David Fincher’s 1995 mystery crime thriller Se7en is a dark and gripping film that has since become a genre-defining classic. Decades later, the film has been given new life through IMAX and 4K releases, giving fans a sharper, richer experience of its grim aesthetic.
But in a recent interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Fincher revealed that the remastering process wasn’t just about improving visual accuracy, it was also an opportunity for a “thrillingly stupid fix” that no one else would have noticed.
Fincher, known for his meticulous attention to detail, revisited a minor issue in a scene where two characters meet at a bar. Despite shooting 14 or 15 takes, the final edit included a “technological malfeasance” where the camera awkwardly pans late, overshooting one of the actors and exposing more of the bar than intended.
While the performances were too good to discard, the pan had nagged at Fincher for years. For the 4K release, Fincher turned to AI to correct the shot, a process he described in detail:
“We had enough of the background, but at the beginning of it, we had cleaved off one of the actor’s shoulders, and he’s wearing a black leather jacket, and there’s no data.
“We don’t know how that shoulder connects to the sleeve and the kind of supple wrinkling and deformation of the leather in that jacket.”
Fincher’s team used footage from other takes to reconstruct the missing details of the jacket. Using AI, they merged these elements seamlessly with the background, effectively erasing the distracting pan.
“We took three or four different shots from earlier, which had a jacket in them that we liked, and then we input that, and then we had it spit back out AI, and then took the background from where the camera landed and just composited them together.
“So, it ends up being the most thrillingly stupid fix in the world because if you see it, we didn’t do our jobs. And you probably won’t see it.”
This subtle use of AI shows its potential as a creative tool rather than a replacement for human artistry, a topic Fincher has historically been vocal about.
In another instance during the restoration, AI was used to adjust the focus in scenes where mixed raw stock left the actors’ eyes slightly soft. Fincher noted:
“We used AI to at least get the focus in the eyes to be on the soft side, but not completely useless.”
While the use of AI in filmmaking is often a controversial subject, here it’s enhancing a film rather than altering the essence of it.
