hello. my name is mike ambs. — Great interview with David Fincher

Great interview with David Fincher - pt 1

Billington: What are the defining factors found in this project and this story, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, that made you decide to direct it?

Fincher: With this movie [Dragon Tattoo] - do I need to make another serial killer movie the rest of my life? No. But I hadn’t seen these two people [Mikael & Lisbeth]. I hadn’t been asked to direct… A love story is too easy. A story of friendship and personal intimacy, sexual intimacy, they are…

Billington: Something you hadn’t seen before? Or is it just the way…

Fincher: I’ve seen people take odd people from different sides of the street to team up to solve a murder mystery. I hadn’t seen this one. I thought she, in conjunction with him, was a team that was unlike anything that I was prepared for. Then I saw the Swedish movie and I thought, “Interesting… The movie I have in my head is different.” Talked to [screenwriter] Steve Zaillian, he was halfway through a script, and when he sent it to me, it was kind of what we had talked about, which was: “Let’s bring them front and center. Is anybody really keeping track of the Vanger clan and who’s in the drawing room with a pipe? Or is all of this something else? An excuse for something else?”

I think that the modernity, the thing that made it a new take on the locked room mystery, was not the foundation of socialism on the Third Reich war profiteering… That’s perfectly good and that’s perfectly understandable, but that’s what [author] Stieg Larsson was about and what he was up in arms about. He certainly was talking about the dark black liquid underbelly of this other… Sweden is still - I still saw it on the list the other day of the top 10 countries for women to live in. It was number three or something. And yet, Larsson would say, and there are many, many reports that would say to you, there’s a disproportionately high rate of rape in this country.

So all those thing were interesting to me, but that’s all backdrop. I love Chinatown. I’m not really that interested in how water was brought to San Fernando Valley, except in this case it’s a very interesting sort of thematic way to hold this investigation together, and worthy of its place in the pantheon of movies. But the thing to me, ultimately, that was fascinating in the story was him [Mikael] and her [Lisbeth].