You managed to come on the one day where the scene will ruin the entire movie for you,” says David Fincher. The director stands outside a modest Middle American house that’s been built within a Los Angeles studio for his adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel. There are, really, plenty of scenes that will “ruin” Gone Girl, and given that part of its strength is unpredictability, it’s better not to know too much about what’s going in. On one level, it’s a murder mystery, with a tempestuous former journalist (Ben Affleck) under suspicion of killing his missing wife (Rosamund Pike). Underneath, it’s much more: an exploration of modern media and trial by television, the commodification of sex and marriage, the way we are driven, by fear and desire, to pretend. “Everybody’s doing the ‘hero’s journey’,” says Fincher, over food in London months later. “So [this is] the antihero’s journey…”
The 52-year-old, Denver-born, west coast-raised film-maker has always tended towards the antiheroic, even in films with big budgets. After a series of music videos for the likes of Madonna, Aerosmith and George Michael, he made Alien 3 – at the time the most expensive feature directorial debut ever. It opened with two of the series’ beloved characters already dead. Though Fincher has since disowned the film – which was compromised and confused by studio pressure – this start could almost be seen as a statement of intent: are you sitting uncomfortably? Then we’ll begin. Little of what followed was routine. Se7en promised a pulpy police procedural but twisted to become a devastating morality tale. Fight Club seemed all fisticuffs and buff Brad Pitt, then slyly indicted the lifestyle of a generation. Zodiac is a serial-killer movie where – spoiler alert, kids – they never find the culprit. Even The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button – ostensibly an Oscar-baiting romantic epic – is preoccupied with grief.
Fincher followed that with The Social Network, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and then a US-set reinvention of the BBC political drama House Of Cards, perhaps the moment online content came of age (if Netflix could attract him and Kevin Spacey, no one was off limits). He was developing 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, raising the intriguing possibility of a David Fincher Disney film, until it fell apart. Then his regular producer (and now wife) Ceán Chaffin read Gone Girl, and soon he was working to adapt the book with Flynn, a former Entertainment Weekly journalist who made hacks worldwide jealous with its breakthrough success.
Fincher’s 10th feature, Gone Girl shows no softening in the film-maker once labelled the “prince of darkness”. As sinuous as Se7en, it may appear less offensive, but could stay with you for just as long; not least because it deals less with murder than it does with marriage. The couple at its centre have been lying to each other, to varying degrees, and though things become – to say the least – extreme, the thematic resonance is universal.
“There’s an incredibly narcissistic function of ‘I feel I deserve this kind of person at my side and as long as you’re willing to do the work to appear like that, yeah, let’s do it’,” says the director. “And five years down the line it’s like, ‘Why are we so resentful of each other just cos we can’t keep it up?’”
As date movies go, it should make dinner after the movie rather interesting.
Fincher thinks people, in general, lie more than they did. Or, at least, “have become more accustomed to recontextualising their shortcomings. The business of shining things up is no longer just the purview of publicists and chatshow hosts, it’s permeated to everybody. With the information age, people are on the cover of their own Rolling Stone; they get to make decisions that cast a better light on what they’ve accomplished. I mean, when people are documenting everything in their life and uploading it, there’s a tendency to edit. There’s not a lot of people going: ‘Got up today, was lonely, masturbated.’”
This notion – of deception, not masturbation – was one of the interesting things to play with in Gone Girl, while one of the biggest challenges was to get audiences to engage in what they know could be a chastening experience. “It’s hard to get to an audience who have been told, you know, ‘Bad things happen in this movie’,” he says. “It’s hard to get people to invest in characters because they’re going, ‘I don’t wanna like somebody who’s going to end up in a 50-gallon drum. I’m gonna reserve judgment.’ It’s a tough balancing act: you want people respecting it as a procedural but you also want them invested. And I’m sure for the cast members, when you read a piece of material like this, you go, ‘If the director fucks this up, this is gonna be slow going.’”
Ben Affleck pursued the part of Nick Dunne, to the extent that he pushed back production on his own directorial follow-up to the Oscar-winning Argo. Fincher cast him, in part, for the enjoyment of seeing someone so affable placed in such severe circumstances. Affleck is often underestimated; he’s much cleverer than the public realises or he appears to admit. “He’s very bright,” says Fincher. “And I think he sort of tempers how people react to him; he’s cautious about that. He doesn’t want to make anybody feel bad. It’s fun to watch somebody who is so willing to sublimate themselves in order to make everything better – or more lubricated – and put him in a situation where he’s got to speak for himself.”
Initially, Fincher wondered if the actor – who was cast as Batman partway through shooting – might be too big a star, but then he realised that too might help the performance: Affleck knew what it was like to be hunted by the media. “Ben went through a period of his life where he was fodder; I guess he still is in a weird way. And you wonder, ‘When will they let him off?’ But it’s really good to have somebody who understands how nutty that is. What it’s like to live in a house where you have to draw the drapes, just in case [of photographers].”
It’s fascinating to listen to the director talk about casting, the metaphors he finds for the qualities needed for the characters. Take his rationale for casting Pike, an excellent actor, but hardly the biggest name he could have secured. “You know, I was just looking for somebody who kind of did the ‘only child’ thing. And she has that: she’s an orchid. She’s not part of the lawn. She’s over in her own place.”
That Fincher gets the casts he does is a testament to two things. First, his determination in resisting any external pressure to go for stars over those best suited for the parts (for Tattoo he opted for the unknown Rooney Mara over Carey Mulligan and Scarlett Johansson). Second, the results: often career-best performances that mean actors are more likely to submit to his rigorous working methods. Spend time on Fincher’s sets and you realise one of the most important qualities for his actors is endurance. It’s not unusual for a take to be repeated 25 times, until the director is satisfied. He makes sure he has time to do this, so he can experiment to capture the little moments, the happy accidents that make a film feel something like life. “It’s like shooting a thousand free throws to hit the bucket.”
He’s worked with actors who weren’t overly keen on the process – Michael Douglas in The Game, Robert Downey Jr in Zodiac – but both would say those performances are among their strongest. The process has become less stressful the more established Fincher has become. “It’s easier to make movies when people want to be there!” he says. “I can’t imagine what it was like for George Lucas on the first Star Wars, with all the accounts of how the cast were mercilessly unsure of the material. That whole ‘trust me’ thing can be very debilitating, when you go, ‘I think I know how this can play.’ And also when you get a piece of material like [Gone Girl], it’s a lot of faith on the part of Ben Affleck to come in and go ‘Okay, I’m the rube.’”
There’s no decision yet on his next feature. A mooted biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs – scripted by Aaron Sorkin and starring Christian Bale – “was definitely a possibility, but it got very sideways very fast”. For the time being, he’s going back to television, remaking the Channel 4 conspiracy series Utopia for HBO, with Flynn scripting again. “I like the world of it,” he says. “I like the characters – I love Dennis’s [Kelly, creator of the UK show] honesty and affinity for the nerds. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of a junior conspiracy theorist cos I don’t have time to connect them all! But it’s nice to see that somebody has.” He is planning to direct the whole series, which will keep him busy for most of 2015, and is not looking much beyond that. There is no long-term plan (at least not that he’s confessing to). “Oddly enough,” he says, “I did a remake of a literary adaptation, then I did a remake of a television show. Now I’m doing a literary adaptation [and then remaking another show]. I don’t know: the pattern is not clear to me exactly what it is that I’m doing. But I’m sure it’ll be illuminated for me. Your job is context. I’m just a hamster on a wheel!”
So, as the hamster scurries on, 22 years since Alien 3 – the painful experience that taught him “take all of the responsibility, because you’re going to get all of the blame” – has anything really changed? He pauses, considers. “I find that people are more willing now to accept my proclivities,” he says, as the waitress clears the table. “I don’t have as many conversations with financiers about, ‘Don’t worry, it’s gonna be funny.’ Now people are more apt to just go, ‘It’s gonna be what it’s gonna be. Don’t ask.’”
Gone Girl is in cinemas on Friday
- Xan Brooks’ Gone Girl first look review
- The films to watch in autumn 2014: from Gone Girl to Mr Turner
