Before Se7en, David Fincher nearly sunk his teeth into Blade
A recurring character in comic book cinema, David S. Goyer tells The Happy Sad Confused podcast about developing Blade with Fincher
Today, it’s impossible to imagine David Fincher directing a superhero movie. Honestly, in 1994, it was kind of impossible, too. Considering the hell Fincher went through making Alien³, it seemed like he was done with franchise filmmaking entirely. But leave it to screenwriter David S. Goyer to reveal that he and Fincher developed a Blade movie together before Se7en came along. In a conversation bursting with interesting tidbits about the last 30 years of genre filmmaking, David S. Goyer told Josh Horowitz of The Happy Sad Confused podcast [via Variety] about working on Blade with Fincher.
“I developed a draft with Fincher before he had done Se7en. I think he had done Alien³, and maybe he was developing Se7en. I developed a draft with him,” he says. “I remember going to our producer’s office. There was this giant conference table. Fincher laid out 40 to 50 books of photography and art with post-it notes inside them. He said, ‘This is the movie.’”
As Goyer describes it, Fincher was far more involved in the development process than expected. Goyer recalls the future Killer director taking him on a “two-hour tour” of the aesthetics for the movie, describing the vibe for different scenes and characters. “It was such a fully fleshed-out visual pitch,” Goyer says. “I had never done something like that before.”