Top 60 David Fincher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Take ownership of every decision you make because you will be hold responsible for the film, whether good or bad.”

— David Fincher

2. “Every child is different. Every child responds in a different way.”

— David Fincher

3. “Hire the right people and get the hell out of the way.”

— David Fincher

4. “My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people’s idea of obsessive.”

— David Fincher

5. “We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.”

— David Fincher

6. “People will say, ‘There are a million ways to shoot a scene,’ but I don’t think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.”

— David Fincher

7. “The thing I always say to any writer that I’m working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.”

— David Fincher

8. “I have demons you can’t even imagine.”

— David Fincher

9. “Movies aren’t finished, they’re abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.”

— David Fincher

10. “In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.”

— David Fincher

11. “I learn the most from making my own mistakes.”

— David Fincher

12. “I think intelligence is totally subjective; it’s like sexiness.”

— David Fincher

13. “Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.”

— David Fincher

14. “Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.”

— David Fincher

15. “How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.”

— David Fincher

16. “I don’t know how much movies should entertain. To me I’m always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

— David Fincher

17. “Directing ain’t about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn’t want to go to film school. I didn’t know what the point was. The fact is, you don’t know what directing is until the sun is setting and you’ve got to get five shots and you’re only going to get two.”

— David Fincher

18. “There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of.”

— David Fincher

19. “People always ask why I don’t make independent movies. I do make independent movies – I just make them at Sony and Paramount.”

— David Fincher

20. “When I’m watching somebody act, it’s a behavior editorial function – I look at someone act, and I might say, ‘I don’t believe him when he says that.’ I don’t know why I don’t believe him, probably because the people that I’ve met, they don’t act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.”

— David Fincher

21. “People are perverts... that’s pretty much been the basis of my career anyway.”

— David Fincher

22. “You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.”

— David Fincher

23. “It’s a bad day when you don’t get the work done that you need to get done or you don’t get it done to the satisfaction.”

— David Fincher

24. “Look, it’s nice. I like the fact that critics liked this movie, but most of the movies that I’ve made, you’ll find a handful of people that love it and more than a few other handfuls of people hate it. If I was invested in that, I would’ve given up long ago.”

— David Fincher

25. “Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.”

— David Fincher

26. “I like characters who don’t change, who don’t learn from their mistakes.”

— David Fincher

27. “A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.”

— David Fincher

28. “I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.”

— David Fincher

29. “The simple-minded always look for something – if it’s not pornography, it’s DVDs or the Internet or video games – but I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil about Facebook.”

— David Fincher

30. “The thing is, that great actors are everywhere. They’re everywhere. They’re doing good parts on television. They’re doing television commercials. They’re doing local theater. There are so few opportunities.”

— David Fincher

31. “I like people that like to work the way that I like to work.”

— David Fincher

32. “For a number of years, I’d been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I’d always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.”

— David Fincher

33. “I have great appreciation for people who do anything well. I think that it’s very difficult to do what you do well.”

— David Fincher

34. “I want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying “Oh, god, didn’t we already do this 17 times?””

— David Fincher

35. “For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there’s somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don’t know he has a refrigerator full of penises.”

— David Fincher

36. “I don’t think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.”

— David Fincher

37. “I want people to flourish. I want them to walk away from the experience going, “That’s what it should be like.””

— David Fincher

38. “I’m totally anti-commercialism.”

— David Fincher

39. “If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.”

— David Fincher

40. “I’ve never been to Harvard, I’ve never been to college, so I don’t know what dorm life is like.”

— David Fincher

41. “I always say everyone was lucky enough to be in a Cate Blanchett movie.”

— David Fincher

42. “You have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom. You can do whatever you want in your own home. It’s a much more relaxed thing. It’s more like a book, it seems to me. That’s kind of the way I watch movies.”

— David Fincher

43. “If you think that you can hide what your interests are, what your prurient interests are, what your noble interests are, what your fascinations are, if you think you can hide that in your work as a film director, you’re nuts.”

— David Fincher

44. “I do agree you can’t just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that’s longer than most marriages.”

— David Fincher

45. “Hollywood is great. I also think it’s stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.”

— David Fincher

46. “If you read the good reviews you gotta read the bad reviews. I kind of think of it as like being a quarterback: you get way too much blame when it’s bad and way too much credit when it’s good.”

— David Fincher

47. “Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.”

— David Fincher

48. “People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.”

— David Fincher

49. “You’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.”

— David Fincher

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

50. “Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.”

— David Fincher