I’ve had my Hollywood fun
Gillian Flynn has gone from literary sensation to one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters. But as her latest film Widows is released, she tells Hannah Flint why she’s ready to leave movies behind
Gillian Flynn interview: ‘I’ve had my Hollywood fun’
when gillian flynn released Gone Girl six years ago, it wasn’t just the plotline – compelling, disturbing and unpredictable as it was – that led to two million people buying it in its first year alone. It was the woman at the centre of the twists and turns who had us all enthralled.
Amy Elliott-dunne – later played by Rosamund Pike after Gillian sold the rights to the film for $1.5 million and wrote the screenplay – was beautiful, manipulative and really quite sociopathic. Gillian has routinely been described as a ‘misogynist’ for daring to show a woman so far from perfection, claims that were repeated earlier this year when her debut book, Sharp Objects, was transformed into an eight-part TV series. The main character Camille was equally difficult to digest: scarred – emotionally by her past, physically by self-harm – and drinking to numb her pain.
Gillian has always defended her female protagonists by arguing that she wants to represent ‘every kind of woman’, pointing out it’s all just fiction anyway. And yet. Gillian’s women aren’t just slightly deranged: the point is often that it’s their anger that makes them so. At a time when women’s anger is fast
becoming a political force for good, can Gillian still play the fiction card? ‘ We’ve reached a particular playing field where Amy’s anger is exactly appropriate, unfortunately,’ admits Gillian, speaking from her home in Chicago, where she’s just done the school run with her two children. ‘ That anger is increasingly normal. I mean, how could it not be, considering what’s going on?’
Female anger is also prominent in her most recent project, Widows, the latest film by Steve Mcqueen ( based on the ’80s mini-series by Lynda La Plante) for which Gillian wrote the screenplay – and which is already creating much awards chatter. The film is set in Chicago, amid a backdrop of gangsters and corrupt local politicians. But at the heart of it are women who do, like so many of Gillian’s characters, exactly the opposite of what the men in their lives expect them to do.
After their career criminal husbands are killed at the start of the movie on a job, the titular widows, played by Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki and Michelle Rodriguez, set out to finish their final heist.
‘Heist films are very elbows out, menonly kind of films,’ says Gillian. ‘ To make one with women that was taken seriously, the stakes were really high. It intrigued me.’ Gillian’s widows are angry and, yes,
a little edgy at times, but they’re a long way from Amy in Gone Girl. Was there a conscious decision to dial down the crazy?
‘I think if you worry too much about that, you’re probably going to make a bad character, and probably not a very believable character,’ says Gillian. ‘I include characters from all over the spectrum of humanity, that’s my goal. My method is not to worry about how you perceive them. And after that I don’t consider myself to be a huge carrier of a big message.’
That may be so, but Gillian still views her work as political. How we see women, she says, is important ‘even when it comes down to the level of commercials. In the past, people who made the decisions about commercials were white males; the women were doing the laundry. Now, there are laundry commercials aimed at dads as well as mums. And inter-racial couples on TV, and gay couples. And that’s no small thing.’
The 49-year-old started her career as a journalist, working on the US magazine Entertainment Weekly until she was made redundant in 2008, writing novels in her free time. She speaks in a low, slow American drawl, which is far more relaxed than I’d expect for someone who has just released a film tipped for awards season glory, or of someone who has created the sort of disturbing fiction she has. I wonder if she gets tired of everyone who meets her thinking she’s going to be as damaged as the characters that come out of her head (when Gone Girl came out, there was much discussion of what her husband, Brett, a lawyer, thought of her after he read it). ‘People are a bit deflated when they meet me,’ she laughs. ‘ They want me to whip out a switch blade or push them against a wall. I am actually a mellow human, and I think I surprise them in that way.’
There’s only one point where she isn’t so mellow, which comes during an outburst about the roles women in Hollywood decide to take on.
‘ We need to see female characters who aren’t the ones we see so often, over and over again, in caregiver roles, or the pure supporting role that’s so uninteresting. I’d love for all these amazing female actors to stop taking these… shitty roles! You’re so much better and so much more interesting.’ She will never, ever, put her own name to something that doesn’t contain interesting female characters, she adds. ‘It’s not that I don’t have it in me, believe me, I can write crap,’ she laughs. ‘I would be bored. I’d be selling myself out.’
In April next year, Gillian’s next project, Utopia, will start filming for Amazon Studios. But after that, there will be no more film or TV. ‘I’m kind of done with that,’ she admits. ‘ Then I’m back to books for quite a while. I’ve had my Hollywood fun, but I need to get back in my little writing cave. I need to start writing a book that has taken hold of me.’
She demurs to say what that book will be, but we can all safely assume it will take hold of us, too. ‘ Widows’ is out now