"I'm here to make a movie. I'm not here to make friends." - David Fincher on his career

[What killed this piece? The fact that the US-remake Dragon Tattoo trailer leaked that very weekend in the States. But I had a glorious 24 hours where I was one of the first people who saw the trailer! Note: Fincher superfans in Sweden all resembled Meatloaf in Fight Club, which was odd.]

David Fincher took a break from day 133 of shooting on his American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to make an appearance at the Stockholm Film Insitute’s “Actors Studio” at the Cinemateket on Friday, May 27th, where he talked about his directing career to an audience of scruffy Swedes with movie dreams. Showing flashes of self-deprecation and his famous steely reputation, he was funny and frank, whether talking about the failure of his debut feature, or his advice to today’s aspiring filmmakers (“write a script and make a film, this is an interesting enough generation with no excuses”), along with tantalizing hints about his upcoming version of Stieg Larsson’s best-seller.

The session ended with the red band teaser trailer for Dragon Tattoo on the big screen, the sounds of Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song,” with vocals by Karen O, booming, quick cuts of Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara as the leads - shots that were pointedly recognizable from the original, revealing nothing, and the tagline was wicked, classic Fincher: “The feel bad movie of Christmas.”

On Aliens 3: “I was lucky enough - my first movie stunk. For my second movie, I siezed control. You have to find the thing you will kill to make and make it a certain way. I’m here to make a movie. I’m not here to make friends. But you can’t say that the first time, because it’s kind of douchey.”

On Seven: “The violence of Seven is psychological, which is part of what I thought was powerful about the script. It was far more horrible because it exists in this Pandora’s Box of the imagination. You remember it differently from what you see.”

On Fight Club: “When I first read Chuck Palahniuk’s book, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so sick and funny at the same time. I embraced it immediately.” While the failure of the film in the theaters was a matter of timing (too close to the Columbine shootings), “it sold 13 or 14 million DVDs. It paid for itself five times over on DVD.”

On The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: “Another movie about death. I loved the metaphor. If you could go in the other direction - beauty, vitality, youth - when you know what to do with it, chronological events conspire to bring you regret, to bring you loss.”

On Dragon Tattoo: “We found a place [on location] three weeks ago that was like ‘Yes, this is why we’re shooting in Stockholm. The cobblestone streets… [The Swedish original] is a really handsome thriller with a towering performance by the girl. Hard to follow.”

On directing: “It’s a circus, it takes 90 people at least. You have to understand what people are going to be best responsible for managing this entity, otherwise you’ll just be pissed off and irritated, which I am all the time anyways. I’m just now getting what storytelling is, the thing that you’re going there to catch, lightning in a bottle. It’s great to have a technical background and to know the physics so you can get to the thing that’s really important - the moment that people surprise you. I tell people, I’m selling immortality. If we do this and do it well, it will last forever.”

Stalking Stieg Larsson

This spring, exiting the Stockholm-Arlanda airport, I found myself in a hall which enthusiastically proclaimed, “Welcome to Sweden!” From its walls, huge portraits of the country’s greatest cultural exports greeted me, head shot after head shot. There were actors and directors (Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman), austere portraits of authors (Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg), and, in 1970s color, ABBA under disco lights, and Bjorn Borg, whacking a tennis ball. At the end of this procession, as if its grand finale, was a full-body photograph of Stieg Larsson. His head rested on his hand, in a position not unlike that of Rodin’s thinker. It’s a familiar photograph, the same one that appears on the back of each of his books: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

(I wrote this for The Paris Review. Read more here…)

Maybe I am a movie nerd/purist because let me tell you, I got to see the teaser trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo tonight and it was an incredibe experience. I walked out of the theater super pumped, stoked, whatever surfer word you want to use. Pretty sure I talked my sister’s ear off because I got excitable.

The majority of films I’ve seen in the past couple of years have been at critics’ screenings, where jerks with iphones tap tap tap and show little to no enthusiasm for what’s to come. There’s never the feeing of an event. Granted, I was at a gimme David Fincher event with Fight Club nerds, but it was pretty thrilling to see a well executed two minutes, at most, of film, that left the audience feeling wowed.

I don’t want to write too much about it, but a note: I was in a room with a bunch of Swedes. I laughed at one dark little joke. They didn’t laugh. It was done, of course, with that Fincher blue everywhere.

But listen to me, and don’t do yourself a disservice: when it leaks to the internet, don’t watch it. You need to see it on the big screen when you’re seeing some other movie, with the images large and the base booming. I guarantee a shiver of excitement.

The more I think about it, Fincher is one of the majors, isn’t he? (A part of me would file away a mild little attraction to him in the David O. Russell category. I have a soft spot for the idealism of directors who seem like visionary jerks.) You have to have strong feelings, one way or another, about Seven, The Social Network, and Fight Club. What other director has been so consistent and so nihilistic and so devastating?