As you’ve read here on TG, there was recently a tremendous uproar about the fact that The New Yorker broke an embargo and ran their review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a week early.
This caused all kinds of self created grief at Sony, and with the film’s producer Scott Rudin. David Fincher, who also gave us Se7en and Fight Club, isn’t too happy about it either, and the normally press shy director just spoke out about it, telling Miami.com what his solution would be if he were in charge.
Fincher says he sides with Rudin, who was quite upset over the early review, and added, “It’s a hard thing for people outside our business to understand. But as silly as this may all look from the outside – privileged people bickering – I think it’s important. This is not about controlling the media.
“If people realized how much thought goes into deciding at what point we can allow our movie to be seen… When you’re trying to orchestrate a build-up of anticipation, it is extremely frustrating to have someone agree to something and upturn the apple cart and change the rules – for everybody.”
Fincher also said to writer Rene Rodriguez, “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t show movies to anybody before they were released.” He’d do a coming attraction, three TV commercials, and that’s it. Fincher wants people to come to a movie, totally pure, even though this is based on a best selling series of books, and a previous foreign adaption of the book, but this also stirs the debate as to how important critics are to today’s movies.
Fincher also feels critics are important, but gave a shout-out to the people who actually pay to see the movies, who he feels are “the most valuable film critics… those people who come see a movie with their Blackberry and then text their friends ‘It sucked’ or ‘It’s awesome.'”
So far, what we’ve gathered from the New Yorker review, and early word gathered on Variety, is that the movie is indeed good, and like classic Fincher dark and dreary, but intelligently put together, very well made, and not exploitive or gratuitous with some pretty tough material. (Not to mention with the Dragon Tattoo girl herself, Rooney Mara, gives a great, potentially star making performance).
It’s hard to keep the movie going experience pure unless you absolutely force yourself not to know anything about a movie before you go in, which in today’s day and age of technology is next to impossible.
We wrote about this before in a story I called Please Know Nothing About This Movie, and it’s a trip to thing how much purer the movie going experience was before the ‘Net. Now word of mouth travels a lot faster, but as we’ve also written, if the experience is worth plunking down your hard earned bucks at the box office instead of waiting for it to stream at home, moviegoers will keep it as pure as possible for whoever wants to go see it, and not give away the store ahead of time.
