Q&A: David Fincher talks us through the off-screen torture of making 'Seven'

By any reasonable measure, David Fincher had made it by 1990. He was directing rapturous music videos for Madonna ("Express Yourself," "Vogue") and doing lucrative ads for top brands worldwide. The production company he co-founded, Propaganda Films, had cornered the MTV market, helping launch the careers of such future notables as Spike Jonze and Antoine Fuqua.

But there was Hollywood to conquer and Fincher, not yet 30, rushed headlong into his feature debut, one that no superfan of Ridley Scott (also a genius director of commercials) could pass up: the third movie of the "Alien" franchise. While it has since found a hardcore base of defenders, 1992's dour, much-mussed "Alien 3," a troubled production, was a disappointment that Fincher has largely disowned.

A little over three years later, however, he was back with a movie that has since come to define him, even with future Oscar-nominated titles on the horizon. Starring Morgan Freeman and a rising Brad Pitt as detectives — one deliberate and cynical, the other impulsive and naive — in an oppressively rainy city hunting down a ghoulish maker of tableaus based on the deadly sins, "Seven" yoked Fincher's gift for atmosphere to Fritz Lang-worthy material that approached metaphysical profundity.

"Who wants to spend their time bitching and moaning about transgressions that were done to you?" says Fincher, 61, of the tough years between "Alien 3" and the breakthrough that cemented his style. "That seems like a waste of time. I don't think I was persecuted