In 1995, David Fincher was a music video director with one film credit, Brad Pitt was a sun-kissed beefcake coming off of Legends of the Fall and Morgan Freeman was best known for a movie in which he drove around an old lady. That’s hardly the trio you’d pick to bring a serial killer thriller to the masses. And yet, with Seven, Fincher, Pitt and Morgan, along with the always brilliant Kevin Spacey, collaborated on a shocking, stylistic masterpiece, universally lauded for its innovative story and gritty tone.

Twenty years later, Fincher, Pitt and Freeman remain at the top of the game and while Seven isn’t the most celebrated work on any of their résumés, it remains one of the best. Gluttons for factoids, we dug into the commentary tracks and special features on the Seven Blu-ray and emerged with these 25 things you should know on the film’s 20th anniversary.

1. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker was inspired by the brutal conditions of New York City, where he lived. He says in the commentary that he could walk down the street and observe one of the Seven Deadly Sins without even trying.

2. Initial script revisions replaced the now infamous head-in-the-box ending with what Fincher feared most: a happy ending that had Detective Mills (Brad Pitt) running home to save his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) from John Doe (Kevin Spacey). It was the studio approved ending, and Fincher insisted on dropping it.

3. Early on, the screenplay was being developed for Denzel Washington, with the idea that he would play Mills. That version, Fincher says, was much more of a kick ass, action cop movie, than the film he made.

4. One version of the script included scenes in which the audience saw Doe working away in this sadistic laboratory. Fincher wanted those scenes cut so that Doe was only ever seen from the perspective of the police. And indeed, this is the case in the film, with the exception of the moment he’s seen exiting the taxi before giving himself up in the police station.

Watch the original trailer:

5. After Freeman, who plays Detective Somerset, and Brad Pitt were on board, attention turned to the actor who would play Doe. Everyone but the studio wanted Kevin Spacey, who was too expensive by New Line’s reckoning. Fincher says he was ready to move on to the next choice, but Pitt stepped in and argued that it had to be Spacey. The studio listened.

6. After signing on, Spacey had one demand of his own — to not be billed or featured in any advertising. He was coming off of The Usual Suspects and Outbreak and figured if his name was featured alongside the two stars, it would be obvious that he was the killer. As he told Games Radar in 2004, “I felt very strongly that it was the right thing to do for the movie.”

Related: ‘Seven’ Turns 20: A Look Back on How That Killer Twist Ending Came Together

7. Initial plans called for Mills to be something of a hipster, but Pitt pushed back against that. One of his contributions in that regard was the series of sports-theme ties that his character wears. He thought they were a perfect illustration of the character’s naiveté.

8. The original opening had Somerset touring a rundown house in upstate New York as he imagined life after retirement. The scene was cut because the sequence that was to follow — Somerset on an Amtrak to New York City, riding back into the belly of the beast —was too expensive to shoot.



9. The scrapped Amtrak shoot was also supposed to serve as the title sequence. Fincher instead turned the titles over to special image engineer Findlay Bunting, who had $50,000 to create a haunting introduction to the film. Fincher says the idea was to indicate to the audience that someone out there was doing “weird, f—ed-up stuff.” Knowing that $15,000 was to be spent on creating John Doe’s notebooks, Fincher decided to include that process in the title sequence. And that process was a meticulous one: The writings and ravings of many lunatics were considered and eventually it was determined that Doe’s notebooks should have small writing filling every inch of the pages.

Watch the creepy title sequence:

10. Bob Mack, the actor who played the murder victim representing Gluttony, was able to lie face down in a pile of spaghetti thanks to a SCUBA-like device that he wore on his face. The dead version of the man on the coroner’s table was a fiberglass body with a noticeably large penis. This was an intentional choice. Fincher says Mack had to spend 10 hours in makeup to appear in the movie for about 30 seconds, and he felt bad about that. To make it up to Mack, Fincher said, he figured he could “at least give him a huge c—.”