Costco Connection - March 2012

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Behind the
scenes of great
DVDs

By Nancy Mills

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

UNTIL HE SIGNED on to direct The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher was best known for his work on The Social Network, Fight Club and Se7en. The 49-year-old Northern Californian envisioned the popular Stieg Larsson thriller as a relationship movie. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

SONY PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT KIM PHILBY was one of history’s master spies, the mole who betrayed Britain and incidentally unmasked a junior agent named David Cornwell in 1964. Cornwell remasked himself as John le Carré and 10 years later wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy—about George Smiley, a retired master spy brought back from retirement to uncover a mole in Britain’s intelligence agency—as a kind of revenge.

CC: Smiley doesn’t talk a lot. PS: He’s a listener and a watcher. He doesn’t give things away. Alec Guinness wasn’t the only Smiley. Gary believes an ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words. If there’s ever a Smiley action figure, you’ll press a switch on its back and it won’t say anything.

CC: Did the TV miniseries influence you? PS: It was virtually a page-by-page adaptation of the book. We watched it once, just to excise the shadow looming over us. It was inspirational and made us want to do just as good a job. Le Carré encouraged us to go further away from the book. What drew me was the emotional story. These characters are very stiff-upper-lip, but you’ve got four men crying in this film. That doesn’t happen often.

The Costco Connection: Is Tattoo really just about a guy and a girl? David Fincher: I understand the geo-socio-political ramifications of what Larsson was talking about, and I understand his passion for fighting fascism and misogyny. You could say The Godfather is a story of the Sicilian Mafia in America, and that is what’s happening in the background. But the foreground is a story of a family. So I was always focused on the little story—the foreground.

CC: What was your biggest challenge? Peter Straughan: Adapting a good novel is hard and easy. It’s hard because a lot of things happen inside the characters’ heads, and that means less action and plot. But it’s easy because the material is so much better, the characters are beautifully drawn and the dialogue is good. Writing the script became more like writing a poem of the book.

CC: What does the British intelligence community think of the film? PS: MI5 asked to see it, and for some reason they have a cinema. So we went into this bunker, a screen came up and all these spies trooped in and watched it. They all apparently liked it. Probably the spy business never changes that much because human nature doesn’t change that much. Betrayal is part of human nature, but so is loyalty. C

Lisbeth in the Swedish version] had because audiences didn’t have a history with her.

the book. I just looked at what he had homed in on.

CC: How did you choose your guy—Daniel Craig—and your girl—Rooney Mara? DF: Daniel was perfect because I needed someone who could walk the line between being extremely masculine and also very self-effacing. Rooney is fearless. She’s got a very direct way of acting. There’s just a moment for them to get all googly-eyed. We’ve got a murderer to catch.

54 ;e Costco Connection MARCH 2012 CC: Did you want a bigger-name actress? DF: We read more established actresses, but we felt we had to make our own Lisbeth. It was not like Julia Roberts or bust. We talked about the kind of power Noomi Rapace [who played

CC: How instrumental were you in Rooney’s
performance?

DF: You cast people because of what they’re going to bring to it. If I have to tell an actor, “I want you to do it this way,” then I failed. The actor’s job is to be on the inside looking out. The director’s job is to be on the outside looking in.

CC: Did you see the Swedish original and, if so, how did it color your approach? DF: I saw the original once and liked it, but felt there was room for something else. [Screenwriter] Steve Zaillian had the unfortunate job of throwing away more than half

CC: Any concerns that the ;lm is too violent? DF: The studio said, “It’s a hard R. We get it. It’s not for kids. We’ll never have a PG- 13. We want you to do the book justice.” But you have to continually ask yourself, “Do I want to rub the audience’s nose in it?” I need it to be effective. I need it to be shocking. But I also need to get on with it. C

The Costco Connection The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (available 3/20), My Week with Marilyn (3/13), and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (3/20) will be in all warehouses.