MS: But there's this fantastic quote that I found, where you said of Alien 3 that "a lot of people hated Alien 3, but no one hated it more than I did."
DF: I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.
MS: At the risk of opening old wounds, what did you take from that experience that has subsequently helped you in your Hollywood career?
DF: It was a baptism by fire. I was very naive. For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid. [audience laughs] So I learned on this movie that nobody really knows, so therefore no one has to care, so it's always going to be your fault. I'd always thought, "Well, surely you don't want to have the Twentieth Century Fox logo over a ****** movie." And they were like, "Well, as long as it opens." So I learned then just to be a belligerent *******, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise. On that movie, I was the guy who was constantly the voice of "We need to do this better, we need to do this, this doesn't make sense". And pretty soon, it was like in Peanuts: WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP! They'd go, "He's doing that again, he's frothing at the mouth, he seems so passionate." They didn't care.
MS: Have you grown to like it since then, Alien 3?
DF: God, no! [audience laughs] But I don't look at anything after it's done.
MS: So that alternate cut on the DVD special edition whatever it is that's not yours?
DF: I don't know who did it, I've never seen it, I can't comment on it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/feb/03/david-fincher-interview-transcript
