STACK #124 Feb 2016

DVD&BD

FEATURE

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Ben Affleck with Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl

Director David Fincher and author Gillian Flynn proved the perfect match to bring Flynn’s bestseller GONE GIRL to the screen.

F ifty Shades of Grey was the

humour and a tantalising mystery at its core. It also asked the question: “Can we truly know somebody we love?” Gone Girl was the perfect candidate for big screen treatment. Flynn herself took on the daunting task of adapting the book into a screenplay, which was then filtered through the dark vision of filmmaker David Fincher, resulting in a twist- laden, nail-biting, visual tour de force. Flynn admits the process of streamlining her novel’s complex, intertwining plot with its duelling narrators was an enormous challenge. “I wanted to find room for the nuances, the relationships and the characters – the dark

humour and odd moments – because that’s where the creepy, toxic heart of the story lives,” she explains. She also saw the material as a perfect fit for Fincher, given his atmospheric approach to storytelling and flair for generating dread. “Even when I was writing the novel, there were certain scenes I pictured him filming – I could see them through his lens,” Flynn notes. “I knew he’d bring a great sense of place and I knew he’d capture the suspense and claustrophobia of the story. “ Gone Girl , for all its nastiness, has moments of humour, too, and I knew he’d

publishing phenomenon of 2012, but female readers looking for something

with a little more style, substance and sting that same year found it in Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl . This merciless thriller spent eight weeks on the NewYork Times bestseller list and sold over two million copies in its first year of publication. A caustic look at marriage, media manipulation and public perception told from the viewpoint of two unreliable narrators, Flynn’s tale wedded the crime novel with the psychological thriller, with a streak of dark

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