David Fincher is notoriously known for doing an obsessive amount of takes per scene, all just to make sure that he gets the best performance from all of his actors and the “perfect shot.” This is the same man who literally had to stop a take because a tiny thread was out of place on someone’s shirt on “Zodiac.” So, yeah, he clearly has a bad case of OCD as well. But so did Kubrick.
In “Mindhunter,” he shot 75 takes for one particular scene.
For “Zodiac,” he spent an entire afternoon trying to get a closeup of Jake Gyllenhaal's hand tossing paperwork inside his car. And you never see the actor's face in the final shot.
In “The Social Network,” in response to a question about how many laptops he broke during that famous laptop smash scene, Andrew Garfield stated that it took 13+ scenes to get the shot Fincher wanted (that’s a lot of wasted laptops).
Now we have Charles Dance, playing William Randolph Hearst in Fincher’s upcoming “Mank,” revealing to Total Film that the “Mank” team performed over 100 takes of the climactic dinner party scene and, suffice to say, Gary Oldman’s patience got tested:
“We did take after take after take after take,” Dance said. “And [Oldman] said to David at one point, ‘David, I’ve done this scene a hundred fucking times.’ And Fincher said, ‘Yeah, I know, but this is 101. Reset!’”
“It was definitely hard,” Seyfried added about filming so many takes of the scene. “But at the same time, it’s like theatre in that you have the luxury of really nailing the tone and the emotion. It does feel like ‘Groundhog Day,’ in a way, but that’s how he captures things that most people don’t.”
Amanda Seyfried had previously stated that in “Mank,” Fincher’s obsessive-compulsive behavior resulted in a week of shooting and 200 takes of that single scene before he was satisfied with the result.
…I was part of scenes with tons of people in it and we would do it for an entire week. I can’t tell you how many takes we did, but I would guess 200, maybe I could be wrong and could be way off. Um, I could be underestimating by five days of one scene when I didn’t have one line… ‘You think I can just relax?’ No, because there are probably about nine or 10 different camera angles that had been on me at one point.
Fincher wants to get a scene right, as he envisioned it. Much like Kubrick, Fincher is an obsessive perfectionist, and the movies speak for themselves. IndieWire claims that he seems to do on average a good 50 plus takes per shot. Regardless, this kind of obsessive attention to detail shows in his films, where every frame is so precisely calculated.