Monday, January 13, 2014

Will Gone Girl Gain From a New Ending?

(from theguardian.com)


Lost or found? … Gillian Flynn. Photograph: Peter Hoffman

I am in two minds about the news that Gillian Flynn has rewritten the ending to Gone Girl, her thriller about Nick and Amy Dunne's horribly dark marriage, and Amy's disappearance, for David Fincher's film version (which is out in October – can't wait). I loved the book, and I loved the ending ; I wasn't entirely sure about the slightly odd section before the conclusion (I'm trying not to give anything away), so I'm intrigued as to what Flynn might have done.

"There was something thrilling about taking this piece of work that I'd spent about two years painstakingly putting together with all its eight million Lego pieces and take a hammer to it and bash it apart and reassemble it into a movie," she told Entertainment Weekly (revealing precisely nothing about her changes). She is also quoted as saying that Ben Affleck, who is playing Nick Dunne, "was so shocked by it … He would say, 'This is a whole new third act! She literally threw that third act out and started from scratch.'"

Well, how tantalising. I like Flynn's refreshing lack of reverence towards her novel, and I wouldn't mind if she'd ditched a certain bizarre character, who I don't think adds much to her sophisticated thriller. I'd be disappointed if she'd Hollywoodised her ending, but I'd also be very surprised; that's not her style.

Roll on October, anyway – I want to see how she's reconstructed her Lego pieces. And I'm wondering which other stories could benefit from a rewrite. Gone Girl's director David Fincher obviously thinks a few changes wouldn't have harmed Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, telling Entertainment Weekly that the lesson he learned from filming the novel in 2011 was that "we may have been too beholden to the source material". Take that, Larsson.

Now, if only JRR Tolkien were still around to be convinced that what The Hobbit really needs is a bit of romance between an elf and a dwarf – actually, Peter Jackson's already sorted that one out . I might set my sights instead on trying to railroad Louisa May Alcott's estate into accepting that Jo shouldn't have said no to Laurie, and that she certainly shouldn't have married that boring old professor… What endings would you change if you could?

No comments:

Post a Comment