Interview [Written]: Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”)

A Rolling Stone interview with author Gillian Flynn who adapted her own novel “Gone Girl”:

There’s all of these great things in the book that don’t make it into the movie — the mom of Neil Patrick Harris’ character Desi, the frozen vomit….

Right.

When you went to write the script, was it agonizing to have to cut that stuff or was it a relief, in its way, to get down to the barest version of the plot?

It’s funny you mention Desi’s Mom — she’s in the book for all about four pages, but everyone is fascinated by Desi’s mom, including myself. She never made it into the first draft, but that was one of the hard ones [to cut]. I just realized there are all sorts of quirky supporting characters that are just kind of strange little cul-de-sacs in the book that just weren’t going to make it into the film. The key to a good adaptation is respecting the incredibly huge differences between a book and a film — and just kind of setting out not to save everything I liked from the book, but saving everything I needed to. It boils down to the plot, which moves everything (and is very hard to disassemble too much) and making these characters believable so you can go to the crazy places that the story goes.

I kind of approached it…I was a writer for 10 years for a weekly magazine [Entertainment Weekly], and had spent so much of my time having my 1,000-word piece suddenly be a 200-word box, and having to disassemble it and create it as a new thing. I think that helped me be pragmatic about it; I sort of had a ruthless, “I killed my darlings” approach to it.

It sounds like you’re comfortable with the execution process.

[Laughs] Yes, I executed them without blinking an eye, for the most part; I really just knew that there was only going to be so much room. It’s a very big book, almost 500 pages, and two-thirds of it was going to have to go. My first draft was as streamlined as possible, and my second draft was all about working with David [Fincher] and him wanting me to put stuff back in. So we could kind of blow it up a little bit, so we have as much room to play as possible.

For the rest of the interview, go here.