Now, Fincher may not get his shot until 2 a.m. That’s fine. At least I knew where he was headed, and I completely see his goal. And when I ask him a question, he either says yes or no. There’s no “Well, I don’t know.”
Pretty much my biggest frustration and pet peeve is jumping onto a project where everybody there is giving up time with their families, they’re sacrificing their health and everything else, and the director doesn’t know what he wants. Fincher knows how he wants his party. And I love that.
The movie’s title refers to a hidden chamber in your character’s apartment — you spend a lot of time in that little room. Was it difficult to keep that interesting?
Yeah, it was very hard on everyone. The tight space is hard on the crew. You can’t get light in. You can’t get a still photographer in. And Fincher almost always works with two cameras. It was just an incredibly challenging film.
You came into ‘Panic Room’ at the last minute, when an injury forced Nicole Kidman to drop out. Was that stressful?
No, I did it on Maverick, too, and it was fantastic. They basically just put me in costume and put me onscreen. It was like how I used to work on TV when I was a kid. Fincher and I have known each other for a while. And Mike Topoozian, who is my first assistant director I’ve worked with four times now, was the first A.D. on Panic Room. He knows I did television for 15 years. You can just put me in front, give me little pieces of information I need to have, and I’ll tell your story. I don’t necessarily know that it’s a good thing that I tackle films like I would tackle a math equation, where I kind of solve them — break them down into categories and say, “Don’t need to know this, don’t need to know that.” But that’s just the way I am.
When you’re directing, how do you make sure that your own celebrity doesn’t turn everyone around you into a bunch of yes-men?
I find that the people who work with me over and over again are people who have really strong personalities and opinions about things. A lot of directors don’t like that. It makes them feel not confident on a movie set. But I start getting very anxious and worried if everybody is too homogeneous, too happy, not obsessive enough, not opinionated enough. That makes me nervous.
How do you create that culture on a set?
[Laughs] I ask people. I ask their advice, and I let them in on every part of the process. It’s exhausting to do that, because it means that every time you have an idea with the camera department, you have to tell the sound department and the production designer — you’ve got to have conversations with all of them about every other conversation you’ve had. But my feeling is that if you don’t give them the whole picture, two things happen. One is, they feel like they’re punching a clock, doing a job, and they’re going to look up at six o’clock and say, “Time to go home.” Two, they don’t know where the train is heading.
If the propman doesn’t know what the look of the movie is, he’s not going to come up with that interesting, cool thing that has this color and reflects light this way, because he wasn’t part of the conversation with the cinematographer. Or let’s say your production designer has spent tons of money creating a whole environment. But now he realizes the camera’s looking up all the time, so he doesn’t have to put down the carpeting. If you don’t tell people where the camera is going to look, they won’t know what to focus on.
I gather you’re very involved in the editing of your films.
I love it. The kinds of conversations you have in an editing room are really like questions about life. You say things like “I just don’t buy it. She walks through the door and the first thing she sees is that? Why didn’t she look over there? You find yourself asking, “Why do you think he says that? Because he just wants to piss him off? Or because he knows its true?”
