Panic Room

Screenwriter David Koepp was inspired by news coverage in 2000 about how safe rooms were becoming prevalent among the wealthy living in urban areas. He sold the script to Sony Pictures for $4 million.[2] Before Fincher's involvement, director Ridley Scott was briefly connected to the project,[15] and actor-director Forest Whitaker studied the script before declining the opportunity to direct.[2] Fincher said he was interested in the script's omniscience and that he was reminded of "the specific subjectivity" of Rear Window (1954).[15] He also saw Panic Room as a cross between Rear Window and Straw Dogs (1971), though he was concerned "a modern audience" would compare Panic Room more to Home Alone (1990) than to Rear Window.[17]

Fincher also saw Panic Room as a crime thriller similar to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), where money is "an object that everyone's after for the wrong reasons".[2] The director was also interested in the story's conciseness of happening in one place and in one night,[2] and how the screenplay was well-laid out to let the director decide a variety of shots and use of set-pieces.[18] Fincher also saw the project as a way to be "in lock-step with the audience" in a change of pace from his previous films.[19]

Koepp's screenplay emphasized pace over exposition. Koepp and Fincher agreed to streamline the film so the opening would introduce the characters as soon as possible. Fincher also sought to lay out the film so audiences could see characters make plans and thus be ahead of them, calling the tense foresight "a very cinematic notion".[20] He wanted to track the different characters' agendas and to also keep scenes chronological, so he set up "computer-generated motion-control shots" to move the camera around the set. He planned scenes in which parallel scenes could be seen through the panic room's video monitors and also intercut between different characters.[21] The final screenplay was similar in outline to the original one; there were minor changes in dialogue and specific moments, especially in the interaction between Meg and Sarah Altman due to Foster replacing Kidman.[22] Explicit mention of Sarah's diabetes, such as the emergency syringe containing glucagon, were removed from the dialogue. Careful beverage intake, refrigerated medicine bottles, and Sarah's glucometer watch were intended as evidence of her diabetes.[23]

The house was built on a soundstage on a Raleigh Studios lot. The set was designed by production designer Arthur Max,[24] and it cost $6 million to build.[6] The panic room was 6 feet (1.8 m) by 14 feet (4.3 m). Three versions of the room were built so Fincher could film scenes from multiple angles.[18] A 3D computer model of the set on the soundstage was designed. Fincher, who had done pre-visualization for Fight Club, used the model to design shots and decide their sequence.[7] The computer model also enabled the camera to have "total freedom to travel" inside the house. Fincher said, "What we were just trying to do with CG was to say, there's no camera operator, there's no crew, there's no track, and the camera can go everywhere."[24] The crew applied photogrammetry—"mapping still images over the surface of computer-generated 'sets'".[12] The filming schedule was also shortened since camera setups could be evaluated and discarded virtually. Fincher had two-thirds of Panic Room's shots planned before the start of filming. Director Steven Soderbergh reviewed Fincher's test footage and warned him that excessive planning would make actual production difficult for him and his crew.[7]

Fincher sought to light his film less than most other films; he believed darkness contributed to the scare factor. Entering production, he initially planned to film the first half of the film in near-total darkness but decided that it required too much patience from audiences. Instead, he chose a "shadowy ambience" as a backdrop for Meg and Sarah Altman.[12]

Jodie Foster was cast in the lead role after original star Nicole Kidman exited due to injury. Foster learned she was pregnant five weeks into filming her scenes.

Casting began in 2000, with Nicole Kidman and Hayden Panettiere cast as Meg and Sarah Altman, the film's mother and daughter. Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam were also cast as the film's burglars.[2] In December 2000, before the start of filming, Panettiere left the project, and was replaced by Kristen Stewart.[25][7] Filming began in January 2001.[3] Shortly after the start of filming, cinematographer Darius Khondji was fired from the film. Khondji said he was fired after a conflict with a crew member that he did not want to name, but David Fincher said he and Khondji could not agree "on aspects of production".[6] Much of the film was already planned in pre-production, and Khondji could not be given flexibility. Fincher replaced Khondji with Conrad W. Hall, with whom he found "a balance".[26] Khondji said he supported Hall as his replacement.[6]

After two weeks of filming, at the end of January 2001, Kidman was injured on set. An x-ray revealed a hairline fracture underneath one of her knee joints. The fracture was an injury from Kidman's filming of Moulin Rouge! (2001), and the fracture had never fully healed.[25] When Kidman left the project, Fincher continued filming scenes that did not include her character. During the same time of Kidman's departure, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were threatening to strike over contractual disputes, so Fincher was pressured to re-cast the role of Meg Altman before it took place. Since the film was early in production, Fincher was ready to shut down, but the studio wanted to continue production and find a replacement. If the studio had shut down production permanently, it would have collected $3 million from insurance. If production was shut down then restarted, it would cost the studio $10 million, necessitating a quick replacement for Kidman.[3] Rumored actors included Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie, and Robin Wright. Jodie Foster was previously occupied with directing duties of Flora Plum before its star Russell Crowe was injured and left the project, leading to that production's shutdown.[3] To join Panic Room, Foster also stepped down as head of the awards jury at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.[27][nb 1] Foster had a week to prepare for her role before filming resumed.[4]

Five weeks after Foster began filming Panic Room, she learned she was pregnant. She informed Fincher and his producer Chaffin of her pregnancy, and they decided to continue filming. Fincher did not want to rush production, so Foster changed her wardrobe from a tank top to a heavy sweater to disguise indications of her pregnancy. For action scenes, stunt double Jill Stokesberry replaced Foster.[5]

In the film's progression, the house degrades in quality, so Fincher filmed scenes in continuity as the set changed.[5] He also filmed many sequences twice due to their near-parallel appearance on the panic room's video monitors.[28] Editor Wall said there were 2,073 set-ups for the film with most set-ups having two cameras.[29] One repeated take was when Raoul attempts to break into the panic room through the plaster ceiling below it. The plaster took 45 minutes to replace, so combined with repeated takes, a scene that was an eighth of a page in the script took two days to film.[18] Another repeated take was one five-second shot being filmed over a hundred times: Meg being attacked by Raoul and dropping Sarah's medical kit. The shot was repeated so it would look like Meg did not toss the kit but instead lost it. Simultaneously, the kit needed to land in frame and in focus for the audience. Fincher argued for repeated takes so he could combine performances by the actors for "fluid" scenes. He also repeated takes with Stewart to ensure that her acting would be comparable to Foster's veteran performance.[28]

The studio planned to release Panic Room in February 2002, but it determined that production could not be completed by then.[28] Executives reviewed dailies of the film's opening scene and did not like Foster "hiding her stomach under a coat and purse".[6] (Foster was also suffering from a sprained hip from distended ligaments due to her pregnancy.)[28] The studio suspended production until after Foster's childbirth and rescheduled for the film to be released in March 2002. Foster gave birth in September 2001, and she returned to perform re-shoots, including the opening scene. She also returned two months later for additional filming,[6] which concluded that November.[30] Columbia Pictures screened the film for test audiences, who rated poorly the ending with the SWAT raid and Burnham's capture. By the screening, the set had been deconstructed due to storage costs, and Fincher estimated that it would cost $3 million to rebuild enough of the set to reshoot the ending. Instead, editors Haygood and Wall revisited Burnham's scenes and chose takes in which the character would appear less sympathetic. The final production budget for Panic Room was $48 million.[6]

A seamless shot at the beginning of Panic Room took nine days to film on set but took several months to complete in post-production. The shot was a combination of camera footage and computer-generated effects. Koepp originally wrote the opening scene to be a series of shots that would zero in on the brownstone house, but Fincher instead chose a sequence of landmarks in New York City with credits hovering in front of them before the sequence transited seamlessly to introduce the film's main characters.[31] The opening titles were inspired by those seen in The Trouble with Harry (1955) and North by Northwest (1959).[17] The scene of Burnham's arrest also used computer-generated effects. Several scenes also involved practical effects: Junior's injuries from a flaming gas burn and Stephen Altman's bloodied, beaten self. A team of puppeteers was used to move Stephen's sticking-out collarbone. Fincher also sent the film reel to be digitally color-corrected as he had done for Fight Club and Seven.[32]

Academic Jyotsna Kapur identifies Panic Room as one of several American conspiracy thrillers in the 2000s that re-cast the subject of childhood as "one of horror and alarm",[nb 2] where it had previously been a subject of celebration in family films dating back to the early 1980s.[33] Kapur also says the depiction of paranoia in the decade's conspiracy thrillers is divided by gender, describing the male protagonist as "an idealized subject who thinks fast on his feet and cuts through fear to find the conspirators". In contrast, the female protagonist "gives in to her fear, turns delusional and vulnerable to suggestion"; Kapur cites Meg Altman in Panic Room as such a depiction with her divorcee status and her residence in a home too big for her and her daughter Sarah. The academic says calling this depiction merely a sexist stereotype is too dismissive: "It is logical that anxieties around the home and loss of children would privilege women because the domestic sphere has remained a gendered space." Kapur recalls 1940s films wherein a woman enters the husband's home as a stranger, with "the house and the husband as sources of dependence and dread".[nb 3] She contrasts them with films like Panic Room, in which the female protagonists instead defend against dangerous intruders. She writes, "They are not economically dependent on the marriage. Yet they portray for most of the film an image of feminized vulnerability, replaying the racist trope of diminutive white women in need of protection from outsider threats."[34]

Panic Room is one of several films at the turn of the 21st century that use video surveillance as a key element.[nb 4] In particular, video surveillance is featured to illustrate aspects of a "surveillance society".[35] The home is wired with a closed-circuit television system, and the images are displayed in the home's panic room. Since the burglars want to access the safe in the panic room where Meg and her daughter Sarah are hiding, there is an irreconcilable contradiction of freedom and safety. Dietmar Kammerer says there is no closed system within the home for the characters: "There is always communication; every action provokes a reaction."[36] In contrast, the film's "camera eye" can travel unimpeded throughout the home, passing through walls. The surveillance footage in the film is never the camera eye; the camera eye itself observes the footage on the monitors. Of the cameras, Kammerer says, they are "Extremely mobile, but unstable: the surveillance technology in Panic Room is useful and harmful, good and evil at once." When the cameras are destroyed, Meg and Sarah are able to overcome the burglars. Kammerer says the cameras reflect ambivalence in the film, between "freedom and security, openness and closedness".[37]

In the film, Sarah is diabetic. Kevin L. Ferguson says, "With diabetes, this self-aware focus on the ethics of the body is drawn sharply by films that also raise the older form of direct, punitive power. This is the reason why diabetics appear with frequency in films involving criminality and law." In a review of nearly forty films with diabetes as a key element,[38] Panic Room is one of the only three that shows a glucometer (a device diabetics use to measure their glucose; Sarah wears a glucometer as a watch.) Sarah's diabetes in the film is never explicitly outlined for audiences, but they hear dialogue about moderating beverage intake and see the glucometer count down. Ferguson says, "The glucometer arranges the viewer's acknowledgement of diabetic selfcare, thus implicating the viewer in the process of control. The pure watchfulness of cinemagoers mimics the controlling relationship diabetic characters must endure."[39] Though mother and daughter bond in the film, the mother actively monitors her daughter's health. Ferguson says, "Panic Room's emphasis on vision and technology necessitates a paternalistic, monitoring attitude towards the diabetic character."[40] He also notes that the glucometer parallels the overarching surveillance system in the film in being read "excessively".[41]

Academic John Kitterman says audiences see Panic Room as a way to confront their fears and to achieve catharsis, but he argues that the film cannot provide that experience authentically.[42] He notes that the film's protagonist Meg Altman is reminded by the panic room of author Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote several short stories related to premature burial. Kitterman highlights one story, "The Premature Burial", as synonymous with Panic Room.[43] He says, in both works, "It is in the representing or acting out of such fears of being buried alive or being the victim of a home invasion that the protagonist actually calls for that trauma to happen."[44] He says that Meg's nervous recognition of the panic room guarantees that her fear will come to pass.[42] Though the home "looks like a mausoleum", the combination of the panic room's being able to monitor all the rooms and the unbounded movement of the film's camera leads audiences to believe they have some control over confronting their fears.[45] Kitterman says the confrontation is unauthentic because of the function of Jacques Lacan's symbolic order, "We can never find what we are looking for because truth and reality exist on a different plane of discovery... Truth is hidden in the symbolic order, and no panoptical vision is going to reveal it to us."[46] Kitterman says the film hides the truth of mortality, especially by making everywhere in the film visible to audiences. He concludes, "[Fincher] hides the truth behind a veil of visibility, using the camera to create a hegemony of vision that brainwashes us all into believing that what we are seeing is real. But the real of death cannot be symbolized."[47]

• Ferguson, Kevin L. (September 2010). "The Cinema of Control: On Diabetic Excess and Illness in Film". Journal of Medical Humanities. 31 (3): 183–204. doi:10.1007/s10912-010-9110-8. ISSN 1041-3545. PMID 20376543. S2CID 27743573.
• Kammerer, Dietmar (2003). "Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies" (PDF). Surveillance & Society. 2 (2/3): 464–473. ISSN 1477-7487. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 17, 2012.
• Kapur, Jyotsna (2008). "Fear on the Footsteps of Comedy: Childhood and Paranoia in Contemporary American Cinema". Visual Anthropology. 22 (1): 44–51. doi:10.1080/08949460802529027. ISSN 0894-9468. S2CID 144697505.
• Kitterman, John (June 2003). "Home(land) Invasion: Poe, Panic Rooms, and 9/11". The Journal of American Culture. 26 (2): 237–242. doi:10.1111/1542-734X.00089. ISSN 1542-734X.
• Swallow, James (2007). "House Arrest". Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher. Reynolds & Hearn. pp. 145–173. ISBN 978-1-905287-30-7.