Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Not there. And so New Cinema told me to go fuck myself, that they absolutely could use my picture and my image, and this became a little bit of a … I’d say 24 hour conversation … and it was Fincher who said, “I actually think this is a really cool idea.” So the compromise was, I’m the first credit at the end of the movie when the credits start. So I got on a plane on that Sunday and I flew to Los Angeles, and I went into where they were shooting, and I went into the makeup room and David Fincher was there, and we were talking about what should I do? How should I look? And I just had my hair short for Outbreak, because I was playing a military character, and I just looked at the hairdresser and I said, do you have a razor? And Fincher went, “Are you kidding?” And I said, “No.” He goes, “If you shave your head, I’ll shave mine.” So we both shaved our heads, and then I started shooting the next day. So my long-winded answer to your question is that I didn’t have that much time to think about how to build that character. What I think in the end, Fincher was able to do so brilliantly, with such terror, was to set the audience up to meet this character. I think the last scene, the ending scene, and the car ride leading up to it, where it’s mostly on you in conversation with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, it’s one of the greatest scenes in film history. So people who somehow didn’t see the movie, there’s these five murders that happened that are inspired by five of the seven deadly sins, and the ending scene is inspired, represents the last two deadly sins, and there’s this calm subtlety about you in your performance, it’s just terrifying. Maybe in contrast with Brad Pitt’s performance, that’s also really strong, but that in the contrast is the terrifying sense that you get in the audience, that builds up to the twist at the end, or the surprise at the end, with the famous, “What’s in the box?” from Brad Pitt, that is Brad Pitt’s character’s wife, her head. Yeah. I can really only tell you that while we were shooting that scene in the car, while we were out in the desert, in that place where all those electrical wires were, David just kept saying, “Less. Do less,” and I just tried to … I remember he kept saying to me, “Remember, you are in control. You are going to win. And knowing that should allow you to have tremendous confidence,” and I just followed that lead. And I just think it’s the kind of film that so many of the elements that had been at work from the beginning of the movie, in terms of its style, in terms of how he built this terror, in terms of how he built for the audience, a sense of this person being one of the scariest people that you might ever encounter, it really allowed me to be able to not have to do that much, just say the words and mean them. And I think it also is, it’s an example of what makes tragedy so difficult. Very often, tragedy is people operating without enough information. They don’t have all the facts. Romeo and Juliet, they don’t have all the facts. They don’t know what we know as an audience. And so in the end, whether Brad Pitt’s character ends up shooting John Doe, or turning the gun on himself, which was a discussion … there were a number of alternative endings that were discussed … nothing ends up being tied up in a nice little bow. It is complicated, and shows how nobody wins in the end when you’re not operating with all the information.…

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