Gone Girl

Started by MacGuffin, April 15, 2014, 12:25:54 AM

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MacGuffin






Release date: October 3, 2014

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Missi Pyle, Tyler Perry, Patrick Fugit, Sela Ward

Directed by: David Fincher

Premise: A woman mysteriously disappears on the day of her wedding anniversary. Based on the novel, "Gone Girl."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Lottery


MacGuffin

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

©brad

Okay I guess. The source material doesn't warrant such an impressive line-up of talent and the premise is about as basic as your average episode of whatever but in Fincher I have faith. We'll see.

polkablues

I'm just happy to see Kim Dickens getting work.
My house, my rules, my coffee

max from fearless

The cast look great. But why does this feel like Fincher by numbers? If anything I'm just excited for another Trent Reznor score. I feel like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo score deserves a whole other movie, it's pretty incredible...

jenkins

Quote from: max from fearless on July 07, 2014, 03:13:37 PM
The cast look great. But why does this feel like Fincher by numbers? If anything I'm just excited for another Trent Reznor score.

fincher is some weird mixture of "boy they sure can make 'em like they used to that's wonderful" and "ummm i'd rather not be watching what we're used to"

and i'm going to share a song that i enjoy and i'm basically just agreeing with you



[edited for clarity]

max from fearless

This is coming out soon, so we're being treated to a slew of Fincher interviews, which is always a good thing. I skipped any questions which seemed to go into the film in any detail, so sorry if there are spoilerish details...but there's some good stuff here...

David Fincher Interview


Ahead of his highly anticipated adaptation of Gillian Flynn's psychological best-seller, Gone Girl, LWLies is granted an audience with director David Fincher.

David Fincher is a director who requires no real introduction. He's thought of as a saviour of American neo-noir with the fastidiousness of Kubrick. With titles like Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to his name, he's created some of the most memorable and innovative – and not to mention, greatest – films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. For his latest endeavour, he has taken on a(nother) literary behemoth (following his take on Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), this time its Gillian Flynn brutal, perspective-switching kidnap saga, Gone Girl. Here, he talks about the challenges of bringing this film to the screen, but also on crude public perceptions of Hollywood and moviemaking.

LWLies: It's hard to think of films in which the focus is equally divided between two characters. Was this a challenge in the case of Gone Girl?

Fincher: We had the two parallel stories in Dragon Tattoo, at least for the first hour. Which was weird, because the audience is then waiting for them to cross over. It's like the Batman TV show, where you have the villain over here doing his thing, and Batman over here doing his. There's usually the promise of intersection. But with this film, the dangling participle is – is she dead? And if she's not dead, where is she? So that's a slightly different thing, because I felt you had to be alongside him, wondering whether or not he's a monster.

There's a mid-point switch in the book. Does having a big event right in the central point of a narrative translate to cinematic storytelling and pacing?

In the movie it's almost at the half-way point. But, yeah, everything is modulated. You try to modulate all the performances, you try to modulate all the rhythms of how you're doling out information. You also keep in mind where the enjoyment is for this character thread, where's the enjoyment for the audience in watching this relationship. And you do it all knowing that in three pages, the other shoe's gonna drop. My hope is not to make the discussion about that switch. It's not going to be marketed like Psycho. No-one admitted to the theatre after it has started.

A big cardboard standee version of yourself.

Turn off your cell phones!

Spoilers is a hot term at the moment. People are verbally thrashed for giving plots away.


And rightly so. I think that the bane of our existence when we're making movies is... It's like someone buying a VCR but having to see all the schematics. It's not enough to say, we have a movie, here are the themes which it'll be sort-of dealing with, here's a taster of the tone. But the promise of the thing has to be imagined. More and more, people have some bizarre idea that they need to see exactly what happens in the movie and the five best jokes. I love to see movies without knowing anything about them.

Does this explain the enigmatic nature of the trailers you produce?

They're supposed to be slippery. What did you know going into the book?

Nothing.

No-one knew anything going into the book and, somehow, they sold seven million of them. I think this story has been wind-tunnel tested. I think that's ultimately why studios buy up hit books; because you know that a few million people have already enjoyed the ride.

Is it your job to figure out why people liked it?


I can't figure out why other people like it. I know why I like it. I know the things that were interesting that kept coming up in conversations. And then also, to work on a script with the person who wrote the novel, that can be a gift. There can also be a lot of frustration. Or certainly it can be perceived that way. Will this person be able to see the forest for the trees? Or will they be so wed to how difficult it was to make this storyline work that they're not willing to jettison certain elements when it doesn't?

I know that's a commonly-held philosophy about novelists. But with Gillian, it couldn't be further from the truth. She has – and David Koepp has it too – that love of where the audience is in the narrative. She was very good at taking things that were 13 chapters into the book and saying, well that could be in the introduction. She picked out the traits that needed to be dramatised, but didn't necessarily put them in the same chronological order.

Had she written a draft before you came on board?


No, I got sent the book. I liked the book. They told me that Gillian was working on a draft and did I want to involve myself. I said, I see no reason to now she's already working. Let's see what she comes up with. My biggest issue was how she was going to handle the diary entries. If she can figure that out, she should take the thing home. That's the biggest quandary, cinematically speaking. I read her first draft – it was long, but it was all there. She had jumped that hurdle, and so simply.

One of her reference points for the book was Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Was nastiness one of your tonal benchmarks?


Nastiness is subjective. I was interested in the material because I loved Gillian's idea of narcissism, and narcissism in attraction. The idea that a person feels they're deserving of a certain type of spouse, and the degree to which people will build a façade in order to ensnare another person who's own façade seems like it's compatible. I liked how spouses find that, after three, four, five years, they get exhausted keeping up their end of the delusion. I liked that, but played out in front of this insane backdrop of the cable TV news cycle.

The story seems to double as a satire of hysterical rolling news coverage.

It's an interesting thing, because you're wondering how satirical you can be. You watch these shows and there's nothing to make fun of. You have to play it straight. You can't take that stuff and hyperbolise it enough because it just looks like what it is, which is screaming speculation. I like those elements. I like the idea of what's going on behind the bedroom door, and how close scrutiny changes inter-personal dynamics. So, how do you act around your sister when you've just been accused of incest on television? Do you kiss 'em good night? What's an inappropriately long hug? And the notion of normalcy and perception: The good wife, the good husband, the good neighbour, the good Christian. It's obvious that Gillian is curious about what everyone else is up to, then she draws it through the ringer and stretches it out and lets you see it for all of its absurdity.

If you look at the comments on book websites, the fans have factionalised into Team Amy and Team Nick. Yet, I found that one of the story's major strengths was that it comes down on neither side.

It sits on the fence looking down at both yards, aghast and agog.

Was balancing on that fence hard when you were making the film?

Most people don't have to look too far to find that kind of example of a marriage. I dunno, maybe I'm too cynical? I never came down on either side. It wasn't hard for me to see that they both have issues. Obviously there are certain interpersonal standards that are being played among this couple – there are things about her which he resents which are universal, and vice versa. There's definitely a Rashomon sense of how things are remembered by certain characters. It's the whole thing of, what's the most reliable point of view? Who has the most to lose at any given juncture?

It's an interesting role for Ben Affleck to play. I felt there was a lot of crossover with his character in Terrence Malick's To The Wonder.

Hmm. Maybe. I've seen To The Wonder and... it's different, but related. Yeah, it's funny because I was walking off the sound stage one day and I overheard Rosamund [Pike] talking to Ben. She was saying, "what do you think David saw in my work that made him think of casting me for this role?" Ben said, "I dunno, I couldn't tell you." I walked over and said, "The question you should be asking is, what have I seen in Ben's work that made me cast him." He laughed. But it is. It's not the kind of role that most leading men go looking for. Yes, I'd like for someone to take a steamroller and grind me in to paste veeery slowly.

Are you looking at other movies when casting?

Yes, but I'm also looking at "the person". I hadn't seen all of Rosamund's work. I'd seen four or five things. The Bond movie, Jack Reacher. They always seemed to be two years apart. I was intrigued that, even after seeing four of five movies, I had no sense of her. She was sort-of opaque. In An Education, I even found myself not being aware of what her age was. That was an intriguing thing. Then I met her and she had the most important thing that Amy needed to have, which is that Rosamund was raised as an only child. You just feel it. It's not that she's not socialised, but that she's an orchid. She has that sense. It's not entitlement, but if you've spend your young life being around adults and not other kids, you carry yourself differently. Ben's thing was that he had lived through this kind of "attention". You can tell that he has made his peace with it. He has considerable charm. You can tell that's he's willing to trade on that. Oftentimes, that can lead to sticky things becoming stickier. And that was key – you have to have that to be Nick. He's really bright as an actor. He was willing to demean himself.

In past interviews I've often read you talking about "putting the camera where it should be".

By that I mean, where you think the story is. The most fun part of executive producing a TV show [House of Cards] was seeing everyone else's dailies. It's so weird because you've read the script, you've seen storyboards, if it's a complicated sequence, you've listened to the read-through. Then the dailies come in and you're like, "Really?! That side of the Oval Office is where you think that scene is?" It was interesting seeing stuff filter in. Stuff I would've never thought would be a quiet moment or a tossed-off moment at the end of the scene. A lot of cases, I'd be thinking why are we here, why are we looking at this thing in this way, and as the coverage progressed, you see what's going on. He's making the most out of this or that. Sometimes you have to wait for people to show you their hand and what they're capable of and what they're thinking.

I feel that in this business you bet on horses not races. The greatest thing about doing House of Cards was telling all these directors that they have final cut. I'm gonna chime in, but I definitely know how to go fuck myself. If you give people that authority and respect, they're going to work harder. It was an interesting lesson. I know that for me it's really important to get the master just right. I'm a little more didactic about that first communication of an idea.

Did the process of working in TV change how you worked on Gone Girl?


No. I don't think so. On House of Cards, we were told that we had to work fast a we couldn't shoot 20 takes. And I did it anyway. It's the only way I know how. The first three are rehearsals. Then you start making it more concise, weeding out the bad stuff. I don't think I moved any faster. I took 100 days to shoot this movie. I think for me, House of Cards was fun for me having that company, all those faces, to go in and work with every day. Making Gone Girl, I was probably more attuned to finding a good ensemble. I was more interested in doing something with a group of eight or ten really good actors as opposed to doing something with two or three. I enjoy the rehearsal part. Figuring out the tone.

Is it hard for you to say, this is the final movie, this is where we stop? Could you go on forever?


No. One could, but I don't think I could. There will always be scenes which you think could be better. The weird thing is that, for the most part, the scenes you look at and think are going to be really hard, those are the scenes you spend all the time and money orchestrating. Then there's always some little stupid scene that should go off without a hitch that you have to go back and reshoot it two, three times. Then you cut it. The hanging chads of movies.

Do you have a better idea of what those hanging chads will be now than you did, say, ten years ago?

No, no. They're always a surprise, because if they weren't you'd be planning for them. It's always like, how are we going to age a guy in reverse? That's what all the money gets spent on. That part was easy. Then we're left with, how you gonna work with 84-year-old extras? Oh my... I forgot, that's going to be really hard. You never quite get it all the way you'd wanna.

Is filmmaking replicating an image you already have in your head?


No, no. Maybe it was initially, when you're first trying to facilitate a shooting schedule or be involved in movies, or commercials. All you have to lean on is what you saw. As you get more comfortable, you realise that when you're shooting and you've done 15 takes or something, they don't have to be a refinement of the same idea. Often, we see directors working and we think that they're taking something and they're minutely tightening it. There are also times when you have to pull the pin and let the pressure off. So you say, now do a take like you've never met. Just as a palette cleanser. I think you should have a very specific idea of what it is that you want. All of us together trying to catch lighting in a bottle on a given day.

So a modulation of an image more than a refinement?


I'd say, you've written the music, all the orchestra's there. But to only do what was written is maybe not to take advantage of a great first violin, or a great oboe player. There are times when you just want people to deliver information, and there are times when you want a solo.

I'm naive about the physical process of making movies.

Really?

I don't think I've experienced that side of things in any meaningful way.


You have to. You have to if you're going to write about film. The imperfection of it and the grab-ass problem solving douchbaggery of it is incredibly important in understanding what goes on. The movie business did this to itself. The reason why the movie business is so expensive is there's this perception that everything is done perfectly. There's this belief in infrastructure and training and the fact that everyone is so specialised. I remember, especially when I was working at Industrial Light and Magic, I was 19, the whole idea that what George Lucas had built this new NASA, this incredibly efficient system. And it wasn't.

You have to realise how much luck goes into making a movie. For the most part, we don't get to test movies any more, thanks to previews crashers. So it's incredibly important if you're writing about film to see how it gets made. Not to say that to write about sausage you need to see sausage being made, but I do think there's this fucked up perception that everything is measured in advance and everyone knows what the outcome's gonna be. That's just not the case. It's much more like tennis. You can win or lose a match based on a couple of serves or a couple of returns you miss, and in the same way, you can fuck a whole scene up.

A lot of what you're doing as a director is mitigating against a disastrous outcome. It's an interesting time to make movies, though. Talking about specialisation – the reason movies have gotten more expensive is because the perception is that everything we're doing is very, very precious and has to be done perfectly. It's not like you go and rent a car and the character drives a car. You have to rent a fleet of them in case one breaks. It's a perceived importance. There's this sense that it's a military operation. And it is a military operation, and if you've ever seen a military operation you'd be shocked that anyone ever comes out alive. Ninety people working together cannot find their ass with a flashlight.

Did you see Soderbergh's speech in San Francisco? He was lamenting the death of medium-sized movies.


They're too risky. If you look at movies like... I guess, All the President's Men was important enough and based on a big enough transgression. But take a movie like Klute – I don't think that movie would be made today. I mean, The Godfather would have a hard time being made today. Even if you could put up the $75 million it would take to make that movie today, and you could guarantee that it would be one of the greatest movies of all time, people would still go, "$75 million? I dunno man, that's a lot of bread..." There are realities to our business. The bottom has fallen out. Dramas that cost more than $20 million, you're taking a big risk. I think Soderbergh was right. And it's sad. I think the thing is to make movies cheaper. People are migrating to television to find characters that aren't spandex-clad superheroes.

Have you ever had one of these mega blockbusters dangled in front of you?

I don't think anyone would come to me with a money-is-no-object proposition. No, I was ready to go to Australia and make 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which was going to be a big tentpole summer movie, but there was a lot of riptide to it. It was not just the hero's journey.

Was it a case of, as they say, creative differences?

You get over $200 million... all motion picture companies have corporate culture and corporate anxieties. Once we got past the list of people we could cast as the different characters in the film, once we got past one or two names which made them very comfortable, making a movie at that price, it became this bizarre endeavour to find which three names you could rub together to make platinum.

Were you one of those names?

No, I'm talking about actors.

I know, but you're a name.


I'm a certain kind of promise. I wanted Aronnax to be French, God forbid! It got to be a little too confusing to me. I had this argument with a studio executive one time where he said to me, "why is it that the actors always side with you and we're paying them?" And I said, "I think it's because, at some level, they know that my only real allegiance is to the movie." And because that's very clear and it never wavers, they may not agree with the image of the movie I have in my head, but they know that's what I'm after. They've seen me for 100 days take the long way around. I think that when you're trying to put together a handful of people to deliver all these facets of humanity and who work well together, it has to be in service of the narrative and not in service of the balance sheet. It became very hard to appease the anxieties of Disney's corporate culture with the list of names that allowed everyone to sleep at night. I just wanted to make sure I had the skill-sets I could turn the movie over to. Not worrying about whether they're big in Japan.

China appears to be the new big thing now.

That will be a big thing when dealing with movies as commodity. I think that movies are different things to different people. To me, they're a really important part of cultural identity. They're a great touchstone to who we were and what were on about at any given time. You look back to the cinema of the '70s and '80s and you see all different types of actors and palettes. It wasn't so much about physical perfection. You had very odd leading men. It's interesting how movies and culture reflect who we are. You'll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term "product" all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.

The term "content" is very popular in journalism.


The flowering of that term really happened in the aughts when a lot of people became involved in the web. I was involved in this company early on where were going to provide all this ambient "content" to all these different venues like malls and film sets and stuff. It's fascinating to me that content almost means the opposite of what it's intended to mean. It's really about square-meters of distraction. There's very little content in content any more. It used to be column inches, now it's how many hours of the day can we steal your eye-balls.

max from fearless

Ok, this one's really good...Fincher talks about death, working on music videos, his vision for 20,000 leagues, big mac movies etc, i'm hoping the new movie's as interesting as this talk...

Playboy Interview: David Fincher
By Stephen Rebello September 16, 2014

People tend to think twice about messing with David Fincher, director of perverse, wickedly funny, impeccably made head-twisters such as Fight Club, Zodiac and The Social Network. That's understandable. He is, after all, the dark, icy moviemaker who merrily snuffed Sigourney Weaver's iconic Ripley character in Alien 3, served up Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box in Seven, trapped Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart in a home invasion in Panic Room and choreographed Rooney Mara's brutal rape in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He made TV viewers' jaws drop with his series House of Cards when Kevin Spacey's ruthless politician shoves his lover Kate Mara (Rooney's sister) in the path of a subway train. Expect more Fincher-style dread, mystery and uneasy laughs from Gone Girl, his big-screen version of Gillian Flynn's relentlessly readable whodunit that spent 11 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, tore through 40 printings, sold more than 6 million copies before hitting paperback and sparked an adult fan base almost as rabid as the young-adult crowds obsessed with Twilight and The Hunger Games. Of the movie, in which Ben Affleck can barely convince anyone he didn't kill his beautiful wife, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who scored the picture with Atticus Ross, says it's "a much darker film than I was expecting. It's a nasty film."

Fincher wouldn't have it any other way. With a reputation for being obsessively perfectionistic and passionate about his creative vision, he has also apparently rattled some of Hollywood's biggest studio bosses and stars. Scott Rudin, producer of The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, has said, "He has an anarchist's mentality. He likes to blow up systems." Robert Downey Jr. compared the Zodiac set to "a gulag," and to salute Fincher's notorious proclivity for demanding as many as 60 takes from his actors, he left urine-filled mason jars around the set. But in an industry that often runs scared from off-kilter projects and inconvenient truths, Fincher stands out for bringing to the mainstream what may be hard to hear and watch but can also be entertaining as hell. David Andrew Leo Fincher was born August 28, 1962 to Claire, a mental health nurse who specialized in treating drug addictions, and Howard Kelly Fincher, also known as Jack, a Life magazine bureau chief and author. When Fincher was two, his parents relocated the family from Denver to Marin County, California. When he was about to enter high school, his parents moved again, this time taking Fincher and his two sisters to bucolic Ashland, Oregon, where he graduated from high school. Introduced to films by his father and inspired by seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the age of seven, Fincher, who was shooting eight-millimeter movies by the time he was eight, returned on his own to Marin County, where he ducked college and instead landed a job with director John Korty (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman). By the age of 19 he was working at George Lucas's special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, where he became an assistant cameraman and matte photographer. Two years later he jumped at the opportunity to make some noise of his own by conceptualizing and directing an attention-grabbing American Cancer Society public-safety commercial in which a fetus puffs a cigarette.

That spot started him on a lucrative career filming TV commercials for Nike, Coca-Cola, Chanel and Levi's, which he alternated with directing award-winning music videos for such artists as Madonna, George Michael and the Rolling Stones. Fincher's feature-film career was launched—and nearly crushed overnight—when 20th Century Fox hired the 27-year-old neophyte to direct the 1992 film Alien 3, the trouble-plagued, critically skewered second sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 futuristic masterwork. Oddly, the failure enhanced Fincher's burgeoning reputation as a visionary, and he parlayed that into a successful movie career. Fiercely private and not given to sharing glimpses of his life, Fincher met his longtime companion and producer, Ceán Chaffin, in the early 1990s when she was producing and he was directing a Coke ad. Fincher had previously been married to model-photographer Donya Fiorentino. They have a daughter, Phelix Imogen Fincher, who is 20; Donya subsequently married actor Gary Oldman, and Fincher gained custody of Phelix.

PLAYBOY sent Contributing Editor Stephen Rebello, who last interviewed Samuel L. Jackson, to catch up with Fincher in his cavernous Hollywood production offices housed in a swank 1920s art deco former bank that later served as a location in L.A. Confidential. Reports Rebello: "You meet David Fincher and know instantly you've been scanned, processed and judged either 'quick' or 'dead.' He doesn't suffer fools. But instead of the cool, brusque, detached man some have described, he struck me as gracious, smart as hell, drolly funny and armed with a lethal dry wit. Tell him you like his films, for instance, and he shoots back, 'Well, it's always nice to meet new perverts.' Back at you, Fincher."

PLAYBOY: You've made movies as different from each other as The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and earned best director Oscar nominations for both. But you're better known for darker, more twisted films such as Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What frightens the guy whose movies provoke, scare and unsettle others?

FINCHER: Complacency. Also, I don't like spiders, snakes, sharks, bears or anything that could make me part of the food chain. In our part of Los Angeles I'm usually okay, but when our daughter was three, this big fucking green garden spider as large as my palm built a gigantic web at about face height for a three-year-old. We were convinced that thing was thinking, If I can just get the tykester to come into my net, I could feed off that little one for two years. It would build this web every single night, and every single morning someone would walk through it. I was like, Dude, seriously? Give it a rest.

PLAYBOY: What else creeps you out?

FINCHER: I heard about a German man who put an ad on an internet site saying he wanted to devour somebody. Someone actually answered the ad. The guy videotaped himself anesthetizing the willing victim, segmenting his body and consuming him. Before the victim died, they ate his genitals together. I don't know if it was some bizarre psychosexual fulfillment, but it's one of the most disturbing things I've ever heard. When you can't count on somebody to even fight for his life, when he goes willingly—well, it's so out of left field, it's not even on my radar. Even though that was the most troubling thing I'd heard in a long time, the things that interest me in cinema kind of work the same way. I like starting with an idea that unlocks a whole Pandora's box of other ideas.

PLAYBOY: Do people ever confront you for unlocking their personal Pandora's box of dark thoughts?

FINCHER: It was offensive to me on a certain level that when Saw and those other movies came out, people said, "Well, torture porn really started with Seven." Fuck you. There's enough pervy shit going on in Seven that I don't have to get on my high horse to defend its artistic sensibilities. It was lurid. It was supposed to be lurid. But the thing I appreciated about it and what I thought Andrew Kevin Walker's script did so well was that it got your mind in overdrive. It worked on your imagination. We were extremely conscious of the fact that we were talking about torture, but we never actually showed it.

PLAYBOY: It's interesting how even some fans of Seven swear they saw the severed and boxed head of Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays the wife of the detective played by Brad Pitt, at the end of the movie.

FINCHER: Exactly, but they never saw it. Because we had Andrew's script and Brad and Morgan Freeman playing the detectives, we were in great shape and didn't have to show the head in the box. Directors get far too much credit and far too much blame. But the fun of movie storytelling is when you know you have the audience's attention and you can see or feel them working to figure out where the movie's going. I'm interested in the psychology of not only leading the audience along but also being responsible for getting them there sooner than the characters, so the audience is watching things and going, "Oh no!" It's an interesting relationship to have with 700 people, even if 200 of them miss it entirely.

PLAYBOY: You've cast Brad Pitt as the star of Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. What's the dynamic between you?

FINCHER: Brad fucks with me all the time. So does Ben Affleck. When we did Fight Club, the studio said, "This is awesome; this is going to be great," because we were going to have a scene with Brad opening the door naked. When it came time to shoot it, being Brad, he said, "I should open the door and have a big yellow dishwasher scrub glove on." I said, "Perfect." When the studio executive saw it, she said, "You got him with his shirt off and then you fucked the whole thing up." I was like, "Excavate that line from Animal House: 'Hey, you fucked up—you trusted us.' "

PLAYBOY: Obviously a movie star of Pitt's stature helps calm nervous investors so you can make the movie you want.

FINCHER: Yeah. With my first movie, Alien 3, I had to get permission for everything, but my second movie, Seven, was my movie, Andy Walker's movie, Brad Pitt's, Morgan Freeman's and Kevin Spacey's movie. I didn't look to anyone for permission. I made a pact with [studio boss] Michael De Luca and just said, "Dude, the audience wants a revelation. I'm going deep. It's $34 million and fuck it." He was a thousand percent there, even when push came to shove and we went $3 million over budget. We gave the audience a revelation with Brad and Morgan and by throwing in Gwyneth Paltrow, whom people had seen a bit of. It was the alchemy of those faces, those careers and the ascendance of different talents in that period. I'd direct Seven in a different way today. I would have a lot more fun. It was only by the time I did Zodiac or Benjamin Button that I knew what I was doing.

PLAYBOY: Do you watch a lot of crime shows on TV?

FINCHER: I like Forensic Files, that kind of stuff. My wife will turn it on, roll over in bed, and things like "The body was found near the parking lot of the 7-Eleven just off the interstate" go into her ears while she's asleep.

PLAYBOY: Having lived with, raised a daughter with and worked closely with your wife, Ceán Chaffin, as your producer since the 1990s, do you ask her for advice when you're on the fence about material?

FINCHER: Constantly. It's a blessing and a curse, because she's obviously someone who knows me, in some ways, better than I know myself. There are definitely things we disagree about. She was extremely vociferous, for instance, when she said, "Don't make The Game."

PLAYBOY: That's the 1997 thriller in which Sean Penn gives his brother Michael Douglas a voucher for a live-action game that takes over his life.

FINCHER: Yeah, and in hindsight, my wife was right. We didn't figure out the third act, and it was my fault, because I thought if you could just keep your foot on the throttle it would be liberating and funny. I know what I like, and one thing I definitely like is not knowing where a movie is going. These days, though, it's hard to get audiences to give themselves over. They want to see the whole movie in a 90-second trailer.

PLAYBOY: Do you ever feel trapped by your own track record as a director?

FINCHER: I know that if a script has a serial killer—or any kind of killer—in it, I have to be sent it; I don't have any choice. [laughs] My responsibility to myself is always, Am I going to be the commodity that people want me to be, or am I going to do the shit that interests me? I have a lot of trouble with material. I don't like most comedies because I don't like characters who try to win me over. I don't like being ingratiated. I don't like obsequiousness. I also have issues with movies where two people fall in love just because they're the stars and their names are above the title. I could maybe do some gigantic mythological Hero With a Thousand Faces–type movie, but so many other people are doing that.

PLAYBOY: Superhero stuff?

FINCHER: I find it dull. I like to anticipate the energy of a movie audience that's waiting for the curtain to come up and thinking, Well, one thing we don't know about this guy is that we don't know how bad it can get.

PLAYBOY: Things get really bad in your new thriller, Gone Girl, both for the audience sweating it out and for the ex-magazine journalist played by Ben Affleck, who keeps swearing he had nothing to do with his wealthy, blonde, apparently perfect wife's disappearance. The book is famous for its twists and turns, so it's tough to discuss the movie without spoiling it. You're known for toying with audiences, but do you worry that the big international fan base for Gillian Flynn's best-selling novel may be rocked by alterations you and she made for the movie version?

FINCHER: There are certainly a lot of elements in Gillian's book that are well trod in my movies, like the procedural aspect, people putting together clues and things like that. It's also a very naughty book. But my thought when I first read it was, Fuck, how do you throw away two thirds of this and still end up with the same journey? How do you still play with the Scott Peterson aspect [the notorious case in which Peterson murdered his pregnant wife]—which we all know is the jumping-off point—but make it about something bigger and more universal?

PLAYBOY: Bigger and more universal, such as...?

FINCHER: I think the movie works on a purely procedural level and on a purely page-turning-mystery level. But it has a real riptide to it, taking to task our cultural narcissism and who we think we are as good wives, good husbands, good Christians, good neighbors, good Americans, good patriots. Once you get fractal about every fissure in somebody's public facade, you're going to see stuff you wish you hadn't. Can we hold ourselves to the same scrutiny to which we hold people we've never met? The great gift of Gillian, who's very wry and bright, and the fun I've had on this movie was having a kindred spirit who likes the naughtiness of going, "You can have your cake and eat it too—but it's preachy cake."

PLAYBOY: The book also says dark, funny, troubling things about marriage.

FINCHER: I think Gillian's book is talking about marriage and hiding it in an absurdist confection. When you peel back the layers and get to the kernel, you think, Wow, I feel queasy for a whole different set of reasons than I thought I would. Remember the 1970s National Lampoon record That's Not Funny, That's Sick? That was what I wanted to go for in terms of performance and tone. That and Lolita, because both are unbelievably funny and unbelievably naughty. They're about disturbing ideas and very disturbed people and their facades of normalcy. There are moments when you find yourself torn by what the characters in Gone Girl have done in service of their urges. They're kind of irredeemable and yet intensely human.

PLAYBOY: You're happily married, but you were previously married to, had a daughter with and divorced a woman who subsequently married and fought a very public and ugly divorce battle with actor Gary Oldman, who recently gave a forthright interview in PLAYBOY. Did any of your history and relationships come into play while directing Gone Girl?

FINCHER: Gary and I certainly have a shared history. I know him very well. In fact, I wanted to cast him in Alien 3, but we couldn't work it out—though, in hindsight, if we had, we probably would never have spoken to each other after that. Gary's not cruel. He's an incredibly thoughtful guy. I see him from time to time, but I haven't seen him in a while. I heard about the Playboy Interview, but I haven't read it yet. It shows you how pathetic it is that I don't know anything else that's going on when I'm in the bubble of finishing a movie.

PLAYBOY: Given your relationship with Pitt and considering how many actresses' names were floated to star in Gone Girl—including Charlize Theron, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon and Emily Blunt—why did you choose Affleck and Rosamund Pike?

FINCHER: I offer everything to Brad, not because I'm pathetic but because he's good for so many things. Both Brad and Ben have a default "affable" setting. Neither wants you to be uncomfortable. You cast movies based on critical scenes. In Gone Girl there's a smile the guy has to give when the local press asks him to stand next to a poster of his missing wife. I flipped through Google Images and found about 50 shots of Affleck giving that kind of smile in public situations. You look at them and know he's trying to make people comfortable in the moment, but by doing that he's making himself vulnerable to people having other perceptions about him.

PLAYBOY: What kind of perceptions?

FINCHER: In Ben's case, what many people don't know is that he's crazy smart, but since he doesn't want that to get awkward, he downplays it. I'm sure when he was a 23-year-old and all this career-success shit was happening for him, he was like, "I just want to go to the after-party and meet J. Lo." I'm sure he said a lot of glib shit and people went, "Ugh, fake." If you have a lot of success when you're young and good-looking, you realize it's okay to let people write you off. It's the path of least resistance. You don't want to be snowbound with them anyway. I think he learned how to skate on charm. I needed somebody who not only knew how to do that but also understood the riptide of perceived reality as opposed to actual reality.

PLAYBOY: In casting the "girl" of the title, how familiar were you with Pike, the British beauty people may know from An Education and Jack Reacher?

FINCHER: I wanted Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, where you think, This person has experienced avenues of pain that no one can articulate. Or Faye in Network, where it's, You're never going to get to the bottom of this, so just stop. It's crazy how much Rosamund reminds me of Faye. I'd seen probably four or five things Rosamund had done, and I didn't have a good take on her. I realized why when I met her. She's odd. The role is really difficult and Rosamund was born to play it. There was a moment on the set when I overheard Rosamund asking Ben, "What do you think Fincher saw in me that he would cast me in this role?" Ben said, "Why don't we ask him?" I, of course, turned to Ben and said, "You should be asking the question, What did Fincher see in me that he wanted me for this role?" Because what we asked him to do was "Open vise, insert testicles and turn" for the entire length of the movie. Ben and Rosamund are both great in it.

PLAYBOY: So far your Gone Girl cast has been mum, but other stars you've worked with, such as Daniel Craig, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal, have spoken about the experience as being tough but worth it, with you demanding many retakes of the same scene.

FINCHER: If you didn't get hugged enough as a kid, you won't find what you're looking for from me. That's not my gig and I'm not attuned to it. On Zodiac I had a conversation with Jake, and I said, "I guarantee I'm going to make a good movie out of this. You can decide if you want to be the weakest thing in it, or you can decide if you want to show up." Downey had an interesting relationship with Jake on that movie. I think he felt it was his job to point out how difficult it is to be a 24-year-old actor with a lot of eyes and expectations on you. In spite of all the drama about whether we were allowing Jake to be the best version of himself because we were expecting so many iterations of his performance, to an extent I also felt that way about him. I also empathized with the wizened Downey looking back at himself in his Less Than Zero days and wanting a more nurturing influence for Jake.

PLAYBOY: Both Downey's and Gyllenhaal's complaints were about reshooting scenes over and over. What do you get on take 11, say, that you don't on take five?

FINCHER: Part of the promise when I work with actors is that we may be on take 11 and I'll say, "We certainly have a version that we can put in the movie that will make us all happy. But I want to do seven more and continue to push this idea. Let's see where it goes." Now, I may go back to them after those seven takes and say, "It was a complete fucking waste of effort, but I had to try because I feel there's something to be mined from this." That's a lot of extra work for an actor, and sometimes it pushes them out of their comfort zone. In some cases they're not getting paid as much as they would on another movie. I go out on a limb, and people work harder for me than they do for other people. But I want them to be happy with the fact that we were able to do something singular, something unlike anything else in their or my filmography.

PLAYBOY: Something that doesn't look much like anything else in your filmography is your big foray into television, the biting, juicy, inside-politics series House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. The show has won a viewership and a slew of awards, put Netflix on the map and made binge watching the new normal.

FINCHER: Netflix is fucking righteous, so smart. I directed two episodes of House of Cards and also did the marketing. We were working with a tiny marketing budget, and I knew the cast, so I said, "Let's keep this really simple." I didn't want to drag Kevin away for three days to do a photo shoot, so we had the art department make that Lincoln chair, and we rolled it over in the corner, dropped Kevin in it and took a picture of him. It wasn't born of wanting to put talented photographers out of work as much as it was, "I think we can do this in an hour and a half because I can say to Kevin, 'Okay, that scene in episode 11, give me that look.' " We whacked this thing together and showed it to Netflix, and they said, "That looks great." I give all credit to Netflix. It was smartly done and very strategic, and they've been able to make a fairly big splash.

PLAYBOY: When The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was about to hit theaters, some of the press focused on your mentor-protégée relationship with young actress Rooney Mara. Why do you think Mara's co-star Daniel Craig described the relationship as "fucking weird" in one magazine piece?

FINCHER: The thing got cloud-seeded by way of one magazine story. Had that one journalist from Vogue delved as deeply into why people were behaving the way they were as he did into what shoes they were wearing, we might have gotten some insight. But it was more interesting for him to do a Tippi Hedren–Alfred Hitchcock sort of thing. From the beginning I said to the Sony publicity people that the purpose of plucking someone like Rooney from obscurity is that they walk on-screen and you immediately believe who the fuck they are, rather than, "You were on Gossip Girl, right?" Rooney will tell you that I let her do anything she wanted. But it seemed counter to what we were trying to do to see her on the cover of Seventeen or being trotted out on every television show to go, "Here she is, cute as a fucking button and not at all this goth Swedish punker." I said, "I think this is absurd," but it didn't move the needle in any way. The Sony publicity people were frustrated with my getting in the way of the exploitation of the character Lisbeth Salander.

PLAYBOY: Do you know if any actors have backed away from working with you because of what they think you're like?

FINCHER: I'm sure there are people who think I bite the heads off puppies. There's nothing I can do about that. The relationships that matter to me are always with people who wouldn't have preconceived notions based on somebody's work. I gave up worrying about that years ago. I remember giving a quote, "I've got demons you can't even imagine." It was a joke. It was fun. It was out of context. My parents were always concerned about things I was quoted as saying. My dad thought for a time that I was playing into it.

PLAYBOY: Let's talk about your parents and your home life. You were born in Denver, but when you were two your family moved to California, eventually settling down in San Anselmo in Marin County. What was it like growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, when the area became synonymous with progressive thought, self-expression and a relaxed view toward drugs and sex?

FINCHER: It was a bizarre, great place to grow up in during that time, with the human potential movement, EST, a lot of drugs and a lot of mixed messages, like "We want you kids to feel free to do whatever you want, just not that." There was always the potential for suffocating liberation. As absurd as it sounds, the movie with Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld, Serial, was a prescient and truthful view of Marin County—a place people think of as affluent, but at the time it wasn't. I grew up before the yuppies, before the Me decade, before "Greed is good." It was never "What are you driving?" I was a latchkey kid. I'd put a note on the fridge, "I'm going to Chris's house" or "I'm spending the night." No GPS, no cell phones. You were trusted. People had a much healthier attitude toward a lot of things.

PLAYBOY: Including sex?

FINCHER: We talked about sex from the time I was eight or nine. I don't think there was any confusion about what people were up to from the time I was in second or third grade. There were a lot of drugs. One of my dad's friends was Thomas Thompson, a writer for Life magazine who also wrote the book Richie: The Ultimate Tragedy Between One Decent Man and the Son He Loved, about a man who killed his son who was on drugs. I had friends with older brothers who were well on their way to being strung out.

PLAYBOY: Did you really slather your sister's dolls in ketchup and hurl them onto the freeway?

FINCHER: I did, because we thought it was funny. We used to egg cars and do all that kind of stupid shit, and it did escalate to all kinds of lunacy. No one was ever injured. I've gotten into a lot of trouble talking about that. You do a lot of dumb shit when you're 10 or 12.

PLAYBOY: Your father also wrote for Life, among other magazines, right?

FINCHER: He was a reporter and then a Life bureau chief. He quit to write nonfiction books on human intelligence, left-handedness and hundreds of magazine stories for Reader's Digest, Psychology Today, Sports Illustrated. Later in his life he wrote a couple of screenplays. He also wrote a novel that he burned in front of my mother. That's a story I was told and it has probably been hyperbolized, by me. But it's who he was. He wanted to get it right.

PLAYBOY: Your mother worked in mental health, specializing in treating drug addiction. Were drugs attractive or scary?

FINCHER: I've definitely been there with my friend in high school on a sodden, rainy, pouring-down night after we'd drunk a bottle of really bad champagne stolen from a restaurant he worked at. I remember trying to keep his mom's Corolla station wagon from slipping off a cliff. I've done all that stupid crap. It's not to say I didn't do my share, but there was no allure for me to see where experimentation could take you. My mom ran a methadone maintenance program, after all. Besides my mom's work, I have too much of a work ethic to disappear into that space. I had a normal teenage life. The only difference was that by the time I was 19, I was working six days a week, 14 hours a day for Industrial Light & Magic.

PLAYBOY: What brought you to a place where you'd be working at the George Lucas–owned, premier visual effects company in the world?

FINCHER: I was the guy who waited in line to see The Empire Strikes Back. I was the kid who didn't read the Time magazine article about Jaws because I was not going to let that fuck it up for me. My dad took me to movie matinees. Movies were all I wanted to do. And I grew up in a perfect time and a perfect place, with all this incredible stuff happening around me.

PLAYBOY: Like what?

FINCHER: George Lucas lived two doors down from my house. I saw American Graffiti being photographed on Fourth Street in San Rafael. They were making The Godfather on Shady Lane in Ross, California. Dirty Harry was being shot at Larkspur Landing. By the time I was 14 I was on my way to a high school that had film courses, 16-millimeter cameras and double-system sound recording. I couldn't wait.

PLAYBOY: So your career path probably hasn't surprised your childhood friends from Marin.

FINCHER: I still have a handful of friends from there—the most cynical, perverse, sardonic, funny, irreverent, ruthless people. They're dark and sinister but wrapped in this perfectly humane, affable package. They get the cosmic joke. I always wonder, Was it something in the water? Or maybe it was being eight years old and having people say, "Okay, if your school bus gets the tires shot out of it, just stay on the bus. The Zodiac killer has sworn that he's going to pick off the little kiddies." My dad was super dry in his delivery, like nothing was ever cause for alarm. He'd say, "Oh, Dave, you should know there's a homicidal maniac who has written to the San Francisco Chronicle." Years later, when we were making Zodiac, I remember the opening scene of the movie wasn't working until [music supervisor] George Drakoulias brought me Three Dog Night's version of the song "Easy to Be Hard," from Hair. We put that music over the scene, and it was like I was in Black Point and could smell the eucalyptus. I was suddenly in 1965, in a green Impala with a huge backseat and a steel dashboard, like I was transported. I've harbored bizarre dreams of returning, but you can't, you know? Sausalito's not the same thing it was in 1976.

PLAYBOY: Did you pursue your moviemaking passion once you hit high school?

FINCHER: My parents became disenchanted with Marin just when I was about to enter high school. They were a little too Midwestern and reticent to succumb to Marin's kind of grooviness. They came back from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival convinced that the three of us kids would love southern Oregon, so they moved us there. I was on the cusp of doing what I wanted to do, and to have it snatched from me was like being choke-chained out of the perfect environment.

PLAYBOY: Did you act out because of it?

FINCHER: I always sort of acted out, but I wasn't a bad kid. Once I realized my parents weren't going to come to their senses, I knew the only way out of there was going to be on me. I wouldn't be able to be in the film business in southern Oregon and wouldn't witness the things I'd been seeing. So instead, as this scrawny drama nerd who always wanted to be a director, I developed my own curriculum and executed it.

PLAYBOY: What kind of jobs did you have as a kid?

FINCHER: For most of high school, after school until six, I would work on plays and design sets and lighting. From six until 12:30 or one I would rush off to the local second-run movie theater, where I was a non-union projectionist. I got to watch movies for free, hundreds of times. That was a great job for someone who loved movies, because I got to see Being There, All That Jazz and 1941 180 times. Of course, I also had to watch things like Audrey Rose 180 times. On Saturdays I worked at KOBI in Medford, a local television news station, as a kind of production assistant. I would lug incredibly unwieldy cameras to shoot location stuff, like when there was a barn on fire or something like that. I also had jobs as a fry cook, busboy, dishwasher.

PLAYBOY: Were your parents down with all this?

FINCHER: When I was about 15 or 16, they sat me down and said, "We want to know where you think you're going and what you think you're going to do." I laid it out for them: "After high school I'm going to move back down to Marin. I want to eventually get a job working at Industrial Light & Magic. From there, I'm going to make television commercials and move to Los Angeles. Then I'd like to make sequels to my favorite science fiction movies." My dad, who was big on taking long, deep breaths while thinking about things, said probably the most important thing ever: "Well, what if that doesn't work out?" I was kind of like, "Fuck you. I'm not thinking about plan B."

PLAYBOY: Your career pretty much followed that trajectory you laid out as a kid—except for the making-sequels part.

FINCHER: I went back to Marin, where my younger sister had done voice-overs for [filmmaker] John Korty, and I got a production assistant job with him—moving Xerox machines, mopping floors, helping rewire animation stands. I rose very quickly in the ranks because of my work ethic. I was doing effects animation, shooting some second-unit stuff and becoming a visual-effects producer. I met wildly talented, inspirational people there. It was kind of a great film school, though some people were definitely like, "Who the fuck does this 18-year-old think he is?"

PLAYBOY: What did your parents make of the fact that within a few years you were directing commercials for some of the biggest clients in the world?

FINCHER: When I was making commercials for Nike, Chanel and Pepsi, I think my parents thought I was doing stuff like "Come on down to Waterbed Warehouse." That was their idea of what television commercials were, so that's what they thought I was doing. My dad was an Okie and my mom was from South Dakota, and because they had a very different view of what one could expect, they wanted to protect me from disappointment. I think it clicked after we started Propaganda Films, and they started to think, Oh wow, he's okay financially.

PLAYBOY: Propaganda was a very successful music video and moviemaking company that you, Dominic Sena and others launched in 1986 and which boosted the feature-film careers of interesting directors such as Spike Jonze and Antoine Fuqua, among many others.

FINCHER: It's weird. Ceán and I were talking about our daughter, who is 20 now. That's the age I was when I directed my first television commercial. The idea of walking in the door, rolling up my sleeves and saying, "Okay, here's what the next 10 hours are about. For the first shot, we're going to...." That doesn't seem so weird or different to me, because that was me at the age of 20. And yet I would have a hard time listening to a 20-year-old tell me, "Here's what we're going to be doing."

PLAYBOY: You directed some of Madonna's most stylish videos, such as "Vogue" and "Bad Girl," the latter depicting the singer as a film noir femme fatale who gets strangled with panty hose. Why do you think that Madonna never translated to the big screen?

FINCHER: Madonna is very crafty. She's street-smart. The video directors who did the best work with her—romantic, amazing stuff like what Jean-Baptiste Mondino did—were the ones she allowed to take risks and the ones who made videos she would throw herself into. I made commercials to make money, but I did music videos as a kind of film school. I learned that the way to be with Madonna was to follow her impetus, because the artist in a music video is not only the star but also the studio. I could say to Madonna, "I need you to do it again. I need you to stop blinking. I need you to get your fucking chin down. And I need you to be better." Whether it was Madonna, Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck, I'm well aware that the work got financed because of them. But they needed to know I had to get them off their mark, get them to a place where it might get warm, because there might be friction.

PLAYBOY: How do you look back on directing your first feature movie, Alien 3?

FINCHER: I was a 27-year-old rube trying to navigate an impervious bureaucracy. It was an absurd and obscene daily battle to do anything interesting with what we were allowed to do. It was the same studio but very different players when I made Fight Club. There were 80 corporate people who, for all the right reasons, became terrified of what the movie became. The biggest tipping point was, "God, the movie's so homoerotic," and that was a real problem for them. At the time, it was incendiary, but I look back on it now and it's so fucking tame, it's almost a TV movie.

PLAYBOY: After that movie, did guys try to fight you, to take you on just for fun?

FINCHER: I'm not tough, but I'm mean. I think people know I'm way too vindictive to try that shit.

PLAYBOY: If any movie divides your ferociously partisan fanboy base it's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—a deeply emotional, odd movie clearly made by someone who has grappled with death and the passage of time.

FINCHER: I'd never made a movie with that big a body count. Everybody dies. And the truth of the matter is everyone is going to die, yet we spend so much time ignoring that fact.

PLAYBOY: Whose death has most affected you?

FINCHER: My father died in 2003, and I'd never been with someone when they died before. Almost all the decision-making I'd done in my life was in hopes of pleasing him or reacting against the things I felt he was shortsighted about. All of a sudden there was no north anymore, only south, east and west. When I read Eric Roth's draft of the script, it felt as though it was talking about an experience I'd had. Everybody kept saying the character was a little passive, and I was like, "My dad was a little passive. People do go through their entire lives being passive." Benjamin Button is a bit of a dirge. I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was an accomplishment.

PLAYBOY: What do you think happens after death?

FINCHER: When my father was sick, starting his chemo and puttering around our house after moving from Oregon to L.A., I could tell when he was about to appear at the bottom of the steps even if I didn't hear him. Of course, I knew him so intimately. When he passed I could tell he was no longer in the room. I was profoundly aware that the frequency he was on was suddenly gone. I've never been a religious person. I've always felt that the responsibility we have to one another should transcend punishment, that you should do what you feel is right because it's right, not because you're going to be scalded forevermore. I hope the ether is out there somewhere and all the star children pass on knowledge, experience, forgiveness, whatever.

PLAYBOY: How do you assess The Social Network, a movie many people thought deserved to win the best picture Oscar over The King's Speech?

FINCHER: It's as close to a John Hughes movie as I can make. For me that was stepping outside my comfort zone by showing nerds in their natural habitat. People said, "Oh, you're making a Facebook movie?" as if we were capitalizing on a trend or doing a Linda Blair Roller Boogie roller-disco movie after disco was dead. I was able to say to the studio, "There are no movie stars in this, just kids between 20 and 25." It was incredibly fun and freeing to be able to just put the best people in those roles.

PLAYBOY: For better or worse, over the years lots of Fincher projects have been announced and then vanished, including a top-chef project meant to star Keanu Reeves and a Steve Jobs movie with a script by Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for writing The Social Network. But the most intriguing was a proposed remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

FINCHER: Dude, it was fucking cool. It was smart and crazy entertaining, with the Nautilus crew fighting every kind of gigantic Ray Harryhausen thing. But it also had this riptide to it. We were doing Osama bin Nemo, a Middle Eastern prince from a wealthy family who has decided that white imperialism is evil and should be resisted. The notion was to put kids in a place where they'd say, "I agree with everything he espouses. I take issue with his means—or his ends." I really wanted to do it, but in the end I didn't have the stomach lining for it. A lot of people flourish at Hollywood studios because they're fear-based. I have a hard time relating to that, because I feel our biggest responsibility is to give the audience something they haven't seen. For example, Gillian Flynn and I are doing Utopia [about fans of a cult graphic novel] for HBO, and that's all I'm focusing on next year.

PLAYBOY: In the end, what do you most want people to know about you?

FINCHER: Studios treat audiences like lemmings, like cattle in a stockyard. I don't want to ask actors or anyone else on a movie to work so hard with me if the studios treat us as though we're making Big Macs. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is not a Big Mac. Gone Girl is not a Big Mac. This TV show I'm doing about music videos in the 1980s and the crew members who worked on them, or this other show, a Sunset Boulevard set in the world of soaps—they're not Big Macs. I don't make Big Macs.

wilder

Quote from: David Fincher Playboy Interview on September 18, 2014, 10:02:10 AM
This TV show I'm doing about music videos in the 1980s and the crew members who worked on them

whoa what is this

ElPandaRoyal

Quite a strong film, it goes some weird places that I wasn't expecting, doing so in risky and uncomfortable ways.

The plot has a couple of twists that may seem too much for the casual viewer, but that's just one of the reasons why it pretty much feels like we're in Hitchcockian territory, where logic is not the most important thing If anything, it's film noir logic. And I say Hitchcockian not only because of how it deals with mystery, but also how it uses some darkly comic undertones (it's a surprisingly funny movie) to work almost as a satire on so many levels (on marriage, on media...), and also how it deals with the question of duplicity - a lot of characters are hiding something in their personality; it's ultimately a movie about lies: the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell others just to please them.
Si

jenkins

now that the movie is coming out, i asked my booklady friends about this. classic scenario

seems to be that readers unanimously agree the ending is bad, bad enough to stain people's memories of the book, and there's hope but doubt that the movie will change the ending. apparently it's also the least impressive book by the author

i've heard it called an "airport reader" but today i learned about the growing reemergence of a style called "domestic noir" which refers back to the 1940s style, of course, specifically centered around the daily rituals and tribulations of normal women

^it'll work great and excel at the bare minimum. is how i read this and guess the movie. the fincher way imho

ElPandaRoyal

I don't know about the book, but when the movie ended I heard some people talking about how they liked it but felt the ending was bad. Well, I think it's precisely what makes the whole thing so damn disturbing. It's the perfect culmination of all its themes and it's also so darkly funny, but I fear regular audiences may not catch what it's really saying. I don't know how it could have ended any other way.
Si

jenkins

i'm in. strikes me as a good curiosity to have before i see a movie

modage

Quote from: jenkins<3 on October 02, 2014, 12:15:03 PM
seems to be that readers unanimously agree the ending is bad, bad enough to stain people's memories of the book, and there's hope but doubt that the movie will change the ending.

MAJOR SPOILERS DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE & KNOW THE ENDING
Most people probably hate the ending because it's the most fucked up one: that they end up together. The bad guy(s) get away with it thus denying them a happy ending of justice being done. They hate it because it's not the sort of ending people expected from a book like this which is precisely why Fincher probably wanted to do it.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.