How 'National Lampoon' Influenced 'Gone Girl' and Other Fun Fincher Facts

With just a few weeks to go until the release of Gone Girl — David Fincher’s highly awaited adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestseller — the director spoke to Film Comment about transferring the book’s twists and turns to the screen. Among the highlights:

Star Ben Affleck would have been nuts to turn down the part.

The 42-year-old actor — who plays Nick Dunne, a former magazine writer turned suspected wife-murderer — could relate to the character’s flashbulb-intensive experience. “The baggage he comes with is most useful to this movie,” Fincher told Film Comment. “I was interested in him primarily because I needed someone who understood the stakes of the kind of public scrutiny that Nick is subjected to and the absurdity of trying to resist public opinion. Ben knows that, not conceptually, but by experience. When I first met with him, I said this is about a guy who gets his nuts in a vise in reel one and then the movie continues to tighten that vise for the next eight reels.”

There’s a reason why you don’t see a lot of Amy Dunne in the trailer.

The titular Gone Girl (who recently received her own Pinterest page) goes to a lot of emotional dark places in Flynn’s novel, including a moment in which she [SPOILER REDACTED], and, of course, the infamous [MEGA-SPOILER REDACTED]. Which is why Fincher wanted to keep the trailer as coy as possible: ”One of the things it took six months to negotiate in my deal was that in the trailers, they couldn’t use anything of Amy past reel four. Because if you do, you ruin the movie.”

The movie’s ensemble cast — which includes Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tyler Perry — first met online.

"When we had all the actors, we got everybody on Skype and had a read-through," says the director. "And we recorded the whole thing. All those little Hollywood squares. We could see who the actors were and how they felt about each other.

The movie’s tone was influenced by a classic National Lampoon record.

When Fincher first met with Affleck, the movie’s script was still being written. So the director cited the 1977 comedy album That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick — which features sketches like “Rapeline” and “The Squalor Show” — to convey how he and screenwriter Flynn intended to approach the material. “That’s kind of the tone of the movie,” Fincher told Film Comment. “If we play it too earnest and sincere, then it’s tragedy, but if we go with the absurdity of it, I think it can walk a satirical line.”

Even Trent Reznor thinks the film’s dark.

The Nine Inch Nails frontman — who won an Oscar for co-writing the score to Fincher’s 2010 hit The Social Network — couldn’t initially relate to Flynn’s novel. "I think he read the book and he felt, this isn’t me, it’s about Midwesterners or this writer who returns to this small town," says Fincher. "But when he came out of the screening he was laughing, almost giddily. And he said: 'That’s so sinister in what it’s talking about. It makes me feel bad about myself.'"