With new podcast Post Mortem, master of horror Mick Garris has been getting some great stories out of some of the top filmmakers in the game. The most recent episode of the show featured an interview with prolific filmmaker Ernest Dickerson (Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, “The Walking Dead”), and Dickerson revealed during the chat that he nearly directed Se7en back in the early ’90s!

Of course, David Fincher ended up getting the gig. But as Dickerson explained to Garris, it’s likely that Fincher’s film would not exist if not for Dickerson’s input during his pitch meeting.

“I was looking for a thriller… I was looking for a good horror film,” Dickerson recalled. “I wound up changing agents. The first two scripts that they gave me… one was Surviving the Game. The other was Seven. I read Seven and I wanted to do it. At that time, they were getting ready to throw the script out. Nobody wanted to touch it. Everybody considered it too dark. And so I went in and interviewed. I thought I did a good interview. I had visual aids. Ideas. How to shoot it. They said, ‘What about the blood and gore?’ I said, ‘You don’t want to see it. You pull back. Make the audience think they saw it.’ I put my best out there.”

“A couple days later, I talked to my agent,” Dickerson continued. “My agent said, ‘Well, you talked your way out of a job.’ She said, ‘They were getting ready to throw that script in the trash. You told them how they could make it. You told them that it could be a great horror film. That it didn’t have to be gory. After you left, they said ‘See, we do have something here. We can get an A-list director. We can get an A-list cast.’ And I swear to god. I gave them the idea… I mentioned the idea that the older officer should be African American. And the younger guy. I said maybe Johnny Depp. I said, ‘But I just saw this movie called Thelma & Louise. And there’s this guy in it… Brad Pitt. I think he’s gonna turn into something.’ I swear to god.”

Dickerson ended up directing Surviving the Game. And the rest is history.