David Fincher has dipped his toes into the world of blockbuster adaptations in the past, but his take on Harry Potter probably would have been quite different from the films we ultimately got. During a recent interview to celebrate the re-release of Se7en on 4K, the legendary director said that he met with Warner Bros. about directing the first film.
“I was asked to come in and talk to them about how I would do ‘Harry Potter,’” Fincher explained in an interview with Variety. “I remember saying, ‘I just don’t want to do the clean Hollywood version of it. I want to do something that looks a lot more like Withnail and I, and I want it to be kind of creepy.’”
Fincher explained that the studio was looking for something a little more traditional for what would become one of its tentpole franchises of the 2000s. “They were like, ‘We want Thom Browne schooldays by way of Oliver.’”
While Fincher never wound up making a Harry Potter movie, Warner Bros. did briefly let an auteur filmmaker into the franchise when Alfonso Cuarón directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That third installment in the franchise was a radical installment from the first two, but it also set the template for what the franchise would feel like moving forward. Cuarón and Fincher aren’t exactly comparable, but the two are both highly touted directors from the same era of moviemaking. Prisoner of Azkaban is today regarded as the best of the Harry Potter movies by most, in part because of Cuarón’s directorial sensibilities.
