Gone Girl author Flynn talks about scripting film

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is one of those rare novels that achieve both thrilling popular success and nearly unanimous critical praise; under those circumstances it seems inevitable that the book would be turned into a movie.

And so it has. The David Fincher-directed film, which stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as a couple whose troubled marriage becomes a national fixation after the wife disappears, opened Friday.

But what might have been unexpected — or maybe not — is that Flynn is credited with the screenplay.

Flynn felt so protective of her book’s characters — and ideas — that she sold the film rights with the stipulation that she’d have first crack at writ- ing the screenplay. She realized that as the owner of the hottest literary property this side of 50 Shades of Grey, she had at least temporarily secured a lit-

tle leverage. Flynn, who spent years as a writer and editor for Entertainment Weekly, understood that writers seldom operate from a position of power in Hollywood. She didn’t want her layered literary novel reduced to a collection of genre cliches.

As Flynn explains, the book is “an examination of the fact that we all are kind of emotional con artists, trying to trick people into loving us … because we’re not showing them all that stuff they’re going to have to deal with two or three years down the road, in this case when Nick and Amy start slipping and letting their real selves come through, the results end up being incredibly disastrous.”

She thought screenwriting might be easier than writing a novel because it seems there is so much less to do — no internal monologues, a minimum of description. Mainly just dialogue. But then she realized she would have to eliminate or greatly reduce the role of some characters. And that the conventions of screenwriting require that every sentence move the story forward. There is no room for discursive flights.

“My goal in writing the screenplay was not to jam every single thing in there, not to be so slavishly devoted” she says, speaking after the film’s premiere at the New York Film Festival. “We’ve all seen those films that are incredibly true to the book but still don’t work because they haven’t taken the time to turn it into a movie.

“You’re never going to rival what’s been in someone’s imagination; you have to take the parts of the story that work [as a film]. The themes of the book are very much intact. That was my goal: To not turn it into a straight thriller, a traditional Hollywood whodunit, but to preserve those themes about marriage, about persona and the false fronts we present to each other, and the media and the idea of storytelling.”

She finished the first draft of her screenplay in December 2012 and turned it in to 20th Century Fox. It was only later she learned the hyper-meticulous David Fincher had signed on to direct her work.

While Fincher has a reputation as a difficult taskmaster (Jake Gyllenhaal and Chloe Sevigny experienced frustration with Fincher on the set of Zodiac because the director insisted on putting them through dozens of takes without giving them much if any feedback on what he wanted from them), Flynn says she had no problem collaborating with him.

“It’s a very daunting thing for a first-time screenwriter to hear that you’re working with David Fincher because he sets such a high bar,” she says. “At the same time, there was a certain relief to it because I knew that I could take his word — that if he said a theme was working, I didn’t have to worry about it any more. If David Fincher gives you his approval, you’re good.

“We had a very similar sensibility. I think if you read my book and you watch his films you’ll find that we have very similar interests in certain things — what is behind facades, we both have an interest in the media and the role that it plays in our society, and we both have a certain dark humor that flows through our work, and so I was relieved when he came aboard because I knew he would take care of all those things.

“Gone Girl is not a book that immediately [presents as something] you can slap up on a movie screen … tonally it’s very complicated — it’s a romance, it’s a thriller, it’s a dark psychological thing. I knew he wouldn’t shy away from making all those different stories work together.”

A book that deserves more space than it’s getting here is the Library of America’s just published The Days Trilogy, an expanded edition of three memoirs by H.L. Mencken — Happy Days, Newspaper Days and Heathen Days — that were released in the 1940s. Included with the original books are about 200 pages of commentary Mencken requested not be published in his lifetime. (The material has been available to scholars and biographers since 1981, but this is the first time it has been published.)

While the value of the volume is unquestionable, I find Mencken the curmudgeon — still the guiding mascot of many a newsroom — a problematic figure. He provided a lot of nasty aphorisms that gave comfort to those who imagine themselves steely, incredulous and superior. An enemy of superstition, a merry despiser of most minorities and an inveterate contrarian who gave not a thought to the niceties of what we now call “political correctness,” Mencken is useful to any would-be pundit who’d prefer making hyperbolic generalizations to rational argu- ment. And he was so prolific (Mencken credibly estimated he published some 5 million words during his career) and ecumenical that, like Jefferson, he can be trotted out to support nearly every position.

While journalists tend to admire Mencken for his usefulness, by the standards of our own “more enlightened age” he was a petty bigot, a mean- spirited and narrow man who openly admired Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm, hated jazz and baited Southerners. He thought Hitler was no more than a ruffian momentarily sucked into a power vacuum and that, if European Jews didn’t exactly have it coming, they were at least their own worst enemy.

Mencken was, by modern standards at least, an anti-Semite. He was also a white supremacist. But he was also arguably the greatest American newspaperman of the 20th century. He made war on the tyranny of the dull nor- mal, the smug, satisfied and stupid strata of American society he famously termed the “booboisie.” He scorned religion and blasted fundamentalist yahoos and “uplifters” alike. He coined the term “Bible Belt” and railed against prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan and “world-savers” like Herbert Hoover and FDR.

As an essayist and magazine editor, his great era was the 1920s when he established himself as a literary talent scout of no small ability. Mencken was one of the first to champion Mark Twain as America’s first novelist and his Huckleberry Finn as the greatest American novel. He championed Joseph Conrad, published Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, and had a hand in creating Theodore Dreiser.

Together these memoirs form an indispensable autobiography of a great — and greatly flawed — American.

Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay for the film version of her best-selling novel, Gone Girl. Director David Fincher, she says, “sets such a high bar.”