Academy-Award winning director David Fincher is very picky when it comes to his projects. Fincher, known for his work on Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network (for which he won the Academy Award for), Zodiac, and most recently, Gone Girl, is known for his meticulous dedication to detail in every film.

Netflix’s Mindhunter, a story about two FBI agents delving into the psychology of murder by getting close to real-life serial killers, is no exception. In the Netflix FYSee panel on Friday, Fincher brought his team of creatives to talk about their experience working on the series.

Director of Photography Erik Messerschmidt was brought on later in production and kept the cinematography pretty simple to fit the theme of the series.

“This is the kind of show we’re making,” Messerschmidt explained in the panel. “This is about elegance and simplicity, minimalism and trying to give the room to the cast and not be fancy and, ideally, no one notices my work. It should be straight-forward and simple.”

“With a story like this, it is important to embrace that which is mundane because the whole notion of these people, who are hunting other people, hiding in plain sight had to be believable that they could,” Fincher said. “Kemper is 6’9 and could hide in plain sight and part of that is if you have giant shafts of light and pigeons flying and you turn him into this phantom of the opera kind of character. It would denude that.”

The production design was no different in terms of keeping it mundane and realistic to the 70s era at the FBI. Production Designer Steve Arnold visited Quantico and used it as a basis to create the FBI offices in Mindhunter.

“We are telling the story of ordinary guys with extraordinary serial killer people,” said Arnold. “It’s one of those things that evolved over time. All of the materials that are there are dark and anodized frame windows and oak paneling, the glass, the shiny floors, and the vertical blinds. The whole Hoover library is kind of a space that we copied parts of to the do the coffered ceiling and we made up the atrium area – outside of Shepard’s office.”

“We also see the image of [actual past FBI director] J. Edgar Hoover hovering over them, right behind their shoulders, in that last sequence,” Arnold later revealed.

Fincher wanted to make sure the mood remained consistent, but with some added scary moments. Because the series is about understanding serial killers, Fincher emphasized the feeling of male dominance and aggression.

Fincher explained, “We have the walk down maximum security prison hallway. We’ve seen that before. We decided to do, instead of doing a lot of coverage, we’re just going to stay on his face and track for almost 85 feet with him and make it about the sound. Because everybody who has ever been in a prison will tell you, it’s the sound that is really unnerving. It’s just male aggression. It’s bouncing off the tiles and permeating from downstairs. It’s coming from upstairs. There are screams. We decided to turn it into a big sequence – as it was, it took hours anyways, but to get him to walk straight down the hallway. We did it that way because we figured we could do more unsettling things with the sound than we could with all the most gruesome looking inmates with tusks or mohawks.”

But, because the show revolved around the mystery and serial killers, Messerschmidt knew he had to shoot the scenes very carefully to avoid revealing too much.

“It’s a show about sequencing and coverage,” said Messerschmidt as the panel came to an end. “How we spoonfeed the audience the information, when we decide who has the information, when did they know they know, when does he know he knows.”

Mindhunter is set to return for a second season on Netflix