Entertainment Weekly has posted an interesting aside from their interview with Moneyball star Brad Pitt from their latest issue. The comment is in regards to the ending of Seven, the 1995 film Pitt made with David Fincher that is undoubtedly an all-time favorite of mine and I suspect legions of fellow movie bloggers and one of the reasons I love movies.
As for the comment, it shows Pitt has a good sense when it comes to drama, but what I’m unsure of is at what point in the script stage Pitt would have made the following statement:
With Se7en, I said, “I will do it on one condition — the head stays in the box. Put in the contract that the head stays in the box.” Actually, there was a second thing, too: “He’s got to shoot the killer in the end. He doesn’t do the ‘right’ thing, he does the thing of passion.” Those two things are in the contract. Cut to: Se7en has been put together, and they’ve tested it. They go, “You know, he would be much more heroic if he didn’t shoot John Doe — and it’s too unsettling with the head in the box. We think maybe if it was the dog’s head in the box…”
If you read Andrew Kevin Walker‘s 1994 production draft it would appear the head remains in the box and Mills does end up being the one to kill John Doe (Kevin Spacey) as well as shoots Somerset (Morgan Freeman). However, if you read an earlier draft (presumed to be 1992), things go much differently with the final scene occurring in a church with Doe killing Mills and Somerset killing Doe. That early draft, however, doesn’t end in Tracy Mills (Gwyneth Paltrow) being killed so perhaps there was a draft somewhere in the middle where things changed.
