Trailer
Plot summary
In an unnamed city, Somerset is a week from retirement when he is teamed with Mills, a young detective who has just moved there with his wife Tracy. Their first case is a man forced to eat until his stomach bursts, with the word gluttony left on a wall. Somerset asks to be taken off the investigation, but is refused. A second victim was forced to cut flesh from himself, and the scene is marked greed. Clues lead them to a drug dealer and child abuser found emaciated and tied to a bed; photographs show he was restrained for a year. Somerset decides the killer is following the Christian seven deadly sins.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Se7en (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Brad Pitt insisted on performing his own stunts for the chase scene and slipped on a rain-slicked hood, crashing through a windshield; he cut tendons and nerves in his left hand, David Fincher said he saw exposed bone, and the resulting cast was written into later scenes.
- David Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker wanted Ned Beatty to play the killer John Doe, inspired by the 1969 Zodiac Killer composite sketch, but Beatty declined, calling the script the "most evil thing I've ever read".
- Under studio pressure for a more mainstream ending, writer Andrew Kevin Walker wrote a draft in which John Doe kills Mills and Somerset shoots Doe while a pregnant Tracy leaves the city; he wrote thirteen drafts and later said he felt he was ruining his script.
- John Doe's scenes were first shot with an unknown actor before Brad Pitt helped negotiate Kevin Spacey's casting; Spacey got a Friday night call and was filming the following Tuesday, shooting his scenes in twelve days.
- Michael Reid MacKay, who played the emaciated "sloth" victim, spent up to 14 hours in prosthetics, starting at 5 am to be ready to film at 8 pm, and had to limit his breathing during four hours of filming.
- Howard Shore's upbeat opening theme "The Last Seven Days" was replaced with Nine Inch Nails's song "Closer", which was remixed for the film by Coil and Danny Hyde.
- Seven's ending was scripted to take place beneath transmission towers, which John Doe picks to interfere with police communications; the real towers interfered with the film crew's radios instead, so the actors used cell phones to talk to the crew.
- To achieve Seven's darkness, David Fincher and cinematographer Darius Khondji used an expensive, lengthy bleach bypass process that kept some silver in the film stock; of 2,500 prints sent to theaters, only a few hundred used it.
