David Finch­er: ​‘A lot of luck goes into mak­ing a movie’

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 whose 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 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 and 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 10 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, 10 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 palate 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 naïve 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 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.