David Fincher’s 4K re-release of Se7en uses AI — but not in the way you might expect

Whenever we see “AI” next to “remaster” in a sentence about a film re-release, we break out in a cold sweat — we’ve yet to see artificial intelligence have a positive effect on a re-released film, being usually used as a shortcut to boost the clarity of an older film transfer, but without the care a classic might need.

So it was unexpected when we heard that David Fincher, a director who has previously expressed his scepticism around artificial intelligence use in filmmaking, would be employing the technology for the 30th anniversary re-release of his classic thriller, Se7en. The 1995 movie, Fincher’s second in the director’s seat following the difficult production of Alien 3, released to great critical acclaim, following detectives Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman on the hunt for a serial killer obsessed with the seven deadly sins.

But, it seems there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it continuity error that’s bugged Fincher for 30 years. And, rather than using AI for a broad-strokes upscale or similar, Fincher’s taking this opportunity to patch up this tiny mistake with the technology, one that it’s unlikely hardly anyone else ever noticed.

AI to right a historical film-making wrong

Speaking to Collider, Fincher revealed a scene at a bar that took multiple takes to capture. “When you pick the ones that mean the most to you in terms of a performance, every once in a while, you're going to have technological malfeasance," he said.

It resulted in “this unasked-for and unearned camera pan where a character moved, and then the camera panned over to follow them but followed them late and overshot them and ended up seeing more of the bar than was intended."

It’s here where AI served up a potential fix.

"We had enough of the background, but at the beginning of it, we had cleaved off one of the actor's shoulders, and he's wearing a black leather jacket, and there's no data," Fincher revealed. "We don't know how that shoulder connects to the sleeve and the kind of supple wrinkling and deformation of the leather in that jacket."

And so AI stepped in, taking a look at several other takes for the information needed to digitally fill the gap in the final take.

"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,” Fincher explained.

“So 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.'”

If you want to see if you can spot the difference yourself, the 4K re-release of Se7en will have a limited run at cinemas up and down the country throughout January, with the 4K UHD Blu-ray re-release hitting shelves on January 6. You can pre-order it from Amazon here.

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