David Prior's Panic Room DVD Production Journal

Click here to learn more about anamorphic widescreen!

Site created 12/15/97.

page created: 5/12/04

DVD Producer David Prior's Panic Room Production Diary

Panic Room DVD Production Journal
Part Two

by David Prior

Back to Part One

4/15/2003 - First of two commentary recording sessions with David Fincher at POP, Santa Monica.

So I'm sitting in a tiny recording booth at POP with David Fincher going over the disc configuration. It's after the session and I bring up a point about the number of discs we've been planning. Fairly early on I had pitched him the idea of a four disc set, with each disc representing a different phase of production (pre-production, principal photography, post, and the film itself), with each disc represented on the menus by one of the four floors of the brownstone. He liked the idea and that's what I'd been working toward. But as the supplements neared completion, I realized that we didn't actually need four discs to fit everything in. I was torn because I really liked the cleanliness of the layout: I thought it was elegant; but as an end user, I didn't want to require any more getting-up-off-the-couch than necessary. Now I was positive I'd mentioned this to the Sony executives, but Michael Stradford was sitting in the adjoining room and could hear everything we were saying over the two-way speaker system and a moment later his voice came over the com saying: "Two discs, right? We're talking about two discs." For a moment there I thought we there was going to be trouble, but Fincher, who can be disarmingly calm and forceful at the same time, said: "Well, no we're trying to decide if it's going to be three or four." And that was the end of that.

Which reminds me, I have a little rebuking to do. As the Panic Room: Special Edition drew closer to release, a lot of internet chatter sprung up suggesting that the film didn't deserve such comprehensive treatment, that three discs was too damn much and why didn't studios devote their time and resources to worthier movies? There was a surprising lot of that, actually, more than I expected, and I expected some. And I have one thing to say to these righteous complainers: Quit your bellyaching, you ungrateful bastards. Apart from the irritation of listening to criticism from people who hadn't even seen the final product, many top-level executives are convinced that DVD would sell just as well with no supplements at all (hell, they're probably right), and complaints from the public about too much content don't help. It also betrays a complete ignorance of how these kinds of decisions are made. Nobody calls a meeting and says: "Well guys, we have five gigantic, multi-disc special editions to do this year. Which are our five lousiest movies?" Panic Room was a big, ambitious project because I wanted it to be and Fincher and the studio supported me. That's it. Dropping a disc worth of material from Panic Room would not have meant an extra disc for Experiment in Terror, no matter how much it may deserve it. Susan King in her L.A. Times capsule review praised the supplements as intelligent and thorough, then proceeded to brand the whole enterprise as "DVD overkill," which I suspect is just a lazy way of saying "I don't care." Well if you don't care, it's not for you. And if you're not interested in American history, don't read Stephen Ambrose. But if you're interested in the craft of filmmaking, especially highly advanced craft carried out under extreme pressure, then there aren't many films more worthy of study than Panic Room.

9/4/2003 - Meeting at Pixel Liberation Front about the creation of the menus.

Fincher had the smart idea of using the same company who did the previsualizations on the film to do the menu animation. Nobody was too keen on the menus from the previous release, so a fresh perspective was required and PLF was perfect. Not only did they already have the entire brownstone set in 3D, but they'd never done menus before; it's a lot easier to think outside the box when you never knew there WAS a box to begin with. It reminded me of Fincher's decision to hire Dust Brothers to do the score for Fight Club precisely BECAUSE they'd never done it before.

Panic Room DVD menu

If I had it to do over again, I would have two menu systems. I love the menus as they are, but after you've seen them a couple of times, navigation gets a bit irritating. I had wanted to create a simple, stripped-down, non-animated menu system that you could elect to use instead, so that if you're revisiting something on one of the discs, you can get there faster. In the crunch to finish, though, it's just one of those things that got away.

PLF actually ended up creating too much animation. I had an idea for an interactive tour-the-brownstone feature that would allow the user, via their remote control, to take a self-guided tour through the virtual set. But when all the navigation was laid out, we realized we'd need an entire disc just to hold the extensive animation. So... exit the tour-the-brownstone. A lot of animation had been done, however, and it seemed a shame to waste it, so for a while it became a tour without the interactive element. That seemed thin though, not enough somehow. So I hit on the idea of combining it with the DVD credits so at least it served a dual purpose, and might give people a reason to WATCH the credits in the bargain. As it stands though, it comes off as the world's most grandiose credit list. Alas, you can't win 'em all.

5/12/2003 - Interviewed Joe Viskocil. Geeked out.

Joe Viskocil was one of several late replacements on the Panic Room crew. The special effects had been prepped for fourteen weeks by another supervisor before Joe was brought in to complete the show. For those of you who don't know, Joe made his name as a miniature pyrotechnician - he figured out how to scale down explosions for miniatures. He worked on Star Wars and blew up the Death Star. I repeat, he blew up the Death Star. He blew up the Death Star and he was sitting on my couch drinking a Diet Coke and chit-chatting about blowing up the Death Star, and other stuff. You may have noticed that some of his interview was a tad out of focus. That's because I was shooting it and I was too busy talking about blowing up the Death Star to check minor technical issues like focus or whether the camera was turned on or not.

There was a bizarre reluctance to talk about the crew changes on Sony's part. I had to really pare down the sections dealing with Darius Khondji and Joe Viskocil because, even though the replacements were well documented in print prior to the release of the film, and none of it was a secret, and my treatment of it was certainly not controversial, the legal department wanted no mention of it whatsoever. From a documentarian's point of view, that position was untenable. It turned into rather a big ordeal, in fact, which Fincher had to come in and arbitrate. Everybody knows we live in a pathologically litigious society. But I've always maintained the only way to completely protect yourself from a frivolous lawsuit is to hide in a cave somewhere and hope some Bedouin doesn't sue you for squatting. If you're going to release something for mass consumption, you risk getting sued. That's just reality. I remember Fincher saying something along the lines of: "The only reason big studios exist is to handle issues like this. If you're not going to do that, why bother with anything?" God bless him.

10/10/2003 - Still editing commentaries. One track falls by the wayside.

While I'm ultimately proud of the final disc, there were a few things that got away, a few mistakes that were made that really make me wince. There was an optional commentary for the Shooting Panic Room doc, comprised of left over bits of Fincher and Conrad W. Hall. I didn't find out it wasn't on the disc until the first reviews came out and nobody mentioned it. There was also a page of introductory text explaining the Habittrail Film. For those of you who wondered what the hell that little animation was all about, here's what should have appeared on a sub-menu:

Habitrail Film

Usually chase sequences are conceived shot-by-shot, with the action tailored to each specific angle. But David Fincher designed the chase sequence following the break-in to be a continuous series of actions, with the camera angles worked out after the blocking. This approach created a more organic feel to the action, as though cameras just happened to be there to photograph an event-in-progress. In order to choreograph the chase, he had PLF create a cutaway view of the brownstone and track CG figures through the space. This animation was affectionately dubbed The Habitrail Film.

Why isn't that on the disc? I don't know. But it points up a pretty important issue: it's in nobody's best interest for the producer and creative force behind the supplements to be dis-included in the authoring and compression phase, especially on a highly complex project like this one, which is what happened here. Authoring is the producer's one chance to see the thing as a whole and make sure everything works before it's too late to make fixes. And nobody is in a better position than the producer to catch mistakes, whether his own or the studio's. God knows, I've prevented more than a couple of lawsuits in the past by pointing out where the authoring facility had used the wrong revision of something. I'm sure nobody was maliciously sabotaging the thing, but the imperfections on the discs pain me enormously. It's like being asked to build a car but not being allowed to test drive it before it goes to market, then finding out nobody attached the airbags.

But before anyone accuses me of excessive whining, allow me to acknowledge the people at the studio who deserve credit for sticking with the project and making it happen. Michael Stradford at Sony Home Entertainment was totally dedicated to getting the disc made. April Olsen coordinated PLF and Creative Domain in pulling the menus together. Jon Simon provided legal and research support. And Gretchen Greaves stuck by me and fought a lot of battles on the projects' behalf. Next to myself and Keith Clark, nobody worked harder on it than Gretchen.

There are also some people at the studio who deserve an entirely different kind of notice, and they're all in the marketing division. It's been a while since I've seen a project so unceremoniously dumped by the very same people who stood to reap the most benefit from its success. Let alone print and broadcast media, there wasn't so much as an internet banner ad announcing the DVD's release, and after two years of struggle and hard work that's pretty insulting. I guess it's true what they say about horses and water. On a much smaller scale, it reminded me of how Terry Gilliam must have felt when The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was shot in the back of the head, execution style, by the theatrical marketing people.

I suppose this has strayed a bit from a production journal and turned into something more like a diatribe, but I warned you from the beginning that it wasn't a true diary. There's a lot more I could tell you about, like the gracious help of the post supervisor, Peter Mavromates, or shooting the Digital Intermediate piece at Technique, but there's no dirt there, nothing to complain about, and who wants to read to a love-fest? Of course there's Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis, both of whom I feel an unwholesome amount of affection for, but the less said about that the better.

If you're still reading this, I hope that it's given you some insight into the rationale behind the production and maybe given you some incentive to buy the disc and check it out. If you still think three discs was too much, I hope you'll buy it anyway and exercise your right not to watch.

David Prior

Editor's Note: Watch for our review of the Panic Room: Special Edition, coming soon.