“We were aware of this virus, but we were all such dumb Americans that we’re like, ‘Obviously, that’s not going to affect us.’ It seemed very far away. I’m like, ‘I’ll see you in a week.’ ”
But everything began to shut down, and she never returned to that L.A. editing suite. Instead, she continued the process remotely, which proved to be a meta experience as the line between fact and fiction blurred. “Editing a show that has a plotline about a pandemic while a pandemic is breaking is extraordinarily surreal,” she says. “Looking at footage on my computer and then looking up at the TV at the news was very strange.”
The Midwest native, who’s 49, is adept at pivoting. She segued from journalist at Entertainment Weekly to best-selling author of Gone Girl, Dark Places and Sharp Objects (23 million copies sold worldwide in 47 languages) to hot screenwriter favored by directors David Fincher and Steve McQueen.
She’s now taken her career to the next level with the twisty Utopia, a $65 million gamble for Amazon. Utopia, starring Sasha Lane, Rainn Wilson and John Cusack, streams Sept. 25 and marks Flynn’s biggest pivot of all given that HBO left it for dead after battling with Fincher in 2015 over the budget.
“I put all that creative energy in — 10 hours of content. That’s five movies I could have written or a couple of books,” she says of the initial disappointment. “And it became just my pure Missouri mule stubbornness that I was like, ‘This goddamned thing is not going to be a waste of time.’”
Meeting Flynn, Lane was struck by that dichotomy. “She has like the sweetest kind of face, and you wouldn’t assume that she’s like writing about murder and all these wild things,” she says. “She’s just so charismatic and energetic and passionate. And definitely a bit twisted.”
Growing up in Kansas City, Flynn’s rearing primed her for writing. Her mom taught reading at a junior college and was always putting books in her daughter’s hands. Her dad was a film professor who treated Flynn to a weekly “wildly inappropriate movie.”
“I saw Alien when I was about 6, and he introduced it by saying, ‘It has a heroine in it. That’s a female hero. You’ll love it.’ And I was like, ‘Aaaah, make it stop!’ ” she recalls. “But I learned from an early age to start really thinking about films and books in a more cerebral way and not just as a consumer.”
From her earliest memory, she knew she wanted to be a writer. Being “pragmatic person,” she settled on journalism after going to the University of Kansas and Northwestern for grad school on the subject and wound up at Entertainment Weekly in 1998, writing celebrity profiles. On the side, she wrote her first two novels, Sharp Objects and Dark Places (both adapted for the screen and starring Amy Adams and Charlize Theron, respectively).
As Dark Places was about to be published, Flynn was laid off in 2008 during the big bloodletting across print media and began writing Gone Girl. “There’s a reason that the main character is a laid-off pop culture writer who goes back to Missouri,” she says. “I was pouring my angst into that.”
During the 2013 shoot, Fincher invited Flynn to the set, which proved to be a pivotal career moment. “I get this text from him out of the blue saying, ‘Hey, I think I know what to do with your life for the next couple years.” What he proposed was collaborating on a remake of the British sci-fi series Utopia for HBO. Flynn then spent two years writing 10 episodes. But former production head Michael Lombardo and Fincher battled over the budget, and HBO pulled the plug.
“At the end, we were $9 million apart, not a crazy amount,” she says. “And we just kept thinking they’d meet it. I suppose we were playing a little bit of a game of chicken. But we had committed to a budget, and David is extremely precise, so he knew what it was going to cost. Ultimately, they liked it $80 million worth but not $90 million worth.”
Flynn continued to write with McQueen’s 2018 feature Widows and adapting her Sharp Objects for TV. The latter put her back in business with HBO. “It wasn’t awkward,” she says. “It was almost like two former lovers who were just like, “Well, we tried. It wasn’t quite the right fit, but we still have Sharp Objects.”
In 2018, Flynn presented Amazon with a nine-episode version of Utopia, and it was ordered to series. For budgetary reasons, it dropped from nine to eight episodes, and Flynn changed the setting from 10 years in the future to present day. Otherwise, it’s unchanged from the HBO version.
Production took place in Chicago, and she barely saw her family for nearly a year, except when they appeared in the film. Son Flynn and daughter Veronica were extras, “then in another episode, my [real-life] mother and husband are killed,” Flynn says. “So it was a real family affair.”
After she oversaw the finishing of Utopia’s editing and score in April, Flynn found the rhythms of normalcy returning, albeit under lockdown in Chicago, one of the nation’s hotspots. She is midway through her fourth novel. “The original goal was I’d spend the rest of the year finishing the book,” she says. “Instead, I’ll be spending the rest of the year homeschooling, learning how to be a teacher.”
Still, some things remain the same, like the protagonist Flynn is crafting. Asked if the untitled book has another complicated heroine, she corrects. “It’s fierce, feral and very dark.”
