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"Did this guy or did he not kill his wife?"

27 February 2017

‘I realize how decadent writing a novel is. You really own this world, you can do whatever you want to it. You can go inside people's minds. Gone Girl has a lot of internal monologues, so it was a big struggle to figure out how to have them show you who they were instead of like, "Here's about me." The entire time I was adapting the screenplay I had a giant sticky note above my computer that said, "IT IS A MOVIE!" to remind myself to not try to take everything from the book that I liked and jam it all in...

Well, on the surface, it's a mystery of "Did this guy or did he not kill his wife?" But to me, what was interesting was that idea of the game of emotional con artist that we are [playing] when we meet people, and we're telling each other very specific stories to get you to like me. I like the idea of what happens two years, three years, four years down the road, when you don't have that energy to keep up the mask anymore.'

Did Gone Girl promote a negative message about women?

‘I had one single dark 24 hours, where I was like, "Did I destroy feminism? Dang it, I did not mean to do that! Am I a misogynist?" There was a weekend when all those think pieces came out and then I very quickly bounced back because I thought, "That's absolutely ludicrous." Just because you have a bad woman in your movie doesn't mean she's indicative of all women or suddenly we're going to go back 20 years, and that goes back to some idea that women had to be protected from evil or were seen as evil, and that's fairly ridiculous. I think we're tough enough to handle it.'

Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and Dark Places in The Hollywood Reporter http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/writer-roundtable-chris-rock-gillian-745744