[Laughs.] I don’t want to go into it too much because looking back on it I just go, “Why did I rewrite this for them?” Why didn’t I just storm off and say, “Look, I won’t rewrite this, this changes it too much”? But the thing to remember is if I didn’t stick around then I likely wouldn’t have been around when it came back around to Fincher. I’ll just say that it involved, as I remember it, an abandoned church and the seven deadly sins were depicted in a kind of tableau of paintings, and I don’t believe there was any head in the box or anything, there was just a confrontation in an abandoned church. It sounds like the end of Batman.
The head in the box really scared a lot of people creatively along the way, people who were deciding whether to make this movie, deciding whether to put money into this movie. Mike De Luca at New Line championed it, but there were other voices in the process saying, “What if the guy drives out in the end and there’s a box and you open the box and there’s a TV monitor that shows that Gwyneth Paltrow’s character is in jeopardy, but then we can save her,” that kind of thing. So, like I say, thank God for Fincher, thank God for Brad, thank God for Morgan, thank God for De Luca, thank God for Kevin Spacey, thank God for all the people who dug their heels in and said, “Look, this is the ending that’s appropriate.”
There’s nothing wrong with up endings, it’s just that the dark ending of Seven was what it was about. To change the ending to something else was to remove the very heart of the story. It’s about “optimist Mills,” Brad Pitt’s character, going up against this pessimistic kind of world-weary detective in Somerset, Morgan Freeman’s character. Those dramatically-opposed points of view are pushing and pulling each other throughout the story. And then once pessimism is confirmed, even to the optimist who’s been arguing that the fight is always worth fighting, will the pessimist in the light of confirmation of all his worst predictions, will he stay or will he walk away?
The other thing is Seven opened and it did all right moneywise. But the thing that was really surprising was that the next weekend it went through that week and it had very little drop-off. And it sustained for three or four weeks very close to where it had started. I really do think that a lot of that had to do with the fact that the ending had provided an experience that I think is incredibly valuable — but these days is a little bit devalued — and that giving the audience an appropriate and earned ending that is surprising is really a pretty rare thing.
The ending probably had some people arguing about it when they left the theater, or having a conversation about it when they were at the coffee shop afterward. I do thank God that the ending was maintained thanks to these people.
