“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Zaillian Streamlines, Improves on Detective Duo in Larsson’s Neo-Noir”
Anne Thompson at IndieWire, who you should be following on Twitter (@akstanwyck), has a great feature on the new version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Why great? Because it focuses on screenwriter Steve Zaillian’s work in adapting the novel upon which the original movie as made. How nice it is to see someone feature the screenwriter, not just the actors or director. Moreover Thompson drilled down into some really interesting subject areas related to the craft, specifically adaptations. Excerpts:
Hollywood studio execs consider Steve Zaillian to be their number one literary adapter. He won the Oscar for “Schindler’s List,” after all, and could wind up with an Oscar nomination for “Moneyball” as well this year, which he serially co-wrote with another alpha Oscar-winner, Aaron Sorkin (the two have agreed only to talk about the film together).
Zaillian’s a ruthless cutter who knows that throwing as much away as possible leaves you with the core of a two-hour movie. In the case of the first installment of the Millennium Trilogy, David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” it was two hours and 32 minutes. “With some projects, I only see the problem solving,” Zaillian says. “This didn’t feel that way.”
As he read the book, he took notes and focused like a lazer on the procedural mystery and the two central detectives — unusual in your standard film noir — and “let the other stuff go.”
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Muckraker journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker Lisbeth Salander are “both in in my mind one character split up,” explains Zaillian. “You have a male character with feminine traits and a female character with masculine traits. One is uncivil in her own space, doesn’t play by society’s rules. The journalist plays by the rules and gets screwed. We get the two characters to the point where she asks, ‘can I kill him?’ She wouldn’t ask permission if she hadn’t met him, and he’d never say ‘yes’ if he hadn’t met her.”
More good insights in the article which you can read here.
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