By Filmmaker David Fincher recently has been doing press for the upcoming 4K re-release of his 1995 breakthrough film “Se7en” and discussed one of the film’s biggest talking points – its ending. More specifically what’s in the box.
The movie ends with it having been revealed that John Doe (Kevin Spacey) has murdered and beheaded the pregnant wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) of Brad Pitt’s Detective Mills character.
Doe placed her head inside the aforementioned box. We never see the contents of the box, only the horrified reaction of Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) to its contents.
Talking to EW, Fincher has dismissed the long-held myth that it was a prosthetic replica of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head:
“It’s entirely ridiculous. I think we had a seven- or eight-pound shot bag. We had done the research to figure out, if Gwyneth Paltrow’s body mass index was X, what portion of that would be attributable to her head. And so we had an idea of what that would weigh, and I think there was a weight in it.
And we did put a wig in there, so that when Morgan rips the box open if there were some of this tape that was used to seal the box – I think it was a shot bag and a wig, and I think the wig had a little bit of blood in it, so some of the hair would stick together. Remember, I think Morgan opened 16 or 17 of those things. But as I always say, you don’t need to see what’s in the box if you have Morgan Freeman.”
Fincher also says it was a LOT of work to get the film up to 4K snuff and cinephiles who praise film as a medium often aren’t aware of how beat up some of these prints can get:
“I know that there are a lot of people who tend to bag on digital, but if you could see a 30-year-old negative and what it looks like even when immaculately stored — it was an enormous amount of fixing, just digs and scratches and cinch. So a good couple of months were just devoted to bringing the thing back to what I would consider to be a negative, and then we could begin.
We were really trying to get back to that first CCE check print that we saw 30 years ago when we were like, ‘Okay, that’s the movie. That’s the contrast of it. That’s the density of it. Those are the colors. This is where they’re muted, and here’s where they’re vibrant, and really just try to remember what — technologically and artistically — that first print effect was. And I think we did.”
The “Se7en” restoration is in IMAX theaters from today with the 4K Blu-ray getting a release on Tuesday.
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