Four directors helmed Warner Bros. Pictures’ eight Harry Potter movies. Home Alone director Chris Columbus directed the series’ first two installments, 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 2002’s Chamber of Secrets, while Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and David Yates tackled the six films that followed. Each brought their own sensibilities to the franchise, especially Cuarón, who is a well-respected name among both casual moviegoers and die-hard cinephiles. It turns out that he isn’t the only celebrated auteur that Warner Bros. met with to direct a Harry Potter film, either.
In a recent interview with Variety, Se7en and The Social Network director David Fincher revealed that he was asked by Warner Bros. at one point to pitch his take on the Harry Potter universe. He doesn’t specify when said conversation happened or which film WB was specifically interested in him handling. Fincher, however, says that his pitch was ultimately far grimier and, well, creepier than the studio was interested in exploring.
“I was asked to come in and talk to them about how I would do Harry Potter,” Fincher recalled. “I remember saying, ‘I just don’t want to do the clean Hollywood version of it. I want to do something that looks a lot more like Withnail and I, and I want it to be kind of creepy.’ They were like, ‘We want Thom Browne schooldays by way of Oliver.’”
Fincher, of course, has experience adapting popular books and pre-existing pieces of source material. Several of his past films, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, The Killer, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, have been adaptations. Having directed 1992’s Alien 3, Fincher is also no stranger to working on a major Hollywood franchise. (He, notably, had a terrible experience making that film, though, and hasn’t directed a sequel or franchise movie since then.)
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All of this is to say: It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that his take on Harry Potter didn’t align with what its parent studio wanted. Those familiar with his work would likely agree that his singularly cold, acidic direction could have produced some odd results when filtered through the fantastic, largely family-friendly world of Harry Potter. That said, it would have also been interesting to see how he might have handled some of the darker aspects of the franchise’s later installments.
A rerelease of David Fincher’s Se7en is now playing in theaters.