Hollywood screenwriting veteran Steven Zaillian is the scribe behind such classics as Schindler’s List, Mission: Impossible, Gangs of New York, All The King’s Men, American Gangster and more recently, Moneyball. He has now taken the first book in the Stieg Larsson’s The Millenium Series, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and adapted it for English-speaking audiences.
It stars Daniel Craig as disgraced magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as computer expert and social outcast Lisbeth Salander who join forces to uncover the dark and deadly secrets of a wealthy Swedish family.
HeyUGuys: Are you a fan of The Millenium Series books?
Steven Zaillian: Yes, absolutely.
What is it about this trilogy that makes it so appealing?
I think it’s a lot of things. Obviously, the Lisbeth Salander character is a key reason. She’s a very modern character, a very modern sort of detective, and what Stieg Larsson has done in Dragon Tattoo that’s smart is taken a classic old mystery setup and put into that two very modern-day detectives. I think people are responding to that.
Did you and director David Fincher have any concerns about how to approach the remake, considering the original films are still fresh in audiences’ minds?
I didn’t see the original film so I didn’t have that in my head. That was helpful, actually. The book is quite descriptive, so in terms of what I had to do, was not a problem at all. It’s probably more of a question for David because he was in Sweden shooting it. As far as I was concerned I was just dealing with the story and I didn’t have to concern myself with those kinds of things.
Did you find anything of Larsson’s story tricky to adapt for screen?
You know a lot of the time I’ll come to a project and only see the problem. My job is like ‘problem solving’. But in this case I didn’t really feel that. I thought it was a very clear narrative, that he had told a very good story. It was long – I would say the biggest thing was how was I going to condense it down into a two-hour film. To me, though, that’s not a difficult challenge. I like the fact that Salander doesn’t say much – I like characters in movies where people don’t go on and on, and where you’re getting a lot of exposition or backstory through dialogue. I like the fact that she’s quiet. I think that the Daniel Craig character, Mikael Blomkvist, is a wonderful anchoring character. He brings a sense to the story, and then gradually over the course of the story, it starts transferring over to being her story. I like that we start the movie with him and end the movie with her. That’s quite an unusual thing to do, and I like that.
Lisbeth doesn’t say much as a character – did you find trying to portray the different facets of her character for screen at all difficult?
No. I think once I find the voice, whether someone says a lot or doesn’t, I can generally put that person in any situation and know how he or she will behave. This is the key for me. The same was true for Blomkvist. If you read the book, Salander does say a lot more, she’s much more explicit with how she feels and thinks about things. I’ve been doing this job long enough to know that when you actually shoot something, and you have an actress as good as Rooney is, less is always going to be more in the dialogue department.
The relationship between Salander and Blomkvist is a very compelling one in the way it changes over the story.
It’s a great relationship. The wonderful thing about Lisbeth is she’s very sophisticated in terms of how she approaches computers, and she’s had a very difficult life and she’s seen things that Blomkvist has never seen – until later on in the film, but emotionally, she’s quite young; she’s 24 in age, but she’s like 14 in terms of how she relates to men. In the story, it’s about how she opens up to somebody after a long time, and is going to get hurt for doing that. That was the element of the story we were always interested in. Ultimately, you can have a movie that’s about Nazis, murder, disappearances, but if you don’t have a strong relationship between the two main characters that is calibrated just as carefully as the plot of the mystery, it’s not going to work. So that was always really important to us.
There was a moment in the film when the door shuts on the abuse about to happen to Lisbeth at the hands of her mentor. We thought you might not show what actually happens, unlike in the original Niels Arden Oplev film, but you do decide to depict the violence.
Yes we do – you mean the rape scene? I don’t remember exactly what happens in the book, but I don’t think that scene is described in any great detail. It isn’t described in any great detail in our script either. I always knew that that was a scene David was going to decide how much of it he wanted to show. I think the script simply says, “And then he rapes her”.
Are you involved in bringing the next two books in the trilogy to the big screen?
I have been looking at the next one and started making notes. If this goes well, then yeah I will probably go on and do the next one. But I have started to look at it.
Lots of Oscar predictions for the film, David Fincher, Rooney Mara and you; what do you say to that – how will The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo fare?
I don’t know. I think anyone who’s made a film or been involved in a film is the last person to know that. We’re so close to the film, it’s impossible to get a sense of what people feel about that.
Are you more attracted to adapting complex stories, like Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, behind your recent film Moneyball?
Moneyball is more typical of what I do and am drawn to and is about an idea, as apposed to a fictional story where the narrative is quite clear. I’ve taken a project several times, like a book, where there’s not a clear narrative story but it just has a great subject matter. The Dragon Tattoo was kind of the opposite for me – it had too much narrative. It’s like using two different sides of the brain on those two projects.
How do you generally go about starting a new project?
I read the book, and I’ll get a sense immediately of if I think I can do this, or I don’t think I can do this. Then I’ll spend about three months sitting in a room alone in frustration, agony and terror and not thinking I can do it, and not thinking I can do it well, and making notes and basically hating everything. Finally, I get to a place where I sit down and just get on with it.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is in cinemas on Boxing Day.
