Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures
David Fincher, left, and Daniel Craig, seated, on the set of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.Director David Fincher may be just about the only person around who sees the edgy, often-violent drama The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a love story.
But surprising people is what this filmmaker, responsible for Zodiac, Fight Club and Best Director Oscar nominee for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network, is known for. Think you have Fincher figured out as a filmmaker — he does dark, violent and stylish, doesn’t he? — and up comes a moving character-driven piece like Benjamin Button or a study of geeks and their fragile friendships with Social Network.
So when Fincher took on making a feature based on Stieg Larsson’s massive 2005 bestseller, he had his own agenda. The story was hardly new to audiences; the Swedish film version starring Noomi Rapace as tattooed computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as reporter Mikael Blomkvist was in theatres just three years ago.In a phone interview with the Star ahead of Dragon Tattoo’s Dec. 20 opening, Fincher said, “I am taking all my cues from the book for this film.” And he found what leaped off the page at him was the evolving relationship between Salander (Rooney Mara) and crusading journalist Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) as they team up to solve a long-ago murder.
“I really love this relationship,” said the soft-spoken Fincher, 49. “I get offered a lot of movies where people do horrible things to each other but I haven’t had a relationship that was this emotive and interesting. I love the two of them . . . I loved their love affair and their friendship and their fighting.”But it’s no sweetheart flick. This is, after all, a Fincher movie. There is nudity, sex and graphic violence, much of it sexual. It will have an R-rating in the U.S. (18A in Ontario).
“I wouldn’t be involved in it if I hadn’t been allowed to make an R-rated movie,” Fincher said, adding with a chuckle he’s hardly the director people go to when they want someone to take a soft approach.
Key to his interpretation is a different take on Salander.
“I found myself at odds with a lot of people’s interpretation of Lisbeth,” he said. “I don’t like this reductive that she’s just a bitch. I didn’t want to make her that; I wanted to make her somebody who is actively navigating a real world. I didn’t see her as an action figure . . . I loved how human and resilient and what kind of interesting disaster she could have been.”
Mara, who worked with Fincher in The Social Network, where she had a small but key role as Erica Albright, Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) plain-spoken girlfriend, landed the role as Salander, one of the most sough-after in Hollywood. Scarlett Johansson, Carey Mulligan and Natalie Portman were all rumoured to have auditioned. Fincher said casting Rooney wasn’t a slam dunk. In fact, he took some convincing.
“I think of myself as a very sophisticated judge of humanity and actors and I could not reconcile upon first blush that Rooney would be able to so something that was the opposite of (Erica Albright),” he said.“As soon as she read for Salander I thought, yeah, she’s not sticking her chin out. She’s very scared and vulnerable. That’s an interesting take on it.”
As Mara continued to audition over and over and “revealing facets of herself,” Fincher knew he had his Salander.
“In the end it became obvious. You (as director) don’t make a performance. A director allows a performance. This is very much the case.”
Salander has a specific look in the film — skinny, chopped black hair, leather, tattoos and piercings. But Fincher also wanted her to have her own sound. You hear her before you see her in many scenes.
“It’s something we worked on for weeks and months,” he said, citing her jingling chains, subway tokens, coins, razor and Taser. “Sound falls from here. We kept saying she’s like Pigpen,” except she’s in a cloud of sound.
Mara isn’t the only Social Network alum to work on the movie. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won Best Original Score for Social Network, have done the music for Dragon Tattoo. Their hammering version of “Immigrant Song,” with Karen O on vocals, plays over the opening credits.
Steven Zaillian, an Oscar winner for Schindler’s List and two-time nominee for Awakenings and Gangs of New York, penned the screenplay for Dragon Tattoo. Condensing the lengthy book posed challenges, said Fincher.
“It’s 500 pages and a 2½-hour movie. You’re making some pretty big cuts,” Fincher allowed, adding he’s seen the Swedish version and pronounced it “beautifully done.” “But we were doing what we were doing. Starting from the book.”
Last year The Social Network was nominated for eight Oscars and won three. Does Fincher see similar success ahead for Dragon Tattoo?
All he’ll say is “it’s a very different animal. It’s going to be on 3,600 screens and there’s a lot of money behind it. It’s not the little movie that could.”
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