The Game (1997 film)

The Game began as a spec screenplay, written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris in 1991.[5] It was sold that year to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who put the project in turnaround, where it was picked up by Propaganda Films. Director Jonathan Mostow was originally attached to the project with Kyle MacLachlan and Bridget Fonda cast in the lead roles. Principal photography was to start in February 1993 but in early 1992, the project was moved to PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. Mostow was no longer the director of the film but instead became an executive producer.[5] Producer Steve Golin bought the script from MGM and gave it to David Fincher in the hopes that he would direct.[6] Fincher liked the various plot twists but brought in Andrew Kevin Walker, who had worked with him on Seven, to make the character of Nicholas more cynical in nature. Fincher and Walker spent six weeks changing the tone and trying to make the story work.[6] According to David Fincher, there were three primary influences on The Game. Michael Douglas' character was a "fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting".[7] He said in an interview that his film differs from others of that kind because "movies usually make a pact with the audience that says: we're going to play it straight. What we show you is going to add up. But we don't do that. In that respect, it's about movies and how movies dole out information".[8] Furthermore, Fincher has said that the film is about "loss of control. The purpose of The Game is to take your greatest fear, put it this close to your face and say 'There, you're still alive. It's all right.'"[5] More revisions were made to the script, including removing a scene where Nicholas kills Christine and then commits suicide, because Fincher felt that this did not make sense.[9] In 1996, Larry Gross and Walker were brought in to make further revisions to the script.[10]

Fincher intended to make The Game before Seven, but when Brad Pitt became available for Seven, that project became top priority.[6] The success of Seven helped the producers of The Game get the larger budget that they wanted. Then, they approached Michael Douglas to star in the film. He was hesitant at first because of concerns that PolyGram was not a big enough company to distribute the film. However, once on board, Douglas' presence helped get the film into production.[6] At the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, PolyGram announced that Jodie Foster would be starring in the film with Douglas.[9] However, Fincher was uncomfortable with putting an actor and movie star of her stature in a supporting part. After talking to her, he considered rewriting the character of Conrad as Nicholas' daughter so that Foster could play that role. However, Douglas didn't like the idea and requested it to change the character to his sister, which Foster found peculiar as Douglas is almost 20 years her senior and also appeared with her in Napoleon and Samantha, when Foster was 9 years old while Douglas was 28. Due to differences in opinions and also scheduling conflicts with Robert Zemeckis' Contact, Foster could not appear in the film. Once she left, the role of Conrad was offered to Jeff Bridges but he declined and Sean Penn was cast instead.[9] Later, Foster alleged that she and PolyGram had orally agreed that she would appear in the film and when this did not transpire, she took out a $54.5 million lawsuit against the company.[11] Deborah Kara Unger's audition for the role of Christine was a test reel consisting of a two-minute sex scene from David Cronenberg's Crash. Douglas thought it was a joke but when he and Fincher met her in person, they were impressed by her acting.[12]

Principal photography began on location in San Francisco, despite studio pressure to shoot in Los Angeles which was cheaper.[10] Fincher also considered shooting the film in Chicago and Seattle, but the former had no mansions that were close by and the latter did not have an adequate financial district. The script had been written with San Francisco in mind and he liked the financial district's "old money, Wall Street vibe".[10] However, that area of the city was very busy and hard to move around in. The production shot on weekends in order to have more control. Fincher utilized old stone buildings, small streets and the city's hills to represent the class system pictorially. To convey the old money world, he set many scenes in restaurants with hardwood paneling and red leather. Some of the locations used in the film included Golden Gate Park, the Presidio of San Francisco, and the historic Filoli Mansion, 25 miles south of San Francisco in Woodside, California, which stood in for the Van Orton mansion.[10]

For the visual look of Nicholas' wealthy lifestyle, Fincher and the film's cinematographer Harris Savides wanted a "rich and supple" feel and took references from films like The Godfather which featured visually appealing locations with ominous intentions lurking under the surface.[13] According to Fincher, once Nicholas left his protective world, he and Savides would let fluorescents, neon signs and other lights in the background be overexposed to let "things get a bit wilder out in the real world".[13] For The Game, Fincher employed a Technicolor printing process known as ENR which lent a smoother look to the night sequences. The challenge for him was how much deception could the audience take and "will they go for 45 minutes of red herrings?"[14] To this end, he tried to stage scenes as simply as possible and use a single camera because "with multiple cameras, you run the risk of boring people with coverage".[14]

The scene where Nicholas' taxi drives into the San Francisco Bay was shot near the Embarcadero, with the close-up of Douglas trapped in the back seat filmed on a soundstage at Sony Pictures Studios in a large tank of water.[15] The actor was in a small compartment that was designed to resemble the backseat of a taxi with three cameras capturing the action.[16] Principal photography lasted 100 days with a lot of shooting done at night utilizing numerous locations.[17]

The film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 73% of 56 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average score is 7.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "The ending could use a little work but this is otherwise another sterling example of David Fincher's iron grip on atmosphere and storytelling."[20] Metacritic gives it a weighted average score of 61 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[21] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B–" on an A+ to F scale.[22]

Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, praising Douglas as "the right actor for the role. He can play smart, he can play cold, and he can play angry. He is also subtle enough that he never arrives at an emotional plateau before the film does, and never overplays the process of his inner change".[23] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Mr. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times".[24]

Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, "Fincher's style is so handsomely oppressive, and Douglas' befuddlement is so cagey, that for a while the film recalls smarter excursions into heroic paranoia (The Parallax View, Total Recall)".[25] In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, "It's formulaic, yet edgy. It's predictable, yet full of surprises. How far you get through this tall tale of a thriller before you give up and howl is a matter of personal taste. But there's much pleasure in Fincher's intricate color schemes, his rich sense of decor, his ability to sustain suspense over long periods of time and his sense of humor".[26] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Emotionally, there's not much at stake in The Game — can Nicholas Van Orton be saved?! — but Douglas is the perfect actor to occupy the center of a crazed Rube Goldberg thriller. The movie has the wit to be playful about its own manipulations, even as it exploits them for maximum pulp impact".[27]

In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle wrote, "At times The Game is frustrating to watch, but that's just a measure of how well Fincher succeeds in putting us in his hero's shoes".[28] However, Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers felt that "Fincher's effort to cover up the plot holes is all the more noticeable for being strained ... The Game has a sunny, redemptive side that ill suits Fincher and ill serves audiences that share his former affinity for loose ends hauntingly left untied".[29]

In retrospect, Michael Douglas said:

I think what I’m most proud about is that it’s one of the very few movies that you could not guess the ending. That’s why I’m such a big sports fan, with sports you can never guess what’s gonna happen. Most movies you get halfway through and you can kind of guess the ending. The Game you could never figure out what the ending was gonna be. David Fincher is a very talented filmmaker. It was an extremely tough shoot, it was very long, a lot of nights. I thought it was a really well-made picture, very unpredictable and I do hear that picture when I talk about movies that I’ve made that people liked a lot.[30]

David Fincher later admitted in interviews that he was not proud of the movie, explaining his working relationship with his wife, longtime producer Ceán Chaffin, the filmmaker said he picks her brain, and that they'll often disagree:

She was extremely vociferous, for instance, when she said, ‘Don’t make The Game and in hindsight, my wife was right. We didn’t figure out the third act, and it was my fault, because I thought if you could just keep your foot on the throttle it would be liberating and funny.[31][32]

In the Criterion edition film notes, the director was referred to as incorporating elements of the writings taken from Franz Kafka stating:

Echoes of Franz Kafka are hard to miss in Nicholas's plight—like Josef K. in The Trial, he's caught in a series of senseless ordeals controlled by faceless people he can't begin to understand—and viewers may also think of Thomas Pynchon when it starts to appear that the conspiracy against Nicholas includes everyone in the story except him. Fincher himself has described The Game as a postmodern version of A Christmas Carol, with Nicholas as a Scrooge-like emotional miser who regains his soul after passing through a whirlwind of life-changing encounters.[33]

A sequence from the film deemed to be the most thrilling was ranked #44 on Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments.[34]