14 DAY TRIAL // The latest issue of Vogue magazine comes with a lengthy piece on the upcoming “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the highly anticipated film starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. Also in it, director David Fincher explains why Scarlett Johansson didn’t get the leading role.
Various actresses have been linked to the project before the announcement came that Mara had been cast as Lisbeth Salander, including Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson.
Asked how difficult it was to find a woman to play the controversial, deeply troubled yet brilliant character, Fincher says it was definitely no walk in the park.
In fact, at one point, he even thought he’d never find the right actress. Scarlett, for one, did a wonderful job but was far too good-looking to be able to pull off the role.
“Look, we saw some amazing people. Scarlett Johansson was great. It was a great audition, I’m telling you. But the thing with Scarlett is, you can’t wait for her to take her clothes off,” Fincher tells Vogue.
“I keep trying to explain this. Salander should be like E.T. If you put E.T. dolls out before anyone had seen the movie, they would say, ‘What is this little squishy thing?’ Well, you know what? When he hides under the table and he grabs the Reese’s Pieces, you love him! It has to be like that,” he adds.
It was precisely this contradiction that made it so hard for him to find the right woman for the part.
“I had seen a lot of actresses. I was beginning to get to the point where I was thinking, Maybe conceptually you are talking about a person who doesn’t exist,” he recalls.
Then, one day, a casting director threw Rooney Mara’s name in the conversation, but Fincher took his time before actually agreeing to let her audition. He didn’t think she was right either.
“I believe in casting people whose core – that essential personality you can’t beat out of them with a tire iron – has to work for the character,” he explains.
With Mara, he was “struck by how different it was from what I felt I already knew about her,” Fincher says.
Dubbed the “feel-bad movie of Christmas,” “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is out in theaters on December 21, 2011.