What’s in the box?

John, Westy and Matt tell the story behind David Fincher’s Se7en, the 1995 thriller that turned the seven deadly sins into the grimmest, wettest police procedural ever made. This is the film that dragged Fincher back from the wreckage of Alien 3 and announced him as one of the defining directors of his generation, and it very nearly reached us in a completely different, far tamer shape.

Our deep dive runs from Andrew Kevin Walker’s script, written during a broke and miserable stretch in New York, to the postal mix-up that accidentally handed Fincher the uncompromised ending a nervous studio had tried to soften. We get into the casting of Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as two detectives who couldn’t be less alike, the decision to drown every frame in rain, and the studio war over a finale executives were convinced would sink the film. Whether you’re here for the craft, the dread, or the sheer nerve of it all, this is the thoroughly researched, big-laughs, big-opinions story of how one of cinema’s bleakest classics survived its own making. Just maybe don’t watch it on a first date.
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