Why David Fincher Used AI to “Enhance” Classic Thriller’s 4K Release

David Fincher, the director of the 1995 groundbreaking horror thriller Se7en, says artificial intelligence was an essential part of the film’s 4K restoration, which is currently playing in theaters for the 30th anniversary of the movie. He calls the use of AI “revelatory.”

Fincher spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the 4K remaster of the film’s original print, a process he was deeply involved with. The 1995 film turns 30 this year, and fans can get their hands on a beautifully restored version of the movie on 4K UHD Blu-ray Discs and digital starting January 7. IMAX theaters are also showing the movie for the first time with a pristine cut that Fincher has approved. What will surely impress some viewers is that Fincher has required the use of AI for difficult tweaks that the film apparently needed:

“I know that there are a lot of people who tend to bag on digital, but if you could see a 30-year-old negative and what it looks like even when immaculately stored — it was an enormous amount of fixing, just digs and scratches and cinch.

So a good couple of months were just devoted to bringing the thing back to what I would consider to be a negative, and then we could begin. It’s a little bit of a misnomer to say, ‘Well, it’s the 4K remaster.’ It’s really the archival negative remaster. And in that respect, I don’t think any of us realized exactly what we were getting into.”

Fincher is not an extremely conservative filmmaker. He has been known to use technology in the past, but it’s undeniable that using AI, even to enhance the experience, is very controversial. Some tried it and failed, but Fincher seems confident that using artificial intelligence for the 4K restoration of Se7en was necessary because of the time it saved:

“Throwing this new kind of technological firepower at stuff was, for me, really revelatory. We ran into things that heretofore had never been noted. I mean, shots that were fundamentally out of focus that you couldn’t read on film and couldn’t read even in HD. And then you get to 4K downsampling of the 8K scan.

We did end up going in and doing little split screens and using AI to sharpen things so that we could reestablish what was intended to be looked at. I think we probably took a little over a year — and left to my own devices, it could have been twice that.”

Did David Fincher Change Anything From the Original Cut of ‘Se7en’?

The huge question on everyone’s minds is whether Fincher changed anything from the original theatrical cut. The answer is simple: He made some tweaks, but nothing as important as replacing stuff on the screen that could be visible to even the most obsessive viewers. There were no changes to his vision; all he did was use AI to correct things. He believes “there are certain lines that can’t be crossed,” which is a relief to those who cringe at the idea of classic films like Se7en suffering significant changes decades later. Per Fincher’s claims:

“There was color matching that we couldn’t do in 1995 making release prints. There were certain things that we just couldn’t get to flow seamlessly from one to the other that we now can do… And I definitely did some things that I felt I had to do, especially in-focus stuff. There were some shots of Kevin [Spacey] in the backseat of the police car with the grate that divides the front of the police car to the back, and there were shots that were completely out of focus. We were able to use AI and make mattes and extract the performance that was in the backseat and render it.“

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Release Date

September 22, 1995

Runtime

127 minutes