8:44AM, Jul 06, 2009
One of contemporary cinema's most dazzling visual stylists, Fincher knew he was going to be a director at the tender age of eight.
During a career which has taken in the groundbreaking horror of Se7en and the cult kudos of Fight Club, the director has reached his artistic peak with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
A neighbour of Star Wars mainman George Lucas, he eschewed the film school route, getting a job loading cameras and doing other hands-on work for an animation company.
He next wangled a position with Lucas' esteemed special effects production company, Industrial Light and Magic, when he was only 18 and stayed there for four years.
After gaining a credit on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, he left the company to helm TV commercials and would go on to create spots for Revlon, Nike and Pepsi.
Fincher soon discovered that the slightly expanded format of music videos gave him more scope and he worked with Aerosmith and did some of his best work with Madonna (Vogue, Express Yourself).
Having always wanted to direct science-fiction movies, Fincher jumped at the chance to make his feature debut with Alien3.
"I have demons you can't even imagine." However, he soon learned that his music video skirmishes had not prepared him for the all-out war of piloting a lucrative franchise previously steered by Ridley Scott and James Cameron.
Disenchanted, he returned to music videos until Se7en came up for grabs, which he turned into a dark, moody and malicious serial killer classic.
Next came The Game, a nightmarish Twilight Zone-style thriller which projected the same sense of suffocating enclosure and mounting despair as Se7en.
With Fight Club, Fincher latched on to his most disturbing material yet, delivering an adrenaline-charged satire sending-up both corporate-consumer culture and the men's movement.
It wasn't until five years after the under-par Panic Room with Jodie Foster that Fincher found critical acclaim with Zodiac.
The meticulously plotted adaptation of Robert Graysmith's books about the hunt for America's notorious Zodiac Killer, it starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr.
