Search For “GONE GIRL” Starts October 8
From the tour de force thriller that became a
bestselling must-read comes David Fincher’s screen version of Gone Girl, a wild
ride through our modern media culture and down into the deep, dark fault lines
of an American marriage – in all its unreliable promises, inescapable deceits
and pitch-black comedy.
The couple at the center of the
story – former New York writer Nick Dunne and his formerly “cool girl” wife
Amy, now trying to make ends meet in the mid-recession Midwest – have all the
sinuous outer contours of contemporary marital bliss. But on the occasion of their 5th wedding
anniversary, Amy goes missing -- and those contours crack into a maze of
fissures. Nick becomes the prime
suspect, shrouded in a fog of suspicious behavior. Amy becomes the vaunted object of a media
frenzy as the search for her, dead or alive, plays out before the eyes of a
world thirsting for revelations.
Taking the alternately guarded and
exposed role of Nick is Ben Affleck.
Says Fincher of casting him:
“Putting a cast together is like putting a basketball team together and
Nick was the point guard. He has to feed
the narrative. It’s a ‘he said, she
said’ in the book; but it’s ‘he experiences, she experiences’ in the
movie. It’s more subjective. You’re not gifted with all these inner
monologues in the movie. So you need an
actor who is very deft to play this role.
It’s 3-D chess, not Chinese checkers.”
Collaborating with Rosamund Pike in
the role of Amy brought Affleck into an intense pas de deux unlike anything
he’s done before. “There’s a kind of
inscrutable, enigmatic quality to Rosamund that made her really right for this
role,” Affleck observes. “A big part of
this movie, at least from my point of view, is the constant calibration of
where each of the characters stands as they keep shifting and evolving – so
that sense of mystery in Amy was very important to the whole enterprise.”
When Nick reports his wife missing,
he begins a thorny, unwanted relationship with Detective Rhonda Boney, the
primary investigator on the case -- and Nick’s only conceivable lifeline. Among the image-obsessed characters in Gone
Girl, Boney is the one drawn to cold, hard truth. Taking the role is Kim Dickens, best known
for The Blind Side, “Deadwood”, “Friday Night Lights” and “Sons of
Anarchy.”
Dickens says she felt an instant
kinship with the character. “I felt I
could climb right into her,” she says. “She’s a real salt-of-the-earth woman –
pragmatic, humble but actually quite good at her job.”
She notes that Boney chooses to
sidle up to Nick because that’s the most promising strategy, guilty or
not. “The percentages are very high when
a wife goes missing that the spouse is involved,” Dickens points out. “But Boney knows that even if Nick did it,
she still has to get him to think she’s on his side so he’ll open up to
her. She knew him as a child, but now
she has to try to figure who he has become as a man – and it’s not all that
clear right off the bat. Things feel a little hinky. But she still gives Nick a little benefit of
the doubt because that’s what her instincts about human behavior tell
her.” Fincher was impressed by Dickens’
organic take on the role. “I wanted
Boney to be a kind of Midwestern Sherlock Holmes, and that’s what Kim brings to
her. She doesn’t miss much,” he
says.
Thrilling
and chilling clues unfold when “Gone Girl” opens October 8 in cinemas
nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.
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