"Se7en" Opening Sequence: Analysis Part 1

Here are some of the iconic credits from the opening sequence: David Fincher's 'Se7en'

Kyle Cooper is speaking where i have quoted, and the rest are my own person ideas, alongside my next blog entry where i look at it in more detail.

Fincher initially came to me with an idea about Morgan Freeman taking a train ride from this gritty, dark, rainy city to a house out in the country that he wanted to buy for his retirement. He needed a temporary title sequence for a studio test screening, so we made this slide show using some of John Doe’s scrap books. It was just stills, and we used a hand-drawn type to suggest that Doe did the writing himself.

FONT- Here he was thinking about the idea of credits as handwriting to suggest the dark part of John Doe’s personality and his obsession, and he actually scratched all the credits on a scratchboard and then scanned it back in.

"I was thinking that because John Doe was a photographer, not only is he writing the type but he’s making  the film optical in his bathtub – he’s physically doing it because he’s got a dark room in his ratty apartment.  So the editor, Angus Wall, who’s gone on to edit The Social Network and Zodiac and other Fincher films, he  and I were writing all kinds of things on the film and stapling it together. The night before the shoot I went around  my house trying to think about the darkest things I could find to make the shot more twisted. I remember taping  fish-hooks together and taking a matt of hair out of my drain."

"I was thinking that because John Doe was a photographer, not only is he writing the type but he’s making
 the film optical in his bathtub – he’s physically doing it because he’s got a dark room in his ratty apartment.
 So the editor, Angus Wall, who’s gone on to edit The Social Network and Zodiac and other Fincher films, he 
and I were writing all kinds of things on the film and stapling it together. The night before the shoot I went around
 my house trying to think about the darkest things I could find to make the shot more twisted. I remember taping 
fish-hooks together and taking a matt of hair out of my drain."

MARKER PEN-"John Doe has this rage and indignation at people’s behaviour and he’s crossing out things that shouldn’t be there. The idea of life and pregnancy and marriage and our ideas about what this perfect life is: he doesn’t think we deserve to have those kinds of experiences. At the end of the day, people are always trying to do things that are bleak and shocking and it’s difficult to do something that reflects a bleak worldview unless you’ve experienced some of those things yourself. But it’s kind of a wink because it is so playful – it’s like a spirited, playful dance. I don’t think of it as super dark."

HANDS- When they filmed the opening sequence, the producers/director looked at many hand models and the one that was hired was a Tai Chi guy, whom was pretty large- and strange, scary and seemed rather threatening. Fischer was apparently upset with the casting as apparently his hands looked nothing like Kevin Spacey 'If you look at spacey's hands, his fingers are long and thin, but this guys hands were kind of stumpy'