Fincher or Cooper?

Moving Image Source guys Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas have assembled a brief video tribute (sans narration) to the legendary opening credit sequence in David Fincher‘s Se7en (1995). At the very end they give credit to Kyle Cooper for having designed the sequence, presumably in collaboration with Fincher. But why do they go on and on about Fincher in their intro, as if it was primarily his idea? I’m honestly confused.

Success has 100 fathers, and failure is an orphan.

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33 thoughts on “Fincher or Cooper?”

  1. I was in college when it was released. A guy I knew and his girlfriend recommended it to me, and the first thing they brought up was the credits.

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  2. “But why do they go on and on about Fincher in their intro, as if it was primarily his idea?”

    Because auteur theory has made everyone think that everything in a movie was the director’s idea.

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  4. I’m normally down for what Seitz and Co. do but this is pretty film-class and on the nose. Great sequence though, film of the ’90s. DETectiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive.

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  5. Always loved the title sequence of Alien 3. I first saw it as an impressionable 17 year old and as the images played across the cinema screen I was thinking to myself “What is this?!”

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  8. This one is really easy to answer.

    How many memorable title sequences has been attached to Fincher’s films?

    How many memorable title sequences has cooper done outside of Finchers film?

    Kooper has done some great work but nothing approaching what he did for Se7en.

    I would argue that title for Panic Room, Fight Club, The Game.

    Even the way Fincher treats the studio logos on his films are always a treat. Wether they are flat out his ideas or not, they’re consistently great.

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  9. Opps missed something.

    What I meant to say was.

    would argue that title for Panic Room, Fight Club, The Game are better than the title sequences Cooper has done since seven including spiderman and minority report

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  10. Does it matter who came up with the idea? Fincher was the director and said “Yes.” A lot of the time, that is what directing is… filtering ideas.

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  11. No directors told Maurice Binder what to do for Bond opening credits.

    Strangely enough, sometimes it is the Producer that calls the shots on how a film is put together. But in the minds of most film critics, a film producer has zero creative input and just signs checks and nods his head to everything that comes out of the director’s mouth.

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  12. Always loved the title sequence of Alien 3. I first saw it as an impressionable 17 year old and as the images played across the cinema screen I was thinking to myself “What is this?!”

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  13. >Strangely enough, sometimes it is the Producer that calls the shots on how a film is put together. But in the minds of most film critics, a film producer has zero creative input and just signs checks and nods his head to everything that comes out of the director’s mouth.

    I think the more learned film critics would have a much more sophisticated view of the matter than that. Not all films can be said to have one “author” in the sense of a single overriding personality that guides it more than anyone else, but to the extent that there are such authors, it’s often the producer, and this is often acknowledged. If Gone With the Wind has an “author” (apart from Margaret Mitchell), surely it’s Darryl Zanuck, not Victor Fleming or any of its other directors. If the producers of the studio days were more dominant and publicly visible than they are today, there are still name-brand producers. One thinks of many movies as Simpson/Bruckheimer flicks, or now just Bruckheimer flicks, before thinking of who directed them. And if memory serves, many 80s films such as Goonies, Gremlins, and Back to the Future were initially thought of as “Spielberg movies” as much as anything else, director notwithstanding.

    I hope not many serious critics would have so naive an interpretation of so-called “auteur theory” as you accuse them of.

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  15. No mention of the music? I assume it’s Trent Reznor/NIN, but this points to another big injustice in the film world – the sometimes forgotten work of composers, sound designers, mixer, foley artists….. the whole audio department. Just finished my first short film having worked with a fantastic sound team and they added as much to whatever creative success has been achieved as the writer, DP, actors, director, whoever.

    This title sequence has FANTASTIC sound. Worth mentioning.

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  16. This is a fun exercise, but I wonder if they are going to skip Fincher’s SOCIAL NETWORK opening credits, which are surprisingly dull.

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  17. No comment about Trent Reznor’s/NIN music? Strange considering the hype around Reznor’s Social Network score. The song is called ‘Closer (Precursor)’ on the ‘Closer to God’ remix album:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdwu3LagN7c&feature=related

    Both Fincher and Palahniuk are big NIN fans, Palahniuk claims he writes all his books listening to NIN and there was a rumor awhile back that there was gonna be a Fight Club musical with all 3 participating.

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