Rooney Mara In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
“For a year, I was Lisbeth Salander—I only wore black; I lived her life. Before this movie, I didn’t even have pierced ears. They put four holes in each ear, and my eyebrow and nipple were pierced. The only thing that concerned me was riding the motorcycle. I wasn’t nervous about the anal rape scene, but the motorcycle had me worried.”

001 x Photoshoots – 2012: W Magazine

In a pleated white dress, her jet-black bangs neatly trimmed, Golden Globe nominee Rooney Mara looks nothing like Lisbeth Salander as she relaxes in the drawing room of New York’s Crosby Street Hotel. But it doesn’t take long for the 26-year-old to show the resolve that helped land her the coveted lead role in the U.S. version of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” vaulting over a scrum of top Hollywood actresses. Mara previously was best known for her opening tête-à-tête with Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network.” Now, her multiply-pierced face as the fierce hacker is everywhere. The piercings in her eyebrow and ears are gone now — though she has said one other, seen in a topless teaser poster released earlier this year, is still in place — but there’s plenty of steel still in her even and unflinching gaze.

There’s a debate about whether Lisbeth has Asperger’s syndrome. What do you think?

People ask me, “What did you decide?” As the character, she doesn’t know, so I didn’t make a decision either way. It’s clear from the book that everyone is diagnosing her with that, and on paper it sounds like she does. I went to a school in Sherman Oaks called the Help Group for kids with autism and Asperger’s, just to see. I got to talk to one girl in particularly who was around the same age and who people said reminded them of the character. It was incredible talking to her. When she was done talking to you, she was done. There was no sign of it; I just wasn’t there anymore. I think Lisbeth does that a lot.

One aspect of the story that can be hard to swallow is when Lisbeth decides to sleep with Daniel Craig’s character shortly after she’s been raped. How do you understand her actions?

There’s certainly a lot of discussion about that. People were horrified by the teaser poster, like, “How can you show her in that way? This is a rape victim.” I think Salander is a character who’s incredibly comfortable with her sexuality. Most of the time, it’s on her terms. This horrible thing happens to her, but I think she has a hard time with intimacy, period. Every once in a while, she needs a fix, friction and human contact. That’s why she goes to the club and meets Miriam and ends up in bed with her. When Mikael comes into her life, he’s one of the first people to just appreciate her for her. He’s honest and straightforward, and he does what he says he’s going to do. She sees someone that she can trust in him. It’s on her terms. It’s not like he gets her into bed.

You got pierced in a number of places to play the part. Did going through that painful process teach you anything about Lisbeth?

Not really. The piercings were one afternoon. It hurts for a second, and then it’s over. It didn’t really faze me. I did a lot of kickboxing and, early on, I would make a face that I was in pain. My trainer would say, “Now do it to me, and try and hurt me.” I would try and try and try, and he wouldn’t show anything, and it was so frustrating. He was like, “You’ve never really experienced pain. If you’re someone who is used to that, you don’t show it, because if you show someone that you’re in pain, it gives them a sense of pleasure.”

As I was working with him more and more, he’d be like, “Does this hurt? Am I working you hard enough? Because I can’t tell anymore.” I’ve kept that, not on purpose. I went on a haunted hayride over Halloween, and people would come up and scare me, and I wouldn’t even flinch. My sister and my friends would be, like, “What is wrong with you?” When you’re used to people being abusive, you find a way to turn it off. It’s not like [Lisbeth] was born not asking for help. She tried to go through channels, and no one helped her. After a while, you stop screaming.

David Fincher said your four-day shoot on “The Social Network” involved 2,400 takes, which was a joke, but he is famously meticulous, which is not something every actor warms to. How did you get along?

I love the way Fincher works. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want to work with someone who does two takes. But I really respond to it. We really work well together.

Why is that?

I think we’re very similar in a lot of different ways. We’re both obsessive and perfectionists. We’re both contrarians. Neither of us likes to be controlled. I’m someone who overthinks everything and really needs to investigate every part of something before I’m ready to do it in front of other people, and he really allows for that. That’s the part of me I think is very similar to Salander.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” has already had a profound effect on your career. What effect did shooting the film have on you personally?

I think it’s had quite an effect on me. I’ve grown and changed in a lot of ways. Certainly, I feel much more capable after this year. One of the things that David instilled in me is to not really compromise myself and to always have a choice. It’s hard to be a young actress. People feel a sort of ownership over you. It’s easy to let people walk all over you as a young girl, because you don’t want to be difficult. David never made me feel that way. He was constantly wanting my opinion. Just from getting to work with him, I think I’m going to be less likely to compromise throughout my career.

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‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’: An Interview With Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, and David Fincher

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a movie for outcasts (and everyone else). Louise Roug sat down with Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, and David Fincher to discuss it.

It’s hard not to like Lisbeth Salander.

For one thing, her sense of purpose is admirable.
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“Horrible things happen to her. And she wanders home. And she sits there. She lights a cigarette, and she fumes. And you don’t know what’s going on in her head. The next time you see her, she’s got a Taser and a 30-pound chrome dildo, and she’s got a plan,” says David Fincher, who directed the much-anticipated movie The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. “You don’t need her to say, ‘This is not right what’s happened to me, and I have to make it right.’ You see her at the hardware store, buying tape and zip ties and black ink.”

From its opening credits–a slick but dark montage of bodies that come together only to pull apart, dissolve, or explode–to its final, gloomy scene, this is a movie about intimacy and control reflecting the grim but central idea of Stieg Larsson’s novel: a meeting between two people is invariably a struggle over power. In this universe, most men are monsters. But even those who aren’t end up causing hurt, out of thoughtlessness or neglect.

It’s a bleak depiction of human relationships, which, when done by Fincher, is unapologetically grown-up–and utterly entertaining.

Toward the beginning of the movie, which opens Dec. 20, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), the patriarch of the dysfunctional Vanger dynasty, hires investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to solve the mysterious disappearance of Vanger’s niece from an isolated island in northern Sweden decades ago. Before long, Blomkvist shares both the investigation and his bed with Salander (Rooney Mara), a young computer hacker with a murky past.

While visually stylish in Fincher’s hands—and with a screenplay written by Steven Zaillian, who specializes in literary adaptations and who won an Oscar for Schindler’s List—the movie plays out the messy plot points of the book: ritualistic murders, aging Nazis, sexual assault, and incest. And rather than downplay the book’s most infamous scene–anal rape followed by shocking, yet gratifying, retribution–Fincher has turned it up a notch. The R rating is fully deserved.

“I don’t think I would have been interested in making another thriller if there hadn’t been a commitment to making it for an adult audience,” says Fincher, who spent months with Mara and Craig, living in Sweden as they shot the movie.

When I meet the three of them together recently at the Dorchester Hotel in London, their familial banter and propensity to finish each other’s thoughts suggest just a touch of, well, Stockholm syndrome.

“So many of the decisions to cleave things out of books which are successful have to do with levels of discomfort,” says Fincher. “Are we going to make the audiences uncomfortable? But there is no way to take out the things from the book that makes the audiences uncomfortable—”

“Because then there’s no book, there’s no story,” Craig interjects.

“It all grows from there,” concludes Fincher.

The charisma of the Salander character is ultimately the reason for the extraordinary success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels. Worldwide, the novel has sold more than 65 million copies, making it one of the most popular books of all time. (In the U.S. alone, it has sold 18 million copies, and, last month, Vintage Books shipped more than 1.3 million more copies in anticipation of the movie.)

But Salander is no female action hero in a tight leather outfit. She is an outcast who bends the world to her will—in the novel, Blomkvist wonders to himself whether she has Asperger’s.

As a director, Fincher is an assured chronicler of life outside the norm. Consider, for example, one of his first movies, Fight Club, or even his most recent, The Social Network, which both revolve around people who live without regard for convention or social acceptance.

In person, he is engaging and funny, dominating the conversation but nudging Mara to speak up when she goes quiet. Having worked with her on The Social Network, in which she had a brief but memorable appearance as Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend, it was Fincher who insisted on casting the little-known actress.

For the role of Salander, Mara’s eyebrows were bleached, her hair was cut short and asymmetric, while her eyebrow, ears, and nipple were pierced. Curled up in the corner of the couch on this late afternoon in London, Mara seems younger than her 26 years, perhaps because of her deference to Fincher, which she tries in vain to hide.

She almost sputters when I ask her whether this is a feminist book.

“I think maybe the feminists see it that way,” she says. “I don’t know what Larsson’s intentions were. But I don’t think Salander does anything in the name of any group or cause or belief. She is certainly not a feminist. That’s like . . . that’s just . . . almost . . . ”

“Too easy,” Fincher offers.

“Yeah,” she agrees.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, written by the now-deceased Swedish journalist Larsson, however, does sometimes sound like a feminist tract. Consider for example its original title in Swedish—Men Who Hate Women–or this statistic at the beginning of the book: “18 percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man.”

Larsson’s longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, has said he did identify as a feminist. And last year, Larsson’s close friend Kurdo Baksi wrote a memoir suggesting that the author’s preoccupation with violence against women sprung from guilt, having watched, as a teenager, three friends gang-rape a girl.

Although that girl’s name was Lisbeth, like Larsson’s heroine, Fincher seems unconvinced by motives of atonement or revenge by literary proxy.

“This whole thing may have sprung from a rape that he saw. But it may also be that he, as a guy exploring fascism in all of its political and financial ramifications, said, ‘You know what, people should be mad as hell, and they shouldn’t take it anymore.’”

A committed communist as a young man, Larsson offers a biting critique of speculative capitalism, today a less outré point of view than it must have seemed–even in Sweden–when the novel was published in 2005. Although Fincher has a few surprises for devotees of the book, he is largely faithful to the novel, spending considerable time on Blomkvist’s desire for justice after his public humiliation at the hand of the tycoon Hans-Erik Wennerström, a stand-in for evil capitalists everywhere.

In other words, this is a movie about revenge as an idea–it is not about one avenging woman. Still, Blomkvist isn’t the person fighting the bad guys or driving the action–Salander is.

“She does everything he can’t,” says Craig. “And I think that dynamic is what has made the book so successful–whether that’s Stieg Larsson writing about himself; about his ideal relationship with someone he would love to save, or whether he actually wants to be saved himself.”

“She is Pippi Longstocking,” says Mara, referring to the Swedish children’s book by Astrid Lindgren, which stars a girl who grows up alone in a big house with a horse and a monkey, the envy of every child who has ever read it.

Like Pippi, Salander makes her own rules. She is a ward of the state, but her demeanor is antisocial. Even when it’s not scrawled rudely on her T-shirt, her torn-up clothes, heavy boots, and multiple piercings carry a clear message: stay away.

“The intimacy she enjoys in her life–she picks on her own terms,” says Fincher. “At the end, she’s walking away, going, ‘You fool. Why would you allow yourself to be conventionally miserable—’”

“Which is the punch,” says Craig. “The story is open-ended, and it leaves Salander in a much more powerful position. It’s, ‘Right, well, fuck that, I’m moving on.’”

For better or worse, Salander could become the role that defines Mara, who has already had to deal with the tremendous expectations that come with the movie. (The casting has been compared to that of Gone With the Wind—something she shrugs off. “That’s silly,” she says.) And then there are the unavoidable comparisons to Noomi Rapace who played Salander in the Scandinavian movie version of the book from 2009.

“I saw that performance, but I saw it months before I auditioned for our movie,” says Mara, a tad defensively. “Once I read the books, I never looked back at that performance . . . I had my own idea in my head of who she was. And I think the performances are quite different.”

I offer that Mara’s take makes Salander appear more vulnerable.

“That was certainly one of my goals,” she says. “She is described as an anorexic waif. At the same time, she has this superhuman strength. She looks quite tough. But she’s quite vulnerable. She’s this brilliant hacker and wise beyond her years, and at the same time, she’s emotionally stunted at 12 years old and naive in a lot of ways. She is full of all these contradictions. And we never wanted to make her just this angry and violent person.”

Not surprisingly, Fincher isn’t keen, either, to talk about the other Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

“The question I asked myself is, is there room? Is there another way at this? Are we going to be walking in someone else’s footsteps? And I think–ultimately–in terms of who I saw these people as, there was a lot of room,” Fincher says, quickly adding: “That’s not to take anything away from what’s come before.”

Ultimately, he believes we like Salander for her persistence. “It’s not that she has the ability to lift vast amounts of weight. It’s that she’s indomitable; that you know that she is going to figure out a way.Fincher, for his part, is a famous perfectionist on the set, someone who shoots scenes over and over, and who talks earnestly about giving it his all as a director, staying behind after Craig leaves, to elucidate a point.

“Every single day you spend $250,000,” he says. “Every single day, you have people that you care about, that you’re trying to make as good a movie around as you possibly can. And you want to get everything out of them.”

Outside the hotel, darkness has fallen on the city. In the cheerless park across the street, a Ferris wheel twinkles. Shoppers clutching Christmas presents for loved ones move quickly through the emptying streets.

Fincher gets up to leave.

“Do your best with it,” he says. “Try to make us sound smart.”

Mara, ahead of him, turns in the doorway.

“He’ll probably be disappointed no matter what you do.”

“Ouch,” he says, and leaves the room.”

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Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig leave marks on ‘Dragon Tattoo’

NEW YORK – For Rooney Mara, playing one of modern literature’s most indelible, unorthodox female creations has meant, to some extent, overcoming her inner Lisbeth Salander.

The breakout star of the much-anticipated film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is still mastering the art of garrulousness. As with Salander, none of it comes naturally, or seamlessly, to her.

“I don’t enjoy talking about myself. I’m a quiet person. I like to observe much more than I like to be observed. It’s definitely exhausting and bizarre to have to talk about yourself all the time,” says Mara. “It’s a weird part of the job.”

But one, thanks to the attention being heaped on the film, she can’t avoid. Mara plays solitary, skittish hacker Salander in David Fincher’s film, based on the first of the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Swedish journalist Larsson died in 2004 of a heart attack, and his best sellers were published posthumously; the three books already were turned into Swedish films, which were released in the USA.

Both in the books and in Fincher’s dark thriller, Salander hides a rapacious intelligence, coupled with ferocious loyalty, under a cloak of piercings, tattoos and tatty clothes. In the film, opening Tuesday, she and disgraced investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) search for a missing girl and unearth a serial killer.

During a joint interview in Manhattan, Mara and Craig are a study in contrasts. Mara, 26, is diffident and quiet, almost curled into herself at one end of a sofa. Craig, 43, outspoken and assertive, radiates confidence and decisiveness. On-screen, says Fincher, the two just fit together.

“Blomkvist is very vulnerable. Salander is very vulnerable and trying not to be — even in real life,” says Fincher. “They’re similar actors, in a way. They’re very feline and thoughtful. They were comfortable with one another.”

Director casts ‘a real actor’

Fincher cast Craig first and built the rest of the film about him. He likens his vision of Blomkvist to a rugged heartthrob like Robert Mitchum, with more than a pinch of misplaced bravado. “He shouldn’t be aware of his attractiveness. He should be oblivious to it,” says Fincher of Blomkvist. “I don’t want to say that he preens. But I needed him to be someone who can rebound from ridiculousness. Daniel is a real actor. He’s not an actor who’s transitioning easily into movie stardom. He’s fighting that every step of the way, and I love that about him.”

As Larsson buffs know, Fincher scoured Hollywood to find his Salander, opting to sidestep A-listers in favor of a relative unknown who could hopefully inhabit the very coveted role. He had worked with Mara before, on last year’s The Social Network, yet he needed her to be the opposite of the perky, preppy and very verbal college student who dumped Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in that film. “Lisbeth had to be furtive and untrusting and scarred — the antithesis of what we needed from her (in Network),” says Fincher.

Mara and Craig knew each other only in passing before heading to Sweden and Los Angeles for the nearly year-long shoot. How did they develop their on-screen relationship, which is the foundation of the books? With his typical brevity, Craig sums up that it’s just part of the job.

“There’s no trick to it. You get on with it and do it. Rooney is who she is, so she came there to do the work and make it happen. You realize quite quickly you’re there with a bunch of people who are there to make the best of it. We didn’t specifically work on our relationship. It just worked,” says Craig.

Says Mara: “We rehearsed a lot. We went through the script over and over again and talked through it. It was all on the page. We had three books’ worth of information. It was all there for us, pretty much.”

She didn’t allow herself to be daunted when embodying such a memorable and wholly original woman. It was reported that just about every major actress in Hollywood wanted the part. “Yeah, of course, there’s that kind of pressure. But I couldn’t go into it thinking about that. She felt very real to me. I tried not to think about that too much,” she says.

Interjects Craig sarcastically: “So many scenes were cut. All the comedy you did. The slapstick.”

For both actors, the roles mandated physical transformations. Craig, buff and taut as 007 agent James Bond, stopped working out and ate what he wanted to mimic Blomkvist’s regular-guy physique. “There’s other things I did to prepare, but that’s the one everyone likes to talk about. That’s the nicest thing I got to do,” he says with a smile.

Mara had the more dramatic regimen, going from a fresh-faced brunette to the ultimate street-urchin misfit — courtesy of razors for her hair and bleach for her brows. It didn’t faze her. OK, maybe just a little.

“It was really easy. One afternoon in this hotel, they cut and dyed my hair and shaved parts of it and dyed the eyebrows. We went and got pierced,” says Mara, referring to her nipple piercing, which is still in place. “That part of it was easy. I had to learn to ride the motorcycle and work out non-stop. The dialect and computer training. There’s all that stuff.”

The shoot was long and very, very cold. Not that you’ll catch Craig complaining. “The challenges are really banal. The challenges are: We’ve been working all night, and it’s freezing, and I don’t have time to go get enough sleep. It’s what happens to everyone when they’re working hard,” he says. “I kind of feel like I’m whining, someone who’s moaning because he’s working hard. This is a dream job. The challenge is getting it right.”

Relating to the characters

It helped that both characters resonated with Craig and Mara. He remembers reading the first book and thinking it would make a killer movie. And when playing Blomkvist, who starts off being found guilty of libel, Craig approached him as the anti-Bond, a guy who gets shot at and runs away and who later wanders right into a killer’s trap.

“You always bring a bit of yourself. That’s how you find your way in. I just wanted him to sit as comfortably with me. He’s an idealist. I’d like to think I am an idealist sometimes,” says Craig. “But he’s an idealist with a big ego who (messes) up. I wanted him to be as keen and as realistic and have a strong sense of what is morally right. I love his honesty. He loves women. That’s one of the things I’m quite happy to relate to.”

On the surface, at least, Mara has nothing in common with Salander, an abused ward of the state who is mostly terrified of people. Mara was raised in tony Bedford, N.Y., attended New York University, and is the great-granddaughter of both Pittsburgh Steelers founder Art Rooney Sr. and New York Giants founder Tim Mara. Her older sister, Kate, is an actress as well. Still, she says Salander got under her skin.

“When I read the books, I felt very much in her head, like I understood her. I related to her on a lot of levels, in a bizarre way. We couldn’t have had a more different upbringing. But I think we have a lot of similarities at the core of us,” says Mara. “I can be quite slow to warm and slow to trust people, and certainly more a loner like she is. We both like to investigate something and understand it fully before we’re ready to sort of reveal ourselves to the world. I definitely have that to a fault. I tend to overthink things.”

Fincher describes her as “wise and childlike in odd combinations. She takes a while to read the room. When you meet a cat for the first time, it won’t just jump on your lap. Rooney is very much that. She doesn’t give herself over to situations easily. She’s very thoughtful.”

As for Craig, he can be famously prickly in interviews, particularly if pressed about his wife, Rachel Weisz. They married over the summer, without anyone the wiser, and avoid discussing each other with reporters. Has playing a reporter given Craig more appreciation for the Fourth Estate?

“I’ve never disliked the media. Never. That’s a total misconception. What I dislike isn’t journalism. It has nothing to do with journalism. Journalism is an incredibly vital part of a free and democratic society. I have no problem with it,” he says.

In person, Craig has an acerbic, edgy sense of humor. Mara is warier. The most notably ridiculous question they’ve been asked while promoting the film? That’s a no-brainer.

Craig: “How many tattoos have you got?”

Mara: “Someone asked me if I liked a smoky eye.”

Craig: “I do. I love a smoky eye.”

For both actors, working together on a project of this magnitude is an experience they treasure. So much so that they’ll happily team up again, for something far less highbrow than a full-length Fincher film. “When it’s right, it’s right. I would do a tampon commercial with David,” says Mara.

Craig laughs, then nods his assent. “So would I. In fact, we talked about doing one. We’re doing a tampon commercial.”

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