For a guy who made Fight Club and Seven, David Fincher doesn’t seem the type to be unnerved by Swedes. Put him in the middle of the Swedish countryside, though, and the chills aren’t just from Nordic winds. “That is a different kind of world,” says the director of ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’, out December 21. “When the sun goes down at 2 in the afternoon, and the winds whip up and it’s 30-below, you realise these people are made of heartier stuff,” Fincher says from his Hollywood offices, where he is wrapping up editing the film.
“And you think, ‘My God, how do you survive this?’ “ It’s a question Fincher says he asked himself often while poring over the 2005 Stieg Larsson crime novel, which serves as the taproot for Fincher’s thriller starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig. The book, the first in the ‘Millennium Series’ trilogy, centers on the search by a disgraced journalist (Craig) and computer hacker (Mara) for a woman missing 40 years. The novel also was adapted for a 2009 Swedish movie starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist. Fincher says he saw it only once.
“It’s a great movie,” Fincher says of the original, which earned a solid $10.1 million in the USA. “But we had to start with the book. That’s the wellspring of everything.” That and Sweden. Fincher, who is a notoriously detail-oriented filmmaker known for using dozens of takes for a scene, spent months in Sweden for the movie, which took 145 days to shoot.
Fincher says the barren landscape became a character in his movie. “People don’t live on top of each other in apartments,” he says. “There’s a house every mile and a half apart, and you’re in 4 feet of ice. It’s unbelievable. There’s a reason this doesn’t take place in Cleveland.” One of Fincher’s toughest tasks: compressing the 600-page book, which includes graphic rape and murder scenes. While Fincher’s résumé doesn’t lack for bloodshed — he also made Panic Room and Zodiac— the director says he didn’t use the story “as a way to thumb my nose” at the Motion Picture Association of America, which gave it an R rating on its first screening.
“I have a much more colourful and sordid reputation as a purveyor of violence than I deserve,” Fincher says. “I just use it as a device for storytelling. (Tattoo) is an R-rated movie, but we didn’t get gynaecological with the violence. I think we were as tasteful as you can be with a subject matter like that.”
