David Fincher’s Seven will be released on 4K next week and the director has spoken about using AI to help him with it. More on that below.
Seven is surely one of David Fincher’s finest films. The 1997 serial killer thriller is a masterclass of tension and features all-time great performances from Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt. The film also looks gloriously dirty and sweaty, but a new 4K restoration might smooth out some of the 90s wrinkles.
We reported in November that Seven would be available to buy on 4K UltraHD from 6th January and as that date approaches, Fincher has been chatting about the project.
Fincher got together with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff and told her how AI was used to achieve the restoration. Fincher mentions the scene in a bar where Detectives Somerset and Mills chat about the case. Turns out, the scene had a teeny tiny mistake in it, but Fincher is known as a bit of a perfectionist, so it probably bothered him.
“In this case, there was this unasked-for and unearned camera pan where a character moved, and then the camera panned over to follow them but followed them late and overshot them and ended up seeing more of the bar than was intended,” Fincher described. A character’s jacket proved to be a real problem in trying to fix the shot, but now, with the help of AI, Fincher was able to get the shot he wanted on the new version.
“So 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.”
Easy peasy! Fincher seems to have also found other uses for AI than just the one bar scene.
“There were shots that I didn’t even realize where I would consider today to be unusably out of focus, and some of those things we were able to go in, make mattes of the section that we wanted, and use AI to at least get the focus in the eyes to be on the soft side, but not completely useless,” the director told Collider.
If you’re still holding out hope for a physical release for Fincher’s superb Netflix series Mindhunter, we have bad news for you. Fincher himself seems convinced it’ll never happen as he admitted in the same interview. Talking about physical media, Fincher says he likes “the act of holding them.”
“But I can’t imagine there’s any interest in the business plan from Netflix to make packaged goods out of the stuff that I’ve made for them because their whole thing is that mainline that connects your eyeballs to their servers.”
Seven is available on 4K UltraHD from 6th January.
