hello. my name is mike ambs.

via thrashyerface, by Alex Billington

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].

Billington: I have to ask, is it true that you have final cut at Columbia?

Fincher: Yep.

Billington: This is a rhetorical question, but would you have it any other way? You seem to be one of the only ones who has that nowadays.

Fincher: No, that’s not true.

Billington: Well, at least with a major studio. At least with Columbia/Sony Pictures, right?

Fincher: No. I had it on Benjamin Button. I had it on Zodiac. I’ve had it since Panic Room.

Billington: To me, from what I’ve observed and from my standpoint, that makes for better films, right?

Fincher: Not always. I mean, look - I look back on stuff that I was… I can flip through channels and see on HBO a movie that I did years ago and I look at it and I go, “awwww I coulda made that better. I could tell that story faster now.” It’s a hard thing. I don’t know that final cut… it doesn’t protect you from people saying to you, “You should look at this. You should really…” It’s not always that polite. I don’t think final cut protects you or insulates you from people’s opinions. You’ve taken tens of millions of dollars to make a movie. It’s somebody else’s money. So you’re going into it and you’re hoping that if you can align this actor, and this actor, and this actor and get this chemistry between this, and make this work, and get to Sweden on time before it’s suddenly 30 degrees below zero every day and the sun is only out for three hours - you have all those things that are going on. I don’t know that final cut makes the movie better. Because when it gets right down to it, I didn’t have final cut of Fight Club. And that’s a movie that you would expect a movie studio to step in and go, “No, no, no, Mr. Fincher. Please.”

And yet, you know, because [producer] Laura Ziskin, may she rest in peace, and Bill Mechanic were people of their word, and because all discussions were had upfront about, “Here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and here’s why it’s seditious, and here’s why it should be done at this kind of scale rather than at this lesser scale, and here are the…” You know, there’s a great place in the pantheon of risk takers if you go with this. There were many, many things that people… there were concessions that were made. This idea that a director is only really a director if he’s stomping his feet, crossing his arms, and holding his breath, it’s bullshit.

I wrote this, actually, to [Sony executive] Michael Lynton at one point because we were disagreeing about something. I said to him, “I’m smart enough to know that these ideas are going to be attributed to me whether they’re mine or not. If you come up with a good idea, I want to take credit for it.” I believe that. I mean, I honestly believe if you show me something that I want take - I will fucking run with it. You know what I mean? I’m no dummy. What I don’t want is those ideas that I know are not a reflection of any of the thinking that went into the making of this thing. I don’t want that stuff reflected. I don’t want it to reflect on me because it can be confusing. Look, nobody wanted to say “The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas”. Everybody thought it was coy. There were people who wrote articles about the fact that it was coy, that it was silly.

I laughed. I did it as a joke initially. And when I saw it on the screen, I thought, “Well, we are counter-programming because this movie does have a lot of… it is sinister and it has a lot of sodomy.” People are treated badly in this movie. That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth the journey because it’s harrowing. And as I watched the trailer over and over again, I thought, “You know, it is the feel bad movie of Christmas.” That’s a great sort of expression of what we want to say about it. We want it to be… it ain’t It’s a Wonderful Life.

And, in the end, you know, there was a lot of resistance. And, in the end, to their credit, [Sony execs] Amy Pascal, Michael Lynton said, “Okay. You want to do that. We’ll do that. We’ll go there for you.”