The publicity for Dragon Tattoo is going about their business, despite the hoopla around the embargo, this and that. But for me, it’s just the movie. And the performance. THE performance. There are only a handful of films this year that are worth talking about, and I totally grock why Denby wanted to splooge on this one. Trust me, I do too. At any rate, here is the NY Times talking the difficult casting of Ms. Salander:
“She’s one of those characters, like Jesus Christ, Dracula and Batman, that everyone has his own ideas about who should play them,” Mr. Fincher said, treating himself to a single martini and a meal that consisted mostly of salad. “All of a sudden I’m getting phone calls from people I respect saying, ‘You can’t possibly cast X, Y or Z.’
“I wanted to say, ‘Are you really calling me to influence the casting of a movie?’ I was naïve about it, to be honest. It wasn’t like there were 5,000 girls in black leggings and goth skull makeup lining up outside on the street. But a lot of the press and the bloggers made it seem like the search for the next Scarlett O’Hara.”
In the end Mr. Fincher picked 26-year-old Rooney Mara. As her name suggests, Ms. Mara is a descendant of two great N.F.L. dynasties, the families that own the Steelers and the Giants, but except to fans of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise (she was Nancy in the 2010 remake) and to viewers who paid attention at the very beginning of Mr. Fincher’s “Social Network,” in which she appeared briefly but memorably as Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend, she is an unknown to most moviegoers. To Mr. Fincher that was part of her appeal.
The Salander character, he explained, never answers questions about herself, and at the beginning no one knows anything about her. “Lisbeth is not a Hot Topic goth,” he said. “She’s not Joan Jett. She’s somebody with a safety pin in her cheek. It’s original punk. She has created a way to be seen as trash. Part of that is a stay-away thing, and part of it is a self-conscious agreement with what everyone thinks of her. She thinks, ‘I’ll live with that if it means no one ever takes advantage of me.’ ”
So what he kept holding out for, Mr. Fincher went on, was someone who didn’t come trailing a lot of movie history and who could convey a sense of Lisbeth as a damaged child. He said, “I kept feeling that I was looking for someone who was in some ways still 13 years old, holding a jar of kerosene in one hand and a lighter in the other.”
Ms. Mara said: “I knew David was fighting for me. The character is such an enigma, he felt that someone with a big name couldn’t have played her.” She added, recalling what it was like to work with Mr. Fincher: “He’s in control of every single thing you see in the movie, and yet somehow I never felt controlled. I can’t imagine anyone else like him.”
