There may be seven deadly sins but David Fincher is maxing his Ks at eight — well, four, as there is really no set distributor that can handle 8K. As such, it was a 4K restoration of Seven that was screened at this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival, although Fincher is still proud of the work presented to viewers.
Appearing at the annual festival, David Fincher pointed out that those who catch this quasi-8K transfer of Seven may be caught off guard by the “imperfections”, which he is well aware of. “It is what it is, warts and all…And some of it is spectacular and some of it is stuff that I would change or fix today, but I didn’t want to mess with that. There’s a lot of imperfections, there’s a lot of things that you just don’t see on film. When people say they love the look of film, what they’re talking about is chaos, entropy, and softness. Now, of course, we live in an HDR world where you get those kinds of very deep, rich, velvety blacks for free.”
As with any high-definition transfer, that of Seven presented the issues of “how much”, something that can easily limit the authenticity and filmic quality — too much and the transfer looks overproduced, ruining the experience and discrediting so much of the filmmakers’ work. For this, Fincher had plenty of meticulous details (no surprise there) on how this was approached for Seven. “And we had to negotiate that fine between what to fix or not…So we attempted to go back in and fix to make it match. And kind of repaint stuff and just take out water spots and little edge flashes. And some of it is impossible to get it to match, certainly by today’s standards. So there was a lot of excavation.”
It took around six months alone for David Fincher and his team just to compile their notes to get moving on the Seven transfer. It will be pretty incredible once distributors can catch up with 8K, which will allow all of Fincher and company’s work to be seen the way they intended three decades later. Even so, a 4K downscale is nothing to lose your head over, so fans should be on the lookout for the Blu-ray release early next month.
Will you be checking out Fincher’s Seven on 4K? Which other film of his would best benefit from an 8K treatment?