Gone Girl is the latest film from David Fincher, the American director who has made some of the most acclaimed films of the last two decades, including Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac and The Social Network.
He recently made his first foray into television with the drama series House of Cards.
Gone Girl, his 10th film as director, is an adaptation of the 2012 novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the adapted screenplay. It stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as married couple Nick and Amy Dunne. When Amy goes missing, Nick becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of the police, the media and the public.
Here, Fincher talks about the making of the film.
What was your first reaction after reading Gone Girl?
If the person who wrote this can find a way to do these flashbacks in a way that doesn’t seem like we have to stop the entire narrative, then she would be doing us all a great service.
It felt like Gillian was on to something that I hadn’t seen before. I felt she had identified this notion that there’s a narcissistic projection not only of who we want to be seen as, but who we want to be seen with. And that can become a very resentful relationship as soon as one of those participants decides, “I’ve had enough. I’m no longer interested in being the spouse of your dreams.”
That seemed a salient and modern look at interpersonal relationships. All of the twisty, turny, crime-fiction aspect of it was good and I enjoyed the plotting, but that wasn’t the thing that I thought, “I haven’t seen this before”.
Some people might suggest the book has quite a cynical take on how people present themselves in relationships. Was that in any way a concern for you?
Is cynicism a concern? No. I think that, for the most part, people who are concerned with something being overly cynical are usually timid.
So you didn’t feel any urge to make the characters, for want of a better word, more “likeable” for the screen?
I think likeability has become sort of synonymous with obsequiousness. And I do not really know what’s to be gained from addressing or defining the “likeability” of characters. The question is: “Are they compelling?”
I think that both these characters seemed realistic to me. I knew people that were like them.
It’s easy to see the commercial reasoning behind a studio’s desire to adapt a popular book. But what drew you to it?
I feel like it’s the responsibility of the filmmaker to first and foremost find things that are interesting to them. I think that the notion of trying to make something that, “Well I don’t like it, but I’m sure that there are people out there who will …” does not make any sense to me. So what I always begin with is, “Is it something that I’m interested in?”
Do you feel this story in some ways has two heroes — neither Amy nor Nick feels like the supporting character to the other. They both kind of feel like the lead character. Is that fair to say?
I think that there’s a very deft transition that’s made from the novel to the screenplay. And I credit Gillian with it completely. She was able to identify that in the book it’s a “He said, she said” because you’re in each of their heads. You are inside their skulls, listening to their thoughts — their most intimate thoughts.
And obviously you cannot do that in a film. It has to be active, it has to be dramatised. You can have the diaries as a presentation of Amy’s most intimate thoughts, whereas Nick obviously has to be played omnisciently in your presence and you have to experience his feelings and thoughts on the matter through his behaviour. He does not get to actually grab you by your earlobe and whisper in your ear and bequeath you all of this intimacy.
So that was a really, really tricky thing. I was extremely impressed that Gillian would see that and devise a way to present ostensibly the same story, but in a way that could work cinematically.
Apart from the changes you made for practical considerations to make it work as a film, were there any changes you made that were more to do with your own focus, or interests? Where you’d say, “I want to dig deeper into this element of the book” or “I want to bring this theme further to the forefront”?
No, it was more about cutting away the marbling. Gillian was a wonderful and diligent collaborator in that she was able to look at stuff, and even though it had taken years to get it to a manuscript stage and then to a published novel and then to a first draft of a screenplay and then finally to a shooting draft, she had incredible facility in being able to say, “This is a trait that is talked about over three or four chapters, but we really only have time for it to be a behavioural tic that we see in this one scene.”
And so the distillation process of it was more about just reminding her, you know, we only have two hours. We only have two hours.
So collaborating with the author of the book was a fairly painless process?
It was beyond painless. It was an incredibly nourishing process of being able to work with someone who was totally committed to make sure their story was told not just in the most complete way.
It was never about page count with Gillian. I think that she writes for Gillian Flynn, 15-year-old movie fan sitting in the third row, scarfing down popcorn and following the story. And that’s a rare thing.
A lot of times people will throw the baby out with the bathwater and often people will dig in their heels and say, “This is really, really important to me …” when no one can figure out how to include it.
So Gillian wasn’t too “precious” about the book?
It is not about finding somebody who is going to maul their own work. You need to be able to have a conversation with the writer to say, “I cannot have this little kernel, which is a great idea and perfectly positioned and phrased in the novel, because I cannot show it”. And she was always about, “What if we show it this way?”
So I think that was the great news. We had somebody there who was more than capable of, more than enthusiastic about, saying, “How do I show instead of say?”
Were there any films that you revisited or suggested that the cast watch in preparation. Anything that offered any useful touch points?
No, not really. I felt like it was sort of ripped from the headlines of the 24-hour cable-news cycle. I think that the story is kind of oddly not the purview of cinema. In a weird way it has its roots more in reality television and tragedy vampirism.
How much, to you, is the film about modern relationships and the way people can be these days and how much is the film about the bigger world we live in, the media, the tabloid sensationalism you refer to?
I think that the film is first and foremost, a ripping yarn, and that secondarily it has just enough medicine to make it pertinent.
Our biggest concern was to do justice to the very delicate alchemy that Gillian was able to achieve, which is that it has all the sort of lurid trappings of a mystery/thriller, but that it has salient things to say about interpersonal, intersexual politics, and expectations.
In hindsight, Ben Affleck seems a natural fit for the role.
No one had any reservations about him. Everyone’s response was, “You know, just because it is perfect casting doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it …”
What were the qualities he brings that were such a good fit for you?
I was looking for something very specific. I felt that the most important attribute that he had to have was, in a guileless way, to be able to put both feet in his mouth and commit character suicide in front of the onslaught, the pressure of the press that’s coming after Nick.
I felt that it was incredibly beneficial to have somebody who had been through that kind of media scrutiny and knew what it was like to be a character in a narrative that one has no control over.
And Ben has great wit about it. He can speak to that state of things in a way that is frustrating and horrifying and intensely humorous, and not a lot of people can. So that was a real benefit.
What was it about Rosamund Pike that made her right for Amy?
Rosamund had two things that were of great interest to me. The first was her opacity. I had seen her probably in three or four movies, and had no real read on her. That’s a rare thing for me. I sort of pride myself on being able to pick up on how many arrows an actor has in their quiver, and what their mechanism is.
If you’re in the business of watching people’s behaviour on TV, which is basically all directing is, you learn to read people very quickly as it relates to the things that they fall back on, the tricks that they tend to use. But I didn’t have a read on her, and I thought that that was interesting.
The second thing was that I knew Amy had to be an only child. When I met Rosamund, she was a dyed-in-the-wool only child. I mean, she just exudes it. She’s an orchid — and you get that. She was socialised with adults, and I thought that was really interesting.
There are some other interesting casting choices.
Finding Carrie Coon [who plays Nick’s twin sister Margo] was a big deal for us, because we needed somebody that could have this amazing familiarity with Ben and that is a very hard thing to play.
Tyler Perry [who plays Nick’s attorney Tanner Bolt] I’d met, and I knew him as a man more so than I knew him as an actor. I had seen some of his films but it was more the meeting of him. I was taken with his calm and with his eye contact and with his voice.
You’ve mentioned that filling the role of Desi Collings [an ex-boyfriend from Amy’s past] was particularly significant.
Yes, the one character in this movie who kind of doesn’t exist in real life. The role of Desi is such an absurd one. He’s a 40-year-old Mama’s boy who collects orchids and comes from wealth. It’s such a literary conceit.
Until you understand how he’s going to be used in the narrative, he’s a total riddle. So it had to be somebody who was mercurial, quicksilver and had a kind of intellect, instinct and … it’s almost like he needed to be a musical-theatre comedian. He needed to be somebody who was multi-disciplined. Obviously I had seen Neil on television, but mostly I’d seen him opening the Tony’s. And I thought if this guy can get me to watch the Tony’s … I met him and I thought, he is kind of like a secret weapon.
Changing this book into a movie sounds like it was quite a challenge — films can struggle so much sometimes with tone. Did you find this to be the case?
Yes, it’s the alchemy. I was doing an interview where I was asked about the technological challenges and I said there are no technological challenges in this movie. The challenge is 100 per cent tone all the time: Can we relate to this? Do we understand what these people are about?
Do you feel you can look at the finished film and say, “Yeah, I knew I wanted that and that, and I’m pleased that I’ve carried that thread all the way through”?
I think most of it is what we talked about doing. I mean, there are a couple of scenes, if we could reshoot them I’d reshoot them, but there’s no point in going into that. Would they be 100 per cent better? No, they’d probably be 15 per cent better. But I feel like we made the movie we set out to make.
Finally, a question about the score, your third collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I remember with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo you said you wanted to exude cold and isolation and there was some discussion about what that sounds like — bells, I believe and reverb, were mentioned. So was there a similar kind of brief for the score to Gone Girl?
Well, this is going to sound weird. I showed the movie to Trent and Atticus and we walked out of the screening room and they said, “So what do you have in mind?” And I said, “The movie’s about facades. The movie is about the appearance of the good neighbour, the good husband, the good wife. So I want you to do your version of spa music. The kind of music that one hears when one goes to get a massage. I want it to be that music that reassures us that everything’s going to be OK.”
But, of course I want it to be the Trent and Atticus version of that, which I don’t think will ever make anyone feel OK …
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