We all have our favorite parts of filmmaking, whether it's creating the shot list for production, working with actors on set, or watching the first cut of the film. There is a part of the filmmaking process that speaks to each of us. This sentiment holds at every level of a person’s filmmaking career.
During the 2023 Tribeca Festival, David Fincher joined Steven Soderbergh in a conversation about his favorite part of the filmmaking process. Surprisingly, shooting the film is not at the top of his list.
"Shooting for me is a lot of indigestion," Fincher said.
This begs the question: What is Fincher's favorite part of filmmaking, and why?
David Fincher on the set of 'Mank'Credit: Netflix
"I love rehearsal," Fincher reveals. "I enjoy talking to people about the intention, going over every single word, and discussing the script's meaning while listening to people read it. I love the casting process and designing the movie. Sitting with the production designer and the DP, we talk about what we want to convey, where we want people's attention, and what we need to emphasize."
"By the time it gets to the shooting... I don't enjoy shooting," the director admitted. "I find it to be a necessary evil. I would much rather workshop it and have someone else take over after all those conversations and bring it home. But you have to be there!"
Fincher's ambivalent relationship with filming became more complicated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The director's latest project for Netflix, The Killer, was shot with strict COVID-19 safety protocols, making Fincher's strict and almost perfectionist-like directing process more challenging.
"Movies require you to show people how much you care and the effort you put in. They have to see it in your face and eyes," Fincher said. "Shooting a movie last year with all the COVID protocols, working through a mask and a visor... I had no idea how much I was conveying through facial expressions and sound effects. It was a completely different experience."
'The Killer'Credit: Netflix
Currently, Fincher isn't working on any new films. Instead, he has turned his attention to remastering his classic 1995 crime thriller, Se7en.
"We're going back and remastering it in 4K from the original negative. We overscan it, oversample it, do all the necessary work. There's a lot that needs to be fixed because high dynamic range allows us to add things we couldn't before. Streaming media is very different from 35mm motion picture negative in terms of what it can retain. So there are a lot of blown-out windows that we have to ghost in a bit of cityscape," Fincher explained.
Fincher emphasized that the remastering process would not involve removing any aspects of the film that may have aged poorly over the years. He stated his firm stance against changing the essence of the film and said, "I'm not gonna take all the guns out of people's hands and replace them with flashlights."
Variety believes Fincher is referring to Steven Spielberg's decision to digitally remove guns from a scene in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, replacing them with walkie-talkies for the movie's 20th-anniversary release. Spielberg admitted that it was a mistake as it altered the original intent and tone of the scene.
However, older works should not be sanitized to make audiences feel comfortable. Cinema is meant to challenge audiences' perceptions of the world and its inhabitants. Protagonists and antagonists aren't meant to be squeaky clean. The world is complex, with both ugliness and beauty. Films should reflect this complexity and allow audiences to decide if the film resonates with them.
'Se7en'Credit: New Line Cinema
Fincher is a filmmaker who pushes boundaries and isn't afraid of being dismissed. He has confidence in the work he creates and moves on to the next project with different intentions for each new story.
So, what can we learn from Fincher's Tribeca conversation?
Stay true to your creative vision, even if it causes discomfort. If people don't receive it well initially, it's okay. What matters is that you and the team behind the film are content and satisfied with the project you've created. Tell the story that matters to you and tell it in your way.
Let us know in the comments what your favorite part of the filmmaking process is!"
I read somewhere that there are only two best-case scenarios for a great screenplay—either it meets the expectations of the audience or it doesn’t. Either they sigh in relief or gasp out loud in shock.
Giving your audience what they want shouldn’t be difficult for a practiced writer. A character has a desire, and they achieve it at the end of the story. Boom! Expectations met!
But there’s something oddly satisfying about not meeting those expectations in a screenplay, leaving the audience shaken in disbelief.
Many compelling screenplays use something called misdirection—it's sneaky, it's intelligent, and it takes viewers somewhere unexpected. It's all about planting subtle clues that seem insignificant until a revelation forces us to reconsider everything.
Let’s examine how this narrative tool, when used thoughtfully, can transform straightforward storytelling into something more complex and satisfying.
What is Misdirection?
Misdirection is distracting the audience to mislead them, preventing them from getting on to your scheme of actions, until you finally reveal the truth. In essence, it is a style of storytelling, where the “audience proposes, filmmaker disposes.”
In misdirection, a filmmaker manipulates information, character(s), and their timing in the narrative while building the conflict, until everything falls into place to reveal an unexpected resolution that does not match the audience’s expectations.
Many times, the audience is also purposefully misdirected by exploiting their biases, prejudices, and gullibility.
Why Would Any Filmmaker Misdirect Their Audience?
A story is as interesting as its narration. Be it a bedtime story or Nolan’s Inception, if the narrative is linear and flat, it may be less engaging to your audience.
Misdirection is one of the finest tools that acts like a hook to your story. Misdirecting elements are thought-provoking, working with the audience’s psychology to throw them off guard.
Fiction gives you the freedom to alter realities, but even while misdirecting, it is important that the dots connect effectively by the end of the story. Information shouldn’t be irrelevant and without context.
How Do You Misdirect Your Audience?
You can use any story element to misdirect the audience, but the most commonly used are characters, sound, props, plot points, strategic information reveal, and the time of the incident of any event.
Examples of Misdirection in Great Films
Gone Girl by David Fincher
Misdirection by unreliable narrator
This is one of those stories that is completely narrated in misdirection.
The film opens through husband Nick’s (Ben Affleck) perspective, who becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), on their fifth marriage anniversary. As the investigation and media frenzy take over, we are let into the lives of our two main characters and led to believe that Amy might actually be dead.
We learn about their failing marriage and Nick’s extramarital affair. Thus, when Nick lies through his teeth about his loving relationship with Amy to the police, he instantly becomes an unreliable narrator in the story.
Thus, even though his alibis are believable, you cannot trust him and can’t take his word. Rather, you, with the police, start suspecting him.
This automatically shifts all your trust to Amy instead, even though you know even less about her than Nick. Wonderfully, you have begun rooting for her now.
What you might not realize is that you have been misdirected to dislike Nick as a character, so that you automatically take Amy’s side right from the beginning, until it is revealed that Amy is alive and purposefully in hiding.
This is one of the many misdirections in the film.
By regulating how the audience judges the characters, their morality, and their intentions, a filmmaker often shatters the expectations of the audience with misdirection to give them a more surprising resolution than expected.
The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan
Misdirection by character
Just by establishing a character in a certain way and revealing information about them strategically, a filmmaker can determine the character’s impression on the audience.
This is what M. Night Shyamalan does in The Sixth Sense. The magician of misdirection keeps both the characters and the audience engaged, looking for the ghost, all the while narrating the events through the ghost’s perspective!
The beauty of a nuanced misdirection lies in the clues left throughout a film’s events, leaving you both frustrated and delighted at the same time that you didn’t pick up on them!
Money Heist by Álex Pina
Misdirection by sound
In the Spanish drama series, Money Heist, the makers use a powerful misdirection but with a genius twist. This misdirection is not only for the audience per se, but for the main character—the Professor (Álvaro Morte), too.
In the Season 2 finale of the drama series, the Professor and Raquel (Itziar Ituño), the love of his life and newly minted partner-in-crime known as “Lisbon,” are sprinting through a dense, shadowy forest. The air crackles with urgency as police hounds close in, their shouts breaking the eerie silence of the forest.
Eventually, they are forced to separate, with a radio as their only mode of communication. Raquel ends up taking refuge in a barn, but not for too long. The police arrive, and she is completely surrounded. A gun to her head, she is ordered to compromise the Professor, but she’s steel-willed and denies the police any information.
All the while, the Professor is on the radio with her, frightened and worried, begging her to tell them everything in exchange for her life. The Professor frantically runs through the forest to reach Raquel, when… bang! A gunshot rips through the radio.
The Professor stops dead, the forest swallowing his anguished cry. But as the episode races to its close, the fog clears. The shot? A cruel ruse. She’s alive and in police custody. The Professor’s despair was their bait, and he bit—hard.
What I love about this particular sequence is that the filmmakers don’t use misdirection as a generalized cliff-hanger of “what happens next.”
Instead of revealing that Raquel is alive in an upcoming episode of the next season, they make a choice to reveal it at the tail end of the same episode.
Raquel is a crucial character in the series at this point, so to lose her in the narrative would have been a huge plot twist. At times, thrillers do go for the cheap surprise, whether it makes sense or not. But in Money Heist, the reveal elevates the value of the misdirection because now the audience knows things are going to change forever—for better or worse.
Final Destination 5 by Steven Quale
Misdirection by props
The sequence leading up to Candice’s fall in Final Destination 5 is a series of brilliantly crafted misdirections that keep us on the edge of our seats until the mishap finally happens.
The misdirections also seem to be symbolic, as the death of poor Candice (Ellen Wroe) is a sharp irony. Throughout the scene, we keep worrying about the loose screw in her gymnastic apparatus but how she is killed by it in the end is absolutely unexpected—just how a nuanced misdirection should be.
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
Misdirection by casting
Killing the heroine halfway through the film was a risky but brilliantly used misdirection by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, especially considering the film dates back to the ‘60s.
An actor’s face value is as important as their acting skills. Big actors usually have strong plot armor and are expected to survive the story.
In Psycho, when a star like Janet Leigh is killed off midway through the movie, the audience is thrown off guard and does not know what to assume, whose story to follow, or what to expect next. This amplifies the shock factor of the plot twist.
Misdirection can turn your story into a fun experience with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. When done well, a reveal should prompt viewers to think, "Of course! How did I miss that?" rather than, "That came out of nowhere!"
The audience hates being deceived. So, not meeting audience expectations doesn’t mean you lie and fill the screenplay with deceiving information, revealed in an untimely way, aiming for a plot twist in the climax that feels isolated and seemingly unmotivated.
Also, be careful not to clutter your narrative with forced misdirections.
For a better understanding, check out the examples in the article—how each misdirection is a strategic literary device, not just a stylized form of storytelling.
David Fincher on the set of 'Mank'Credit: Netflix
'The Killer'Credit: Netflix
'Se7en'Credit: New Line Cinema
