Despite taking a darker tone with each iteration, David Fincher is one of the last filmmakers you’d expect to see at the helm of a Harry Potter movie. Famously known for directing stand-out thrillers like Seven, Fight Club, and Zodiac, Fincher’s style promotes a gritty, scarred look with film grain, imperfections, and striking mood lighting. Harry Potter’s journey to defeat Voldemort and prevent Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from falling into ruin takes many dark turns. However, there’s still something about Fincher’s sensibilities that makes the thought of him tackling a Potter film perplexing. Then again, what do I know? According to David Fincher, he met with Warner Bros. about directing a movie in the Harry Potter series, though the project never materialized.
“I was asked to come in and talk to them about how I would do ‘Harry Potter,'” David Fincher told Variety while promoting the upcoming 4K release of 1995’s Seven. “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.'” He said Warner Bros. had something more traditional in mind for their series of adaptations of author J.K. Rowling’s best-selling young adult books about the eponymous wizard. “They were like, ‘We want Thom Browne schooldays by way of ‘Oliver’.'”
The Harry Potter franchise is currently being developed for a series adaptation at HBO. The show aims to include diverse casting, giving each book in J.K. Rowling’s timeless fantasy saga room to breathe. The wizarding world of Harry Potter offers filmmakers a seemingly limitless playground, with magic, mischief, and a large cast of evolving characters. The thought of Fincher playing in Rowling’s arena is exciting, though he’s not exactly the type of filmmaker to conform to studio mandates. How dark and violent would David Fincher’s Harry Potter movie become? Would he surprise everyone and go in a lighter, more fanciful direction? We’ll likely never know, as Fincher’s Harry Potter pitch was rejected, and he’s moved on to projects that better suit his sensibilities.
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