Gone Girl, David Fincher, and How to Make a Decent Adaptation

Before I get into things in-depth, let's just clear the air here: Gone Girl is pretty fucked up. The book, the film, the whole damn premise of the story is some of the darkest, most messed up stuff I've ever heard. I'll do my best not to spoil anything for people who haven't seen/read it yet, but let's be honest, I probably will at some point. Just a heads up.

(Side note for anyone who has seen the film, I just saw that the movie was rated R for - among other things (cough cough Ben Affleck's penis) - a scene of bloody violence. A scene. Just one. I think we can all assume what it was.)

Touching less on the technical aspects of David Fincher  - Emily already beat me to that - I'd like to focus more on how he makes, as the Economist called it, a "perfect adaptation." Never one to shy away from adapting books, (3 of his last 4 feature films were based on short stories or novels; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and now Gone Girl) Fincher always seems to find a way to circumvent the pre-established audience and market for a certain book and create something that is uniquely his. The question I'm interested in answering is: how does a director give a film his/her own personal flourish while simultaneously staying true to the source material?

Fincher, probably talking about how creepy his films are.

There's been plenty of bad book adaptations. More bad than good, actually. The handful of really good ones - Lord of the Rings, Blade Runner, No Country for Old Men, to name a few - all have the same basic thing in common: they capture the essence of the source material, along with the plot. In one of the more informative articles I think I've ever found on the A.V. club, one of the contributing writers, Scott Tobias, brings up a really interesting point about adaptations. When talking about Gary Ross' film adaptation of the Hunger Games, he says that "Films content with merely illustrating books are more concerned with problem solving and translation than artistic expression." This is something I'd never considered before. A literal, direct-from-the-book adaptation is almost no fun at all: if you're going to just film everything right from the page, there's a sense of "well hey, what was the point?" If the audience already knows everything, it's basically just a rehashing of the book, just with less.

It's pretty safe to say that Fincher gets this. The very first thing he did right was to hire the author of Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, to also pen the screenplay (her first). This assured not only that the story would be close to that of the novel - pleasing the already established fan base - but that the general tone (cold, dark) would be the same as well. Films are much less intimate than novels by nature. In many books - Gone Girl included - we can literally hear inside the characters heads. One of the many goals for adaptations is to find a believable substitute for these internal voices, and to show character's emotions and thoughts in a much more visual manner. Gone Girl succeeds at this on every level.

While it stuck surprisingly close to the book (Flynn only cut out a few minor, expendable characters and events to cut down on the already lengthy 2.5 hour runtime) I never found myself knowing what would happen next. Apart from the acting (a pretty great Ben Affleck and a really great Rosamund Pike) and the score (the always amazing dynamic duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross gave the film a super weird, super dark tone throughout) I thought the film did a particularly nice job of depicting the various news shows breaking the story about Amy going missing. The 24 hour news cycle was a big part of Flynn's book, but it was only elevated here; the whole thing worked better on a more visual level.

Apart from a few underdeveloped areas (Amy's "cool girl" monologue - one of the best parts of the book - was more or less glossed over) I thought Fincher did an amazing job of taking a very dark, very complex subject matter and turning it into something that was not only visually stimulating but also really fucking creepy. The atmosphere, tone, and message all matched that of the book, all while giving me a whole new perspective on the story as a whole.

David Fincher: The Don'ts to Filmmaking

“Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.”

                                                                                                                       -David Fincher

   Every filmmaker has their list of dos and don’ts and David Fincher is no exception. Producer and director of countless films such as Seven, Fight Club, and this year’s highly anticipated Gone Girl, he has honed a skill that has arguable been very influential.

   And if you want to understand his craft, you need to ask yourself this: what does David Fincher not do? To put it simply, there are three things he does not do: handheld shots, close-ups, and camera movement. But it’s not a matter of casting these aside, but using them when the times calls for it.

   In terms of handheld operation, Fincher is notorious for having as little to one shot not placed on a tripod or Steadicam. The reason for this is the way he wants the camera to act in any given scene. Camera shake (the most well-known trait of handheld) puts the audience in the scene with the character but a smoothly gliding shot drags us out of the scene. Normally, most filmmakers want to avoid this as they don’t want their audience to become separated from the story they’re trying to tell. But to David Fincher, this is exactly what he wants. He wants the camera to be this omniscient character. It forces you to really look at everything that’s happening on screen. Without the camera shake, you’re eye has nowhere to look but at the action. It’s subtle but a very powerful technique when executed properly.

   Close-ups are similarly a need-by basic sort of deal. Excessive close-ups will distract an audience and can potentially exclude too much for to hold their attention. Yet, having only a few close-ups in any given film is a crafty way to tell the audience that they need to look at something. It’s similar to grabbing a person by the face and physically shoving their attention at an object. It’s the equivalent of shouting, “you need to see this!” It’s a subtle way to tell an audience that what’s happening on screen is about to impact the movie in huge way.

    And the last don’t on this list, may seem like the strangest. It’s all about camera movement, or the lack thereof. David Fincher, if he can help it, likes to keep his camera in one place. This allows the scene to play out as it might be viewed realistically from a person on the outside (as he sets the camera up to be in the first rule).  This adds to the idea that what we’re seeing on screen is important and all of our attention needs to be focused on that specific thing. The lack of movement forces our eye, much like the lack of camera shake, to really look at what’s happening.

   All three of these techniques end up creating  the same thing: a movie we can’t force ourselves to look away from. They’re subtle, their powerful, and they’re not something to be overlooked. As Fincher said, “people will say ‘there are a million ways to shoot a scene,’ but I don’t think so. I think there’s two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.”