David Fincher reflects on Girl With the Dragon Tattoo : 'Swing and a miss'
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David Fincher has no regrets about making The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but he can still acknowledge his 2011 adaptation of Stieg Larsson's hit novel as a "swing and a miss."
During a masterclass conversation at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, the Oscar-nominated director said that although a Millennium trilogy never came to fruition, he is still very "proud" of what the movie accomplished.
"We did it the way that we could," Fincher said. "And when people said it cost too much for what the return on investment was, I said, 'Okay, swing and a miss.'"
Originally, Sony Pictures planned to launch a trilogy of movies based on the successful Millennium crime novels, starting with Fincher's adaptation of Dragon Tattoo. Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian even inked a deal to helm the sequels — but when the first movie barely crossed $100 million in the U.S., on a production budget of $90 million, those plans were canceled. Fincher says he's long made his peace with the movie's commercial failings, and is happy with where the film succeeded.
Baldur Bragason/Columbia Rooney Mara in 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'
"I was offered Dragon Tattoo long before the first movie was made, and was in the middle of something else," the Mank director explained. "And I was like, 'Lesbian hacker on a motorcycle? I don't think so.'"
But then the book series penned by Swedish author Stieg Larsson was translated to English in 2008, and quickly became an international bestseller. The challenge of an adaptation piqued Fincher's interest.
"The thing went on to be a huge deal, and it came back around," the filmmaker said. "I thought it would be interesting to see if you took this piece of material that has millions of people excited and you did it within an inch of its life — could it support the kind of money that it would take to do it?"
Making matters more expensive was Fincher's determination to stay true to the Swedish origins of the novel. "We had pledged early on that we wanted to make a movie that was not embarrassing to its Swedish heritage," he continued. "They said, 'Well, can you shoot it in Atlanta?' I was like, 'Well, no. Atlanta for Sweden? I don't know.' We wanted it to be true to its essence. You shoot in Sweden, you're shooting for eight or nine-hour days, if you're lucky. And so the movie took 140 days to shoot. I was proud of it. I thought we did what we set out to do."
When EW spoke to Fincher about the film in 2011, the director was well aware that fans of the book (and the 2009 Swedish film starring Noomi Rapace) would be hyper critical of every adaptational difference. "We've got something very simple to deliver on," Fincher joked. "A gigantic f—ing book that people have very rigid preconceived notions of, to the point that they actually take umbrage with a teaser poster."
The Girls With The Dragon Tattoo eventually got a sequel in the form of The Girl in the Spider's Web, a soft reboot in which Claire Foy replaced Rooney Mara as heroine Lisbeth Salander, the antisocial hacker at the center of the series.
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