Bill Gates grew up in Seattle near an early computer center and Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley. Would they have chosen different paths in life if they were raised in Idaho or Kansas? How much does the place where we’re raised have to do with who we become? How much of it is chance and how much of it is hardwired?

David Fincher spent his formative years in the shadow of Northern California filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and believes that explains to a good extent why he’s a filmmaker. From a really good Financial Times piece about Fincher by Matthew Garrahan:

“Though Fincher’s childhood experience of Rear Window convinced him that he wanted to work in Hollywood, there was already plenty of film-making taking place around him in Marin County. He grew up in a middle-class family but their neighbors were some of Hollywood’s biggest names. ‘George Lucas was my neighbor, Francis Coppola was shooting The Godfather [nearby] in Shady Lane. There was a lot of film around.’

Lucas, who had not yet made Star Wars, was then embarking on his film career. ‘I was walking down the street one day with a friend of mine and saw a crew setting up lights for American Graffiti. We saw these old [Ford] Thunderbirds driving around. And then the movie came out. They found a part of a street in Petaluma that looked 10 years old and were able to transport an audience back in time with wardrobe, the hairstyles. To see that happen … was unbelievable.’ And fortunate, I say. Imagine if he had been raised in Idaho instead of Marin County. ‘I’d be a rancher. I’d be delivering calves now.’

When he was 14 his parents moved to Oregon but three years later the 17-year-old Fincher returned to California, where he stayed with a friend and his mother, and, unusually for a film director of his generation, did not attend film school. Within two years, however, he had found himself a job working for Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, where he was part of the crew that made Return of the Jedi.”