“...ONE OF THE MOST INGENIOUS AND ENTERTAINING THRILLERS I’VE SEEN IN QUITE A LONG TIME...” Richard Roeper - Ebert & Roeper
Newly divorced Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her young daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) move into a New York brownstone equipped with a panic room; a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of unwanted ‘visitors,’ unaware of how soon they will need it. When their home is the target of a seamless late-night break-in, Meg and Sarah take a stand from the sanctuary of the panic room, playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with three intruders: Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) and Junior (Jared Leto), during a brutal home invasion. But mother and daughter are unaware of two important facts: first, that Burnham himself is a designer and builder of safe rooms; and second, that the room itself is their target... and the interlopers will stop at nothing to get inside.
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Audio commentary with director David Fincher. Audio commentary with writer / producer David Koepp and William Goldman n Audio commentary with actress Jodie Foster, and actors Dwight Yoakham and Forest Whitaker n Trailers and marketing materials n Documentaries, featurettes, multi-angle sequences and in-depth galleries – broken down by Pre-Production, Production and Post-Production n
SPECIAL FEATURES
VIDEO
1080P HIGH DEFINITION (1:78:1 - OPEN MATTE)
STANDARD DEFINITION
AUDIO
ENGLISH DTS-HD 5.1 / FRENCH DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1 / GERMAN DTS 5.1 / ITALIAN DTS 5.1 / SPANISH DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1
ENGLISH
SUBTITLES
ENGLISH / FRENCH / GERMAN / ITALIAN / SPANISH
ENGLISH
Approx. 112 Minutes • Color • Soundtrack on Varèse Sarabande Design and Layout - pineapples101@gmail.com
J O D I E
F O S T E R
www.sonypictures.com
1022 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City. California 90232-3195 2002 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and GH One LLC. All rights Reserved. Disclaimer: This is a fan preservation project; it was created for criticism, research, and is completely nonprofit; it falls under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. section 107. To have this version, you must own the original, unaltered retail release. Please, respect the rights of the copyright holders and purchase a copy of the original release if you do not own one already.
S P E C I A L Special Features are not rated
E D I T I O N
1022 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City. California 90232-3195 | 2002 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and GH One LLC. All rights Reserved. Disclaimer: This is a fan preservation project; it was created for criticism, research, and is completely nonprofit; it falls under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. section 107. To have this version, you must own the original, unaltered retail release. Please, respect the rights of the copyright holders and purchase a copy of the original release if you do not own one already.
‘DIRECTING IS MASOCHISM’ Ten years ago David Fincher swore he would rather have colon cancer than direct another picture. At the time, the precocious Californian was reeling from a gruelling feature debut, having warred with 20th Century Fox throughout the making of Alien 3. The result was a hobbled compromise - too bleak for Fox, too bright for Fincher and too little of either for the public at large. “A lot of people hated Alien 3,” he says. “But no one hated it more than I did.” What a difference a decade makes. Today Fincher (Finch to his friends and colleagues) is one of Hollywood’s most sought-after directors, the creator of the black nightmares of Seven, the glossy playfulness of The Game and - most notably - the unstable flash and fury of 1999’s Fight Club. Nudging 40, he is that rare beast: an auteur who’s thrived within the studio system. His latest picture, Panic Room, recently bounded straight to the top of the US box office. But if Fincher feels mollified, he’s not showing it. I’m barely through the door when he’s reeling off the headaches that plagued him during Panic Room: the cast and crew changes, the meticulous planning that went awry, the test preview that was scuppered from the start because the punters came in anticipating a different movie to the one they actually saw. Directing, he says, is a masochistic endeavour. It was back in 1992, and still is today. There are other parallels between then and now, too. A muscular, high-concept blockbuster, Panic Room stars Jodie Foster as Meg Altman, a rich divorcee battling to shield her daughter as their New York brownstone comes under siege from a trio of thugs. Like the Alien franchise, it offers a kind of feminised action thriller along with a revamp of the Old Dark House horror movie, where spooks rear up around every corner. But when I mention this comparison, Fincher pulls a face. “I didn’t really think of it that way. To me, it’s about divorce. It’s a movie about the destruction of the home and how far you’re willing to go to hold on to what you have.” Certainly the making of Panic Room called for many similar decisions. Fincher initially accepted the project because it provided an antidote to his previous film. Where Fight Club exploded across 150 separate locations, Panic Room was almost entirely self-contained. It allowed the director the chance to plan out every shot on computer and hand pick every single piece of equipment. “I wanted to make what
Coppola called ‘a composed movie’,” he explains. Yet these best-laid plans were soon to unravel. Having signed to play Meg Altman, Nicole Kidman withdrew at the 11th hour with a knee injury. Her replacement by Foster inevitably changed the story’s tone and tempo. “Nicole Kidman makes you make a different movie,” he says. “It’s like Hitchcock casting Grace Kelly. It’s about glamour and physicality. With Jodie Foster it’s more about what happens in her eyes. It’s more political. Jodie is someone who has spent 35 years making choices that define her as a woman and define women in film. Jodie Foster is nobody’s fucking pet, nobody’s trophy wife.” Elsewhere Fincher’s composed movie was causing other problems. Initially, Panic Room was to reunite the director with Darius Khondji, the cinematographer who had helped sculpt the beguilingly stark, under-lit design of Seven, back in 1995. On this occasion the marriage was less harmonious. A fortnight into shooting, Khondji was history; his place filled by the less experienced Conrad Hall Jr. Fincher shoulders much of the blame. He admits that his determination to micro-manage every aspect of the production forced Khondji onto the margins. “Darius is not a light-meter jockey. He wants to be part of the decisionmaking process. This movie did not allow that, and it was incredibly frustrating for him.” Artistically, too, the men were at loggerheads. At the time, Fincher explained the split by commenting that “Darius makes films, and Panic Room is a movie.” The more I dwell on this remark, the more significant it seems. It highlights a curious philosophy; that there are movies and there are films, and the two are somehow distinct. “Oh absolutely, there’s a big difference,” Fincher says. “A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club’s a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn’t look at Panic Room and think: Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire. These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trappedin-a-house movies. They’re not particularly important.” Does that make them less personal? “No, because you’d kill for your young. There’s the genius child and the polite child and the problem child. Your children are all different and they all require different things from you. That doesn’t mean you love them any less.” Except that I’m not convinced. For a start, Fincher’s outpouring of fatherly love runs counter to his evident dislike for Alien 3, a problem child he still seems eager to farm out for adoption. It’s also clear that he reserves
a special place in his heart for Fight Club, a turbulent genius child that polarised the public and ranks (alongside Being John Malkovich) as arguably one of the most daring studio films of the past 10 years. Detractors labelled Fight Club as macho porn that teetered on the verge of fascism. Fans hailed it as a savage deconstruction of bogus notions of western masculinity. For Fincher, the film is “an attack on all those things that complicate and confuse our sense of maleness. It’s a condemnation of the lifestyle seekers and the lifestyle sellers and the lifestyle packagers.” You could argue that Fincher was one of these himself. In his 20s, he carved a profitable niche as a director of big-budget TV commercials for the likes of Nike, Levi’s, Pepsi and Coke. His CV provides ammunition for critics who dismiss him as an expert visual stylist, a smooth-talking salesman who ratted on his former employers. “When I started making television commercials in the mid-1980s I was certainly privy to a lot of that lifestyle packaging,” he admits. “But I give the audience far more credit than most people do. There’s this assumption that commercials are just close-ups of celebrities holding products up to their faces. But some of them are great art. It’s not the art of the surrealistic painting or the poem, but it is art.” He puts the prejudice down to a simple case of snobbery. “There are certain easy truisms that we all adopt. Beautiful people are stupid. Smart people have the potential for evil and should be watched. Commercials are supposed to sell you something, and therefore must be bad. But the best commercials are anti-corporate. So I never thought: Oh, Fight Club is my chance to get back at all those people. Because I never did anything I didn’t want to do.” A portrait of split, compartmentalised identity, Fight Club stars Ed Norton as an office drone and Brad Pitt as his wild alter-ego. While shooting the film, Fincher identified with Norton while aspiring to be Pitt. He still feels that way today. “On-screen and off-screen, Brad’s the ultimate guy,” he tells me. “If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt. Even if I couldn’t look like him. Just to be him. He has such a great ease with who he is.” Fincher, by contrast, presents a study in friction. Listen long enough and the man will cross-reference you to death. He’s a dark fatalist at work in a brightly populist industry, a master of the anti-commercial, and a director who divides his work into two mutually exclusive categories. His witty, fluent demeanour acknowledges a whole swarm of insecurities. Maybe his next move will map him out more clearly. Flushed from the success of Panic Room, Fincher is currently torn between two projects. On the one hand he’s nursing a long-cherished adaptation of James Ellroy’s dank 1940s murder story The Black Dahlia. On the other he’s being wooed to direct the third Mission: Impossible outing, starring Tom Cruise. In Fincher’s view, the first surely qualifies as a film and the second as a movie. Fincher shrugs. He still hasn’t found quite the right script for the Ellroy film, he admits, whereas Mission: Impossible 3 is primed and ready to go. He says that it’s a cool idea, very violent, and he reckons he can make a pretty good fist of directing it. Imperceptibly, the scales are tipping in one direction. And the movies are winning out. Xan Brooks
@XanBrooks
Wed 24 Apr 2002 10.45 BST
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Panic Room - DVD Special Features Preservation. Panic Room: Special Edition (2002) [UPC Number: 043396026094] http://www.dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=2184 Blu Ray - Region A/B/C Audio: English DTS-HD 5.1 / French Dolby Digital 5.1 / German DTS 5.1 Italian DTS 5.1 / Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Subtitles: English / French / German / Italian / Spanish Main title: 1080p Supplementary material: 480p DVD source
Artwork Standard Blu Ray Case - Inlay 269mm x 148mm Standard 4 Page Booklet 235mm x 145mm Blu Ray Disc Art 115mm x 115mm