David Prior's Panic Room DVD Production Journal

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DVD Producer David Prior's Panic Room Production Diary

Panic Room DVD Production Journal
Part One

by David Prior

The only thing a journal requires to earn the name is consistency; you have to make regular entries or it's not a journal. Well, I don't have a journal. Not for lack of trying, I just haven't remained consistent. But for any of you who may be interested, here is a summary, a sort of journal-in-retrospect, of my two years in production on the Panic Room DVD, assembled with the help of the lengthy e-mail trail every project leaves behind. I'll try to leave out as many of the boring parts as possible.

Panic Room is without question the most elaborate, complex DVD I have yet produced. It wasn't designed to be that from the outset, it just grew in the process. There's a strange phenomena that can sometimes occur where the circumstances of a film's production are mirrored in everything else related to the film; if pre-production was a bitch, production will be a bitch. And so will post, marketing, et cetera, right on through to the DVD, almost like a generational curse. When David Fincher set out to make Panic Room, he intended it to be a quick, breezy B-movie with a relatively low budget. But somewhere along the way a series of almost mythically proportioned mishaps and difficulties arose that turned a quick-and-dirty exercise in suspense into a gargantuan undertaking that tested the endurance and tenacity of everyone involved. Similarly, the DVD took a long and tortured route to completion, albeit for different reasons.

2/28/2002 - Saw Panic Room for the first time at Sony Studios. Wasn't crazy about it, but absolutely gorgeous to look at. Been over a year since Fincher and I first met about the DVD.

When my initial budget (half of what it ballooned into in the end, incidentally) was rejected by the studio, we were already several weeks into production. It often happens that in order to stand even a slim chance of making a studio's ever-shrinking delivery dates, you have to begin work before the details are finalized. The producer David Brown once said that movies don't get a firm green light until two weeks into principal photography, and so it usually is with DVD. So, with the budget rejected and the bills not being paid, I had to shut down until we could settle everything. Shutting down is always a dangerous proposition, not only for aesthetic reasons, like losing creative momentum, but because the early stages of production are when you and your editor are doing all the "head work" of getting familiar with the material on hand, figuring out what needs to be shot, what holes need filling, and how the whole thing will shape up. If you shut down, not only does the information go stale, but you risk losing your team. They have to work, after all, and they have the annoying tendency of going where the money is. Over the course of production on Panic Room, we shut down three times.

Part of the problem in the early stage was that Fincher himself was a little ambivalent about the whole thing to begin with. I think he was questioning whether or not a Special Edition was warranted. While I didn't disagree in a general sense, I felt that the technical achievement of the film and the intense, grueling nature of the production left plenty to talk about on DVD. Trouble was that, while I certainly sensed a bit of apprehension in him when we spoke about it, he never directly communicated anything to me but enthusiasm and willingness to go ahead. But for whatever reason, the studio was getting a different message and the communication breakdown during this early period is what resulted in the budget disagreements.

Eventually we got everything straightened out... sort of. I used the hiatus to complete the Blade II DVD, which had been going on concurrently, and then my editor Keith Clark and I went back to work. Keith is a very capable, very talented editor who was instrumental in sorting through the huge amount of footage and giving it a coherent shape. I only took on some of the editing chores myself because there was too much for one man to do, and because sometimes the easiest way to get what you want is to do it yourself. That, plus my megalomaniacal need to put my grubby fingerprints on everything.

2/29/2002 - Twenty three boxes of tapes and paperwork show up from the Panic Room production office.

As with Fight Club, the on-set footage had been shot by John Dorsey, an associate of Fincher's who had worked with him since The Game. Out of a perfectly reasonable distaste for the typical EPK crew and the work they churn out, Fincher has long made a practice of barring them from his sets and having Dorsey shoot all the behind-the-scenes stuff. The benefits of this are numerous, mostly having to do with the fact that by the time production starts, the cast and crew are already very familiar with Dorsey and allow him access that an EPK crew would never have. Plus, Dorsey is there on set every day, whereas EPK folks typically show up for a couple of days, grab some B-roll, an interview or two, and move on to the next gig. (A good example of this is Freddy vs. Jason. Of the five days the EPK crew was on set, they elected not to shoot on the days that Freddy was fighting Jason - there wasn't one frame of footage from the finale, arguably the most crucial scene in the film, to work with. File that one as one of the biggest head-scratchers in my career). And if Dorsey's footage is less polished and grittier than what you get from EPK, I think it only adds to the raw, fly-on-the-wall vibe that I always try to shoot for with DVD supplements.

However, Dorsey doesn't shoot interviews, and as much as I try to avoid those irritating talking-heads that are the crutch of so many sloppy DVD supplements, they do have a place and we needed a bunch for Panic Room. The first was Conrad W. Hall, who lives in Santa Barbara. We had to find a place near him to shoot and finally located a small, privately-owned soundstage near the mission. The owner of the stage was a trust-fund hippy, part Jeff Lebowski, part Gordon Gekko, in the sense that he feigned the laid-back, dropped-out recluse, but was in fact such a hard-ass for cash that he held the interview footage ransom while we ran to the bank so the sound man could loan me the $300 bucks for the stage rental. Okay, so I had forgotten the cashier's check in L.A. But was that any reason to demand my personal video camera as collateral before we could even begin shooting? I wasn't there on behalf of Full Moon, for God's sake. This was Sony Home Entertainment, and they always pay their bills. "There's a courier on his way up here right now with the check. He'll be here in two hours," I assured him. "No-can-do, man," he said, tossing his mane. "Fine. Here's my credit card." "Sorry bro, cash only." This went on for half an hour, to no avail.

On the upside, the interview went extraordinarily well. I ended up with two and a half hours worth of terrific material, some of which you can also see in the Alien Resurrection doc (Conrad was the operator on that film, and I played an Alien, so we had a lot to chat about). It's days like that that provide this job's greatest rewards. How can you beat sitting around talking about movies with some of the best filmmakers in the world, many of whom you've admired, even worshipped, for years?

11/23/2003 - Flight to San Francisco. Rental car trouble results in a hundred dollar cab ride to Marin County.

A few weeks later it was off to Sausalito to meet with the obscenely talented sound designer Ren Klyce. I didn't have a crew with me this time, it was just me and my HandyCam. This stripped-down kind of approach can be a gamble; the downside is that you aren't properly lit and the mic is only so-so. The upside is that it's much looser, there's more freedom to move around quickly and it's more intimate, which is particularly beneficial when you're interviewing people who haven't been on camera much, if ever. I decided to risk it and, if you ask me, it paid off. In hindsight, the piece on sound design wouldn't have been nearly as involving or instructive if it had been shot traditionally. The only thing I would do differently is have a wireless mic pinned to Ren's chest.

4/22/2003 - After innumerable last minute cancellations, finally got the first of the commentary sessions scheduled. They'll all be recorded at POP in Santa Monica and edited at CCI. Final editing will take place over the next six months.

All during this period and continuing over the next few months the commentaries were being scheduled and, bit-by-bit, recorded. The initial plan had been to record the cast together. I've done this before, and it can result in an entertaining track. You get a lot of glad-and-happy, "Hey, remember this day..." and "Oh, you're really good in this scene..." kind of stuff, sometimes more, often less. It really depends on the personalities involved and the chemistry they do or don't have. Unfortunately, it's very hard to predict what the results of a group recording will be before you do it, and by then you've used your one window of opportunity in a movie star's schedule. One definite thing these kind of tracks have going for them, however, is they're much easier on me. Aside from cutting out snorts and coughs, maybe shuffling a few sentences around, the editing is typically very light. You turn on the red light, they go, and you stop when they're done. With solo tracks I always sit on the stage with the subject and ask questions, offer topics and reminders and generally make a nuisance of myself in an attempt to make it flow like a conversation. This ensures that the things I want to cover get covered and I think it makes for a more relaxed, intimate recording. But it makes editing very tough, since nobody wants to hear my lousy two cents chiming in all the time. Removing my own voice without making it sound like anything has been removed is... well, it's harder than it sounds. More often than not it means taking bits of one sentence, changing the words around, grabbing a "th" sound from another word, an "s" with the right amount of sibilance, and Frankenstein-ing a coherent statement out of something that started out as a response to a question you no longer hear. That's hard enough as it is, but then you have to do the same thing with the other participants, and then mesh them all together so that the track as a whole has focus and purpose and tells a story. It's long and torturous and it takes months to do and if you do it right, nobody notices. And after all that, some desk jockey in the studio legal department decides they don't like a particular turn of phrase and wants you to change it -- that's enough to steam up a man's glasses.

None of which is to say that the participants didn't do a terrific job on their own. As anyone who's ever edited anything will tell you, the final piece will never be any good if you don't start out with great material. It's a testament to the people involved that the tracks work despite all the monkeying around I did.

It was Fincher who suggested that the actors should be recorded separately for the simple reason that the content invariably ends up more instructive, and while I knew that spelled months of editing hell for me, I couldn't disagree with him. On Fight Club I had recorded Fincher, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter individually, then recorded again with Fincher, Pitt and Norton together, and cobbled the final track together out of those five separate sessions. But the group recording for that disc seemed to make more sense than for Panic Room. And yes, we tried like hell to get Jared Leto involved, but he was either unwilling or unable to do it. We never did get a firm answer. Anyway, I'm pleased with the final result and any shortcomings they may have are entirely my fault.

On to Part Two