Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
“She’s not above her material. She’s not making fun of these people, even the nosy neighbor. She’s not making fun of even those archetypes. And she’s interesting in that way. I kind of held my breath and waited to read her first draft and I was so emboldened by it. She was not only capable of slaughtering the darling, she took a peculiar pleasure in offing those extensions of her own imagination.”
Bestselling author Gillian Flynn didn’t pull any punches when it came to the script for David Fincher’s Gone Girl ‐ a script based on her own blockbuster book and her first produced attempt at working in that medium ‐ slicing and dicing and cutting and crafting without prejudice. In fact, even Fincher was stunned by her ability to “off” bits and pieces (and even whole people) from her script, sharing with FilmComment the above quote about Flynn’s interest in keeping things neat for the sake of a good script. This is not a novelist beholden to her own material, and that might be why Fincher and Flynn are teaming up for yet another project ‐ and why the duo is making a claim to be Hollywood’s next big dream team.
The Guardian reports that Fincher and Flynn have already lined up their next project together, despite Gone Girl not hitting theaters until Friday. The pair will next hit the small screen with an HBO-produced remake of the British Channel 4 series Utopia. Fincher, who has already dabbled in television work with Netflix’s House of Cards (which he executive produces and has occasionally directed), but Utopia will see him going whole hog: he will direct the entire series, with Flynn set to write it. The project will keep the pair busy well into 2015, though it ensures we’re due to get a metric ton of Fincher/Flynn material piped into our eyeballs very soon.
As ComingSoon reports, “the original Utopia revolved around a graphic novel called ‘The Utopia Experiments’ that proved oddly prophetic in predicting world disasters. When a group of young people/conspiracy geeks come across the manuscript for the sequel novel, they are pursued by an agency called The Network while trying to stop the future calamities it documents.” The British Utopia finished its second season over the summer, and may continue on into third and fourth runs (which CS reminds us is definitely on the longer side for most British television series).
Of the British original, Fincher says, “I like the world of it…I like the characters ‐ I love Dennis’s [Kelly, creator of the UK show] honesty and affinity for the nerds. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of a junior conspiracy theorist [because] I don’t have time to connect them all! But it’s nice to see that somebody has.”
Utopia isn’t Flynn’s only recent foray into television ‐ her Sharp Objects is being turned into a television drama with Marti Noxon at the helm. That alone is something worth getting excited about (weekly Flynn? we’re sold), but now our televisions will be absolutely lousy with Flynn-penned material.
Fincher and Flynn obviously got along quite well while making Gone Girl together ‐ and the results sort of speak for themselves ‐ which is, quite honestly, kind of surprising. Flynn’s rise through the literary world has been seemingly meteoric (though extremely well-deserved; her books are all kinds of great), and Gone Girl was a big endeavor for her to undertake. And with a revered and practiced director like Fincher? The clashes could have been legendary. Instead, however, the pair appear to have carved out a working relationship that’s already without rigid boundaries: not just movies, but also television, not just Flynn’s novels, but also other works. What else will they be able to do together?
Related Topics: David Fincher
