Director David Fincher talked to Playboy about his much-anticipated upcoming thriller, Gone Girl, which serves as opening night of the N.Y. Film Fest.
The Gillian Flynn film adaptation stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a husband suspected of murdering his wife, who has gone missing.
When asked why he decided to cast Affleck as the protagonist, Fincher said it had to do with a bit of Google-stalking.
“You cast movies based on critical scenes,” he says. “In Gone Girl there’s a smile the guy has to give when the local press asks him to stand next to a poster of his missing wife. I flipped through Google Images and found about 50 shots of Affleck giving that kind of smile in public situations. You look at them and know he’s trying to make people comfortable in the moment, but by doing that he’s making himself vulnerable to people having other perceptions about him.”
Fans of the book know exactly the scene he is talking about, when Nick’s smile reads as either sad husband trying to smile or completely creepy murderer. “What we asked him to do was ‘Open vise, insert testicles and turn’ for the entire length of the movie,” adds Fincher.
The interviewer asked Fincher about his reputation for being a tough and demanding director, often asking for many retakes of the same scene. His response?
“If you didn’t get hugged enough as a kid, you won’t find what you’re looking for from me,” says Fincher. “That’s not my gig and I’m not attuned to it.”