25 Things You Didn’t Know About Se7en
23. It Was Nearly Directed By The Guy Who Did National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
When the screenplay was first optioned by Italian production company Penta, who’d been involved when Jeremiah S. Chechik expressed an interest in directing the movie, Walker was required to make substantial changes to his script, including substituting a radically different ending for the ‘head-in-a-box’ climax.
Walker recalls the Chechik rewrite’s finale taking place in a bombed-out church, with the seven deadly sins represented by a tableau of paintings, and the general feeling that someone was trying to make a Batman movie.
Now, in fairness to Chechik, he’s not a one-trick pony. However, at the time Chechik had only done a raft of TV commercials and the Chevy Chase movie. He might have been looking to expand his repertoire… but had Chechik stayed on the Se7en project it would have been an entirely different film.