David Fincher

David Fincher was born on August 28, 1962, in Denver, Colorado, and grew up in California’s Marin County. Before directing feature films, he worked at Industrial Light & Magic on productions including *Return of the Jedi* and *Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom*. He later directed commercials and music videos. His videos for Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and “Vogue” helped establish the precise visual style that would become a feature of his films.

Fincher’s feature debut, *Alien 3* (1992), was marked by production difficulties and studio interference; he has since distanced himself from the finished film. His next feature, *Se7en* (1995), follows two detectives, played by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, as they investigate murders patterned on the seven deadly sins. He reunited with Pitt for *Fight Club* (1999), adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. Between those films, Fincher directed *The Game* (1997), starring Michael Douglas as a wealthy banker drawn into an elaborate, unsettling experience. He followed *Fight Club* with *Panic Room* (2002), in which Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart play a mother and daughter hiding from intruders.

In *Zodiac* (2007), Fincher depicted the long, inconclusive search for the Zodiac Killer, drawing on books by Robert Graysmith. *The Curious Case of Benjamin Button* (2008), about a man who ages in reverse, earned Fincher his first Academy Award nomination for directing. He received another for *The Social Network* (2010), which dramatizes the founding of Facebook. Aaron Sorkin wrote its screenplay, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composed its Oscar-winning score. Fincher then adapted Stieg Larsson’s novel *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo* (2011), with Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, and Gillian Flynn’s *Gone Girl* (2014), with Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as a married couple caught in a disappearance and a media storm.

Fincher also directed the first two episodes of Netflix’s *House of Cards* and several episodes of *Mindhunter*, a series about FBI agents studying serial killers in the late 1970s. His film *Mank* (2020) stars Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz during the writing of *Citizen Kane*; its screenplay was written by Fincher’s father, Jack. In *The Killer* (2023), adapted from a French graphic novel, Michael Fassbender plays an assassin whose failed assignment sets off a violent pursuit. Across these projects, Fincher has repeatedly turned documented events, novels and graphic stories into films concerned with obsession, deception and the difficulty of knowing what happened.