Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.
Interpretation
Movies are never truly complete; the process ends when creators decide to move on.
David Fincher's quote reflects the complex nature of film-making, emphasizing that a completed film is more a matter of the creators' decision to stop refining it than a definitive point of perfection. It highlights the reality faced by filmmakers that they must reconcile with the fact that their work will always have room for improvement and cannot be polished indefinitely.
In practice
When discussing the creative process at a film festival.
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.
In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.
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.
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.
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.
In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.
I often feel like a nutty professor, like I'm going to try this experiment and see if it works. My hypothesis is, people in the West can absorb African women stories without any shaken or stirred mixer. It can come directly from the source.
I couldn't possibly write 'Next to Normal,' but God, I can weep and watch 'Next to Normal' five times.
It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.
Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.
A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall.
Drag queens have always taken on that role of spilling the tea - and the tea is the emperor has no clothes!
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