David Fincher shares how AI was helpful in the 4K restoration of Se7en

Throughout his career, David Fincher has often taken advantage of new technology. For Zodiac, his 2007 psychological thriller, he decided to shoot digitally even if the technology was not used as extensively as it is now. Since then, he has shot other projects like The Social Network or the Netflix series Mindhunter on digital over film. According to the reports, he prefers digital as it suits his filmmaking approach. It allows him the freedom to shoot multiple takes without much burden and eases his workflow.

While that is true, David Fincher’s earlier films were shot on film, including Se7en, one of his more popular works. In 2025, this crime thriller enters the 30th year since its release. It was critically acclaimed at the time of its release and received an Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing.

Se7en follows Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as two detectives at different stages in their professional careers, paired to solve a series of murders linked to the seven deadly sins.

Now, in its 30th anniversary year, Se7en will arrive on 4K UHD on January 7. It is a result of a painstaking restoration process that takes a lot more work than one would imagine. While speaking in an interview, David Fincher shared his thoughts about the process and how AI came into the picture.

Let’s find out what he has to say.

David Fincher on the 4k restoration of Se7en

During a recent interview, David Fincher spoke about the process that went into the 4K UHD restoration of his 2007 film, Se7en. Turns out, so much more goes into these processes than what meets the eye.

The remastering decisions are not based on just a creative interest. They also depend on many financial and technical factors. While speaking about these aspects, director David Fincher also revealed how the storage or film degradation issues impact the quality of the remastered 4K print. Here's what he said,

"The film, you have a core and then the negatives on it, and when the core gets tightened, you end up with these tiny little scratches, which are completely invisible in the film printing process to a release print, and they're almost invisible in HD, but in 4K, they are not. There was a lot. We had to really get a baseline assessment of how deep we were going to go in fixing it."

Even though Fincher decided to remaster Se7en, he did not want to make any major changes. Still, he appreciates how a newer technology like AI can help him in his process.

While speaking about some minor changes, Fincher gave an example of a scene. He did multiple takes of this scene. One of them featured an incredible performance. However, it also included an unintended camera pan. So, during the remastering process, Fincher used AI to stabilize this camera movement and to fix an issue about a jacket that a character was wearing. He goes into detail to explain this process. Here's what he says,

"We took three or four different shots from earlier, which had a jacket in them that we liked, and then we input that, and then we had it spit back out AI, and then took the background from where the camera landed and just composited them together.

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Fincher appreciates how AI helped him fix this issue. Here's how AI was useful in his remastering process:

"It ends up being the most thrillingly stupid fix in the world because if you see it, we didn't do our jobs. And you probably won't see it. You probably won't be aware that it's happened. But you look at it, and you just think to yourself, ‘It's so nice that we can fix that kind of stuff today."

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