The Game

David Fincher’s film comes from a 1991 screenplay by John Brancato and Michael Ferris. Jonathan Mostow was attached first, with Kyle MacLachlan and Bridget Fonda discussed as leads. Taking over, Fincher brought in his Seven writer Andrew Kevin Walker to make Nicholas colder. Jodie Foster was announced opposite Michael Douglas in 1996, but an argument over whether her character was a daughter or a sibling broke the casting apart; Foster left and sued over a verbal agreement, and the part went to Sean Penn after Jeff Bridges passed. Shooting ran a hundred days in San Francisco, mostly at night, with the Filoli estate at Woodside standing in for the Van Orton house. Fincher has said he worked with a single camera because multiple cameras risk boring an audience with coverage. So you see each event from the single angle Nicholas does, with no second image to check it against. Years later Fincher said they never solved the third act and that this was his fault, having assumed that keeping his foot on the throttle would be liberating and funny. A good fit if you will watch it as an escalation with the accelerator down rather than a puzzle awaiting its solution. Less so if you want to leave and reconstruct how the company staging the game arranged every step.