Collaboration is the key to success in Hollywood. And when you get the opportunity to get advice or notes from someone further along in their career, you should take it.

And you should especially take it if that person is David Fincher.

These lessons came to the real world when Zach Cregger, director of Weapons, talked to Variety about how David Fincher made himself available as a sort of mentor for Cregger when he was making Weapons.

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And for that, his name made it into the "Thank You" section.

Now, we've talked about the movie's ending, but let's talk about the contributions that made this instant classic pop on screen.

When asked about Fincher's involvement, Cregger said, "He’s just a very helpful guy. He was available to me during prep, and then he was very available during the post process. He watched the movie and had a lot of really constructive thoughts and gave me a ton of ideas. He helped me learn more about the editing process and how to think about it in a new way that wasn’t available to me when I was making Barbarian. So he just opened my mind up a lot."

When it comes to specifics, it sounds like Fincher really helped Cregger learn about the post process and some nifty tools in some cool ways. Things that you need to have made a lot of movies to understand, or tools you may not know about if you're only on your second feature.

Cregger elaborated, "There are things I thought I had to just settle for. I thought, “Well, that’s the take I have. That’s the best take. And it’s not perfect, but by God, nothing is.” Dave’s attitude is, “It can always be better, and there are a lot of tools that you have at your disposal that you might not be thinking about.” So, from reframing to stabilization to ADR to all sorts of things, it was really cool. Honestly, I learned a lot about how to prep, what lenses to use. I shot this mostly anamorphic, and I didn’t quite respect how limiting anamorphic is in the post process. So stuff like that, technical stuff."

I actually loved hearing this, not just because it reinforces how important collaboration is in Hollywood, but because it's also cool to see how humble Cregger is and how willing to learn.
A lot of what holds people back is their egos.
They can't take a note, or they want to be known as an auteur and don't want anyone's help.
But those people get left behind, and the ones who listen and then pay it forward later are the ones who get ahead.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
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