David Fincher finds ‘Gone Girl’s’ Rosamund Pike
How the Oscar-nominated director of ‘The Social Network’ and ‘Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” discovered his Amy Dunne.
David Fincher likes to go looking for the unexpected. When he was searching for his Lisbeth Salander, the title character in his adaptation of Stieg Larsson's mega-selling Swedish thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, he picked Rooney Mara, and everyone went "Who?" Jesse Eisenberg wasn't exactly a household name either when Fincher cast the New York actor as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Both Mara and Eisenberg went on to receive Academy Award nominations for their work in the Fincher films.
To play Amy Dunne, the mysterious missus vanished and presumed dead in Fincher's spellbinding take on the Gillian Flynn bestseller, Gone Girl, Fincher looked high and low, hither and yon, before casting Rosamund Pike, a British actress he'd seen in a few films over the years. It was a meeting in St. Louis, where Fincher was in the early stages of pre-production on Gone Girl, that clinched the deal.
"Rosamund is an interesting puzzle," Fincher explained in a phone interview recently. "I'd seen her in four or five things.... I'd seen her in the James Bond movie [Die Another Day, the last of the Pierce Brosnan 007s], I'd seen her in Joe Wright's movie [Pride & Prejudice}, I'd seen her in An Education… and I'm somebody who sort of prides themselves on being able to see what the actor comes equipped with, what their weaponry is, what their— like Batman, what's on their utility belt. I look for an actor's utility belt, and she's one of those people that I just could never get a bead on."
And the fact that Fincher was stymied by Pike, that he couldn't get a handle on the tools and tics and techniques she used, intrigued him. -- it seemed just right if she were to play a woman who seems to be one thing -- a happy housewife, wed to a struggling writer, played by Ben Affleck – but who may very well be someone else altogether.
"That's kind of an important thing for Amy -- you want Amy to be somebody who's unfathomable. So Rosamund flew to St. Louis and we met in the Four Seasons and we had dinner and drinks, and as we were talking, and about two hours in, I said, 'Are you an only child?' And she said, 'Yes.' And I realized that's what Amy had to have. She had to wear that. It's the thing that children who are socialized with adults and not with other siblings have -- this other thing that sets them apart…. And so from that point on we built Amy around Rosamund, tailored it to Rosamund, Rosamund was the one."
Gone Girl opens in theaters on Friday, Oct. 3.