress.
David Fincher confirms that this is completely false:
“No, this is completely ridiculous. I think we had a weight, a bag of sand, of two or three kilos. We did some research to understand: if Gwyneth Paltrow's body weighed so many kilos, how many would be attributed to her head. So we had an idea of what it would be, and I think there was a weight in the box. (…) I think it was the sandbag and a wig, and I think there was a little bit of blood on the wig, so the hair was a little stuck together. Morgan Freeman opened this 17 or 18 times. But like I always say, we don't need to see what's in the box if we have Morgan Freeman. »
…Or seven ways to die
The 4K remastering of Seven was also an opportunity for David Fincher to use artificial intelligence tools in order to correct and improve the original image, while preserving the dark aesthetic and the very particular grain of the film.
The director assured that he had himself supervised this restorationfor which he relied on the original negatives, which required immense work to restore the original copies. Fincher is very proud of the result, which he describes as being very faithful to his vision of the 1995 film:
“We were really trying to go back to the first copy that we saw 30 years ago and that made us say, 'Here's the movie. That's the contrast. It's the density. Here are the colors. Here's where they're muted, and here's where they're vibrant. » And really try to remember what that first impression was – technologically and artistically. And I think we did it. »
The restored 4K version of Seven will be available on the market from January 8, 2025.
