25 Things You Didn’t Know About Se7en
20. Pitt Had To Fight For The Ending Throughout Shooting Too
Astonishingly, even after the fight was won, people continued to try and run around Fincher to scale down the magnitude of that climax. Fine, keep the head-in-a-f*cking-box, they said… but does our boyishly handsome hero have to be the one who gets ruined at the end?
For a while, Walker and Fincher actually toyed with the idea of switching the shooter: of making Somerset, inches from retirement, be the one to shoot John Doe and save David Mills’ career and future. Even Freeman was on board with it.
However, they didn’t reckon with the ferocious stubborness of one William Bradley Pitt, whose terrible experiences with studio interference on Legends Of The Fall had made him determined not to let this movie be homogenised in the same way.
Luckily, he didn’t just have that obstinate attitude to bet on. Pitt also knew his character backwards, and with his usual charming directness pointed out the bleeding obvious: there was no way in seven hells the David Mills who kicked down doors first and found probable cause later was not going to shoot the man who’d murdered his wife.