Director David Fincher has finally revealed the contents of the mystery box in the 1995 thriller Se7en, which is being re-released today in IMAX, marking the film’s thirtieth anniversary. On January 7 it is slated for release on 4K UHD Blu-ray Discs and in digital form. Fincher supervised the creative team that used AI tools to enhance images and correct visual errors in the original production.
The 1955 film starred Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey. Se7en ended with a grisly scene in which Paltrow was decapitated
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Fincher revealed that—contrary to rumor—the item in the mystery box was not a prosthetic replica of the actress’s severed head. “It’s entirely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying. “I think we had a seven- or eight-pound shot bag. We had done the research to figure out, if Gwyneth Paltrow’s body mass index was X, what portion of that would be attributable to her head. And so we had an idea of what that would weigh, and I think there was a weight in it.”
The director admitted, however, that “we did put a wig in there, so that when Morgan rips the box open if there were some of this tape that was used to seal the box — I think it was a shot bag and a wig, and I think the wig had a little bit of blood in it, so some of the hair would stick together. Remember, I think Morgan opened 16 or 17 of those things. But as I always say, you don’t need to see what’s in the box if you have Morgan Freeman.”
Fincher also described in detail the process he and his team used in remastering the film. “I know that there are a lot of people who tend to bag on digital,” he said, “but if you could see a 30-year-old negative and what it looks like even when immaculately stored — it was an enormous amount of fixing, just digs and scratches and cinch. So a good couple of months were just devoted to bringing the thing back to what I would consider to be a negative, and then we could begin. It’s a little bit of a misnomer to say, ‘Well, it’s the 4K remaster.’ It’s really the archival negative remaster. And in that respect, I don’t think any of us realized exactly what we were getting into.”
Fincher concluded that he made an effort not to second-guess his original creative strategy. He admitted that “There are so many things that I would do differently. I mean, I would do things differently that I completed three weeks ago. So you’re constantly in that process of ‘I know better now.’ There’s a lot of kicking yourself and going, ‘Yeah, I would do this so differently.’ But that wasn’t the job. The job was to exhume this and make it look like a pristine CCE print from September of 1995.”
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