David Fincher used artificial intelligence in the 4K release of Se7en for a thrillingly silly edit

In 1995, a few years after the critical failure of his debut film “Alien 3”, David Fincher released his second feature film to the world and proved that he is not only a great filmmaker, but also one of the industry's most promising young voices. That movie was Se7en, starring Morgan Freeman as veteran detective William Somerset and Brad Pitt as hotshot detective David Mills. The two are paired up to investigate a series of brutal and twisted murders inspired by each of the seven deadly sins, and thanks to an absolutely iconic final scene“Se7en” has maintained its reputation as one of the greatest crime thrillers of all time.

Recently Collider's Perri Nemiroff interviewed Fincher about the film 30 years later and the changes made for the new IMAX and 4K physical media releases. Nemiroff noted that Fincher had previously stated at Tribeca that he would not make major changes to his films for 4K releases, but was curious if he would change anything for “Se7en.” This is where Fincher's attention to detail really kicked in, as he discussed fixing a problem that he doubts anyone else has ever actually noticed. It's a sequence in which two actors meet in a bar to chat, and despite the fact that each set-up has 14 or 15 shots, “once in a while you choose the ones that mean the most to you in terms of the performance, you're going to have technological errors.”

The result was what Fincher called “this unsolicited and unearned camera pan where the character moves and then the camera turns to follow them, but follows them late and beats them, and ends up seeing more lane than intended.” That little mistake must have bothered him for years as he jumped at the chance to fix this scene with the AI.

Fincher told Nemiroff that the performance in that scene was too good to use any other footage, so the pan went into the final edit first, but he was determined to make it work. “We had enough background, but at the beginning of it we had cut off one of the actors' shoulders, and he's wearing a black leather jacket, and there's no data,” Fincher explained. “We don't know how that shoulder connects to the sleeve and what kind of elastic folding and deformation of the skin is in that jacket.” So Fincher asked if it was possible to use footage from other shots of the day to “restore” the jacket so he could get rid of the panoramic shot. He continued:

“We took three or four different shots from before that had a jacket that we liked, and then we fed it, and then we had it spit back into the AI, and then we took the background from where the camera went and just put it together. As a result, it's the dumbest fix in the world because if you see it, we didn't do our job, and you might not realize it happened, but you look at it. and just think to yourself, “It's so nice that we can fix things like this today.”

People reading this headline probably cringed even at the mention of the word “AI”, but what a filmmaker with a history of being vocally opposed to technologyit certainly sounds like an example of using AI as a tool rather than a replacement method. He also added that working with cinematographer Darius Hondji involved mixing and matching moments of raw footage in the same scene. In the new update, the artificial intelligence was used “to at least get the focus in the eyes so it's on the soft side, but not completely useless,” he explained.

But will anyone even notice the change? We'll have to wait and see when people first check out “Se7en” from IMAX starting today, or via The 4K Ultra HD release will be available on January 7th and can be purchased here.