David Fincher has lots of ideas — The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
In December David Fincher’s new film Mank is released on Netflix. The period drama about the creation of Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane was written by Fincher’s late father Jack, and marks the director’s return to film-making.
Fincher, perhaps the most acclaimed director of his generation, has enjoyed a six-year hiatus. The 58-year-old made his film-making debut in 1992 with Alien3 however due to consistent meddling from executives he disavowed the finished product.
Since then he has made 9 feature length films, each one released with a director’s commentary.
Listening to Fincher’s commentaries one thing is clear — he loves his films bristling with ideas. With almost every scene, even with some specific shots, he is trying to present an idea. And he loves to talk about it.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, adapted from Stieg Larsson’s Swedish book of the same name was released in 2011, two years after the Swedish-language adaptation.
It stars Daniel Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl in remote northern Sweden 40 years prior.
Here are David Fincher’s ideas in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (spoilers ahead, obviously):
Title sequence set to Karen O’s cover of Immigrant Song
“I was riding in a van in Sweden, I had my iPhone with me and I was listening to Led Zeppelin and this song came on and… I mean aside from the incredibly inane obviousness of ‘I come from the land of the ice and snow’, I just liked the idea of a anthemnal, incredibly famous track that could be wailed by a woman.
“And I called Trent and I said ‘what do you think of a cover of Immigrant Song?’ I think at first he thought I was joking. I said ‘no, imagine a woman’s voice singing this’ and he did a version just to the music and I listened to it and I thought it’s so evocative of what I think Lisbeth’s, not thinking… her marrow, whats happening down deep inside her bones and we got Karen O.”
A disgraced Blomkvist buys cigarettes
“Steve Zaillian (writer) added this nice little bit of Blomkvist buying his cigarettes. We were trying to figure out a way to tell the story that he had quit smoking, so I thought the only way we’d really be able to do that was to have him also need a lighter, it’s not just enough that he has to buy cigarettes he needs a lighter, you get the idea that he’s picking up an old habit.”
Lisbeth has produced a background check on Blomkvist but is being asked for more information
“He’s looking for her take on the subject, it’s an old fashioned sense of the private eye, he’s looking to her to say ‘give me your gut’ and part of her inability to deal with the world has to do with… she doesn’t have a gut opinion, she doesn’t trust opinion, she doesn’t trust hearsay, she only trusts data.
“And so the notion of their schism, the thing that makes it kind of impossible for them to even communicate is that she’s not about to give him an opinion. She’s just going to dump this information in his lap, and I liked that and I liked how it played out in the movie.”
Inside Lisbeth’s home for the first time
“So, in the movie she lives in an apartment that her mother lived in before her mother died and I liked this idea, this person who has taken all of her mother’s belongings and instead of putting them away in some kind of reverential way she just sort of stacked it to the ceiling away in a corner like a hoarder and she’s moved on with her life.”
Lisbeth’s contact Plague is wearing a Nine Inch Nails (NIN)shirt
“Tony Way who plays Plague was a… a wonderful find. I ended up having to call Trent (Reznor, NIN frontman who recorded the score) to tell him that — I didn’t want to do anything disparaging about NIN fans I just liked the idea that Plague would have a NIN sweatshirt on.”
Henrik Vanger recruits Blomkvist to investigate Harriet’s disappearance
“I love the notion of the detective who’s trying to turn down work and he’s up against a guy who is not taking no for an answer and it’s part of what makes Henrik interesting he is used to having his own way, he’s used to getting things the way he wants them.
“He’s buried the lede here and he’s not going to mention Wennerstrom until the very last possible moment, he knows that’s his, that’s the ace up his sleeve.”
Blomkvist arrives back at Hedestad having taken the job
“In the master shot that we did of Daniel getting off the train we had a woman unload all of his luggage for him in the background and I liked the — we kept talking about the idea of Blomqvist as a sort of a bimbo.
“It was very funny because in the background you would see him and he was so kind of lost in his own thoughts about trying to get a cab to take him to the cottage and there was this woman with like 8 huge pieces of luggage wrestling them down the stairs.”
Blomkvist burns his books on his first night in the cottage
“There was a little story point in here that he was bringing his favourite books because he knew he was going away for a while and he would want to bring books that he cared about so he could re-read them while he had time alone and I love the idea that literally the first night he would burn them trying to keep warm.”
Introducing Detective Morell
“Originally this sequence, the way that it connected to Officer Morell who we see David (Dencik, actor playing young Morell) in flashback and then to Officer Morell as he is in modern day and that’s Donald (Sumpter) when we connect the two, we went with this idea, this gestural link between them, the lighting of the cigarette we see him step forward out of the trees and he lights his cigarette and we cut to him present day and he’s finishing lighting a cigarette.
“It wasn’t initially intended that way It just one of those things that we found as we were cutting the material we need to really be able to tie this guy in the past and this guy in the present.”
Lisbeth leaves Bjurman’s office for the first time
“This was an idea that we just came up with on the day, when she just gets into the elevator and screams.
“And I like the fact that she has to find a release for some of these feelings. One of the things we kept talking about is Lisbeth is afraid of her inner Zala, she’s afraid of her father’s genetic package and I liked the idea that she almost has to find a secret place in order to deal with her frustration with the real world.”
Martin Vanger’s glass house
“I wanted this house, I loved the idea of this sinister character living this wide open life. He has nothing to hide, there’s nowhere to hide and of course you find out that’s not the case. Don’t look in the pool room(!)”
Blomkvist is a ‘post-Watergate’ journalist
“Again, trying to sure up these ideas about how a journalist, who’s, you know, a post-Watergate written-word guy and his colour coordinated post its. I loved the contrast between Blomqvist and Salandar, that she, she doesn’t work that way at all, and when he’s later on going to use a computer in front of her it’s going to be in such a dorky, primitive way.”
Floor polisher outside Bjurman’s office when he forces her into oral sex
“We had a guy with the floor polisher in the background and part of this was due to the fact that there’s a cue that Trent and Atticus had written, a musical cue that sounded like this weird humming machine and I liked that drone and I liked the tone of that for this scene and I thought I’m gonna add the guy with the floor polisher in the background.
“A, he’ll tell me that the offices are closed for the evening. B, we can sort of take the sound of his floor polisher and move it into the music of the scene.
“The idea of the floor polisher being a reminder of how alone she is in the building with Bjurman and then it becoming this horrible underscore to his sexual impropriety.”
Bjurman ‘manipulating’ Lisbeth
“Steve Zaillian when he crafted this scene included this idea, which we talked about, we were constantly playing with the notion of Bjurman, his manipulation of her, his putting her in the corner, has everything to do with challenging her desire which he feels she must have to be normal and I love the notion of relationships as transactions, so when he says to her ‘I want you to have this computer, you do something for me, I do something for you, the way normal people do’ it’s such a wonderfully hideous manipulation of her.”
Lisbeth plotting her revenge on Bjurman
“We wanted to shoot the scene where she’s plotting her revenge of Bjurman and I wanted the idea that her world literally gets turned upside down. And I liked the idea of taking a Technodolly and just flying over the top of her head and seeing her face as you see her eyes darting around as she’s lost in vindictive fantasy.”
Lisbeth has been brutally raped by Bjurman at his home
“When Rooney fumbles with the pills and takes off her shirt, we see the tattoo on her chest that has her mother’s name and the date her mother died and then she squats in the shower… it’s so incredibly vulnerable and it’s so brave of somebody to do, it totally wins me over and it’s one of those moments that strikes me as an audience member that I can’t even rationalise, I can’t even look at it and say what it is that’s so moving about it, but it’s that notion of being so... it’s not the nakedness, it’s the trying to put the pieces back together it’s the trying to make sense of it, trying to move on.”
Blomkvist discovers a key photograph for Harriet’s disappearance
“So this is a moment that was written originally… I’m not exactly sure what the order of the events were but I liked the idea that he finds, by accident, this photograph, or this series of enlargements, that leads him to this picture of one of the Vanger girls and he doesn’t know if it’s her, if it’s Anita or if it’s Harriet but it’s taken on the day at the bridge and it leads to the next idea which is taking the photographs of the parade and blowing them up.”
Lisbeth’s revenge on Bjurman
“Now, we played with this idea that maybe she looks a little strung out so that he begins to sort of see her as… ‘maybe she does have a drug problem and maybe she’s finally come around’ and she will be what he wants her to be which is her concubine or his booty call. It was an interesting thing because we screened the movie one time for an audience of about 80 people at Sony and when she shows up at Bjurman’s apartment people were so upset with her, there were people who didn’t know the story, didn’t know what was coming next who were really prepared to leave.
“They had almost written off Salander if she was going to make this mistake again, this would be an irreversible error as far as they were concerned.”
Lisbeth goes clubbing and picks up a girl
“So this was an important scene to me. It was definitely something we contemplated losing for length but I loved the idea of seeing Salander smile somewhere in the movie.
“I felt like Lisbeth’s bisexuality was an important thing to see and I also felt it was important to show she does get her needs met. She’s emotionally 13 years old but she’s 23 in her daily life and she needs a release and she needs closeness even if she doesn’t trust intimacy she has to find comfort in people that will be safe for her and the safe ones are strangers.”
Lisbeth and Blomqvist meet at Lisbeth’s home
“By the time we got down to shooting it we had, what I thought was a very specific idea of what we were doing. And it was funny because when the studio saw it some people were concerned they were ‘well she’s not bristley enough, she’s not angry enough that he’s there’ and I thought that was an odd… I never saw it that way, I always saw it as a — this is her sanctuary, she is off the grid, nobody’s knows where she lives, it’s the thing that makes her feel safe and she only brings strangers to this place and she has control but when she sends them home and if she wants them to stay.
“And all of a sudden there’s a knock on the door and there’s this person that she knows more about than most people in her life is on the other side of the door and he says ‘I wanna talk to you’ there would be this — to my way of thinking, as somebody who finds people and who finds out about people — she would be fascinated by him.”
Lisbeth brings Coca-Cola to Hedestad
“I like the fact that she decides to bring her own Coca-cola, it’s the single worst idea of transporting something that is your private stash because it’s really heavy, you can buy it anywhere, yet she feels somehow that she’s going to be so busy that she gonna need to bring her own coke.
Lisbeth confronts Bjurman in the lift
“So when we were trying to devise the different looks for Lisbeth, different make-up looks, one of the different things I talked to Pat McGrath, she came in to play with Rooney one weekend when we were in Stockholm and I talked to her about this David Bowie video called Jazzin’ For Blue Jean that Julian Temple had done, I think in the late 80s, and they painted the shadows onto Bowie’s face and no matter where the lights moved he still had these shadows under his eyes and still had these shadows for his cheekbones and we played with this idea and this is the scene where we decided to use it.
“Torsten Witte who did Rooney’s make up every day of the actual shooting took these photos from Pat and the idea and we brought Rooney into the elevator and we looked at the light the way the light fell on her face and then he painted these shadows under her eyes, under her cheekbones and under her nose and it’s a very odd thing. You almost don’t see that its there but it sculpts her features in a way that’s really kind of wraith-like.”
Lisbeth going through Vanger’s company records
“I love this woman, I love the notion that the real thing that’s actually subjugating Lisbeth is bureaucracy, its not just misogyny it’s bureaucracy.”
Blomkvist meets Harald Vanger
“In the script he’s supposed to be this very frightening figure and I love the idea of him as sort of Yoda. I think the thing that makes him scary is not his physical presence or how sort of diabolical his lair is but he’s making no excuses for his past, he’s completely comfortable with his anti-semitism and he’s not about to hide it. I thought Steve Zaillian’s approach to that was very very adult and interesting.”
Harald talking disparagingly about IKEA
“I mean I have nothing against Ikea, I keep being asked this question ‘what’s your personal attack on Ikea, why do you keep doing this?’ but it was the idea of the veneer of something and then when he finally gets to say ‘no, no, I’m more honest than the rest’, ‘meaning the family?’, ‘no, meaning Sweden’.”
Lisbeth’s computer
“One of the things that was important to the character is that Lisbeth would have her own kind of customised operating system that would.. her computer is not going to look like Blomkvist’s computer, Blomkvist’s computer is going to have digital colour-coded post it notes on, he’s operating OS10 Lion and she’s got her own weird custom skin and interface and little things like that were very important to me that we get those ideas across.”
Blomkvist and Salander are both investigating different strands
“Most of this sequence was shot with the Technodolly which is the motion control camera that you kind of rough into position and you can move all these different axis and the whole idea was this would be a very quick way to do these elaborate moves and of course the quick part… didn’t really work out.”
Blomkvist investigates Martin’s empty house
“This was a sequence that I, from the beginning when Wren and I and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, when we started talking about the scene where Mikael goes up to Martin’s house and he walks in the back door of the glass house, I said there’s not going to be any music because music will tell us that we’re in a movie, it’s all sound effects and it’s as much silence as we can possibly do and I really wanted to get the idea of — there’s outside where you feel the wind blowing and there’s inside where it’s hermetically sealed and you have the air conditioning so that when he leaves the door open just a crack you would get this whistling later on when Martin returns.”
Martin torturing Mikael
“I like the idea of Martin as a half-assed sort of Dick Cavett. I thought it was kind of a funny notion that he’s so narcissistic, I mean he has all these tapes from all these of all this horrendous shit that he’s done and I like the idea that he finally has somebody in his basement who is an interviewer and he wants to sort of try his hand at it.”
Martin is an audiophile
“One of the things I liked was the idea of Martin as sort of an audiophile, so I wanted him to have a reel-to-reel tape recorder/player and when we started riffing on that idea of the audiophile, these tapes that he makes are very private and he probably doesn’t make more of them than 3 or 4 a year at the most.
“So he’s bought in bulk and he has a camera that he’s comfortable with and a system he’s comfortable with and it doesn’t matter that it’s from 1985, he has his way of working and he’s comfortable with it and it’s never occurred to him that it’s time to switch over to re-writable DVD.”
Martin plays Orinoco Flow when he’s about to kill Blomkvist
“We were were talking about ‘here are the things that Martin should talk about, or shouldn’t talk about’ and we were playing around with these ideas.
“There was a moment where we cut away to Salander and when we came back, I liked the idea of Martin having music that calmed him because he was about to do some really terrible stuff and he has his music, he has his music that likes to drive to, he has his music he likes to slaughter to.
“And we started to talk about what that should be when he goes over and he hits the play button and the reel-to-reel recorder spins — what comes out? And Daniel Craig, to give credit where credit’s due, immediately sat up in his chair and said Orinoco Flow… we just thought it was the greatest thing for this serial murderer to have this as his music to kill by.”
Martin tries to find Blomkvist’s ribcage edge
“Stellan came up with this idea of sort of finding the edge of his ribcage, you know he has all these knives, these different kinds of knives and bolt cutters and saws… and yet he needs to select exactly the implement and I do think there’s something about what you’ve seen before in the movie that might lead you to believe we’re going to see Daniel Craig get gutted.”
Lisbeth asks Blomkvist, after rescuing him, if he can kill a fleeing Martin
“There was much debate about whether it was a wise idea or not to have Lisbeth ask ‘may I kill him’ and I wrote this line and liked this idea. And the idea for me was not that she was looking for permission as much as — I always felt the drama between the two characters… the friction comes from the fact that Blomkvist, in his journalistic hubris, feels that he understands exactly the evils that men do and he can speak about it from a safe proximity, he’s able to say ‘no, no, I get it, I get what you’ve been through’ and Lisbeth, who has suffered at the hands of sadists, is able to in this moment say ‘now how do you feel’? It’s not really asking for permission, it’s kind of saying ‘are you with me now on this?’”
Blomkvist recovers from his wounds on a bed next to Lisbeth
“I loved the idea of a person revealing something and in the moment of revealing something about themselves makes themselves more enigmatic and to me this is the moment where they truly come together.
“It’s not where they fornicate it’s where he wakes up and she’s watching him sleep and he says ‘tell me something about you, because you’re fascinating me’ and she tells him something and it only ends up realising how little he knows about her.”
Plague sleeping on the plane to London
“I loved dissolving through and seeing Tony asleep. I don’t know if everybody who has seen the movie realises that’s Plague but I liked the idea that Tony is snoring away on the plane.”
Bugging Anita’s London home to get to reveal Harriet
“I liked the idea of a scene where people think that they’re doing the smartest possible thing and the end of it is… that much more frustrating. I think both Daniel and Jolie in this scene are fantastic. I love how she is finally fed up with his nonsense.”
Lisbeth asks Blomkvist ‘Put your hand back in my shirt’
“The ‘put your hand back in my shirt’ was something that I wanted from Steve Zaillian.
“I really liked this idea that they’re getting getting comfortable with one another and that she really just likes his touch and that’s what makes her feel good and so she asks for it and there’s a change, you get the sense of a change.”
Anita reveals that she is actually Harriet
“There are people who were very upset with the idea that we didn’t go all the way to Australia to find Harriet but I liked the idea of Harriet hiding in plain sight, I liked its parallels with Lisbeth.
“Lisbeth has learned to hide in plain sight in her way by being sort of invisible to trace and Harriet had to become Anita. I liked the parallels of those two stories.”
Lisbeth’s disguise to set-up Wennerstrom
“And now we get into something that’s ostensibly a montage, a music video but I love Rooney’s performance as Irene, I love the idea that she’s made herself up to sort look like Robin Wright in a slightly more drag queeny way.”
Lisbeth outside Millenium magazine
“We had a point of view in there of Salander waiting on the pavement, when Blomkvist goes over we’d cut to it but it just seemed so ham-fisted and I liked the idea that he sees something that draws him outside and then we find out what it is and then we see them together and we’re made aware of Erika Berger (Blomkvist’s colleague/lover played by Robin Wright) noticing that he’s gone.”
Lisbeth with her original state-appointed guardian playing chess
“I loved the idea that we don’t have to see her on camera saying ‘I’m happy’, that that can be one little step for a little pawn.”
Total number of ideas: 41
Film length: 158 minutes
Ratio of minutes to ideas: 3.8
Next up: Panic Room
