The most exacting director in Hollywood. Procedural detail, take counts in the hundreds, and a worldview that's quietly nihilist all the way down.
David Fincher started in commercials and music videos in the 1980s — including Madonna's Express Yourself and Aerosmith's Janie's Got a Gun. He took over Alien 3 in 1992 after development hell and disowned the result. He has spent every film since pursuing a level of technical control most studios consider unreasonable.
He shoots, famously, dozens of takes. He works in high-resolution digital, often at native 5K or 6K, and grades down. His sound mix is detailed to a degree most directors don't bother with: the apartment hum in Fight Club, the basement HVAC in Gone Girl, the ammunition rattle in The Killer.
Fincher's habit of shooting 50, 70, sometimes over 100 takes on a single performer setup is documented. The standard interpretation is that he's chasing a specific performance moment. Fincher's own framing, given in interviews, is that he's exhausting the actor's conscious choices so that what's left on camera is the actor's body language under fatigue.
Robert Downey Jr. famously left jars of his urine on the Zodiac set as a silent protest against the take count. Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo have both described the experience as the most difficult of their careers.
Fincher was an early adopter of high-end digital cinematography. He shot The Social Network on the RED, Gone Girl on the RED Epic Dragon, The Killer on the Sony Venice. He grades aggressively — Gone Girl's amber-and-grey palette, The Social Network's greenish underexposure — to push digital cinematography away from naturalism toward an almost hyper-real corporate sheen.
His longtime DP Jeff Cronenweth (son of Blade Runner's Jordan Cronenweth) has been with him for most of the digital era.
Fincher's films are interested in obsessive men doing detailed work inside indifferent institutions. The detectives in Zodiac. The Facebook lawyers in The Social Network. The hitman in The Killer. The serial killer in Mindhunter's interrogation rooms. Almost no Fincher protagonist ends the film morally improved. Almost all of them succeed at their narrow task.
It's not a cynical worldview exactly — Fincher's films take craft and effort seriously. But they refuse to soften the picture of human nature his films keep returning to.
If you've never watched a Fincher film:
Alan J. Pakula, William Friedkin, Roman Polanski, the post-Watergate American thriller tradition. Fincher has spoken extensively about Klute, The Conversation, and All the President's Men.