Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn reveals her family life is nothing like the book

GONE Girl author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn chats to us about toxic marriages, Ben Affleck’s chin and the lure of dark places. Plus how to spot a psycho spouse.

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in a scene from Gone Girl.

GILLIAN Flynn is flopped on her bed at home in Chicago, recovering from a whirlwind of publicity following the glamorous premiere of Gone Girl at the New York Film Festival at the end of last month.

Suddenly everyone wants to know who she is and if her own marriage is as toxic as the one played out by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in the film based on her blockbuster novel.

As a former journalist, Flynn, 43, appreciates the need to create a positive profile and laughs when Weekend asks her to describe her surroundings and attire so that we, as readers on the other side of the world, can gain some insight into her personality.

“Sure, that’s fun. I will endeavour to tell the truth,” she says. “Let’s see. We just had a baby (Veronica) in August and we have a four-year-old (Flynn), they are downstairs with my husband, so I’m up in the bedroom where it’s a little quieter.

“The bed is unmade because we’ve had a crazy week. The shelves are not filled because we just moved in here before the baby came, so we’re still half unpacked and half packed.

SCROLL DOWN: ARE YOU MARRIED TO A SOCIOPATH?

READ BELOW: HOW TO SPOT A PSYCHO SPOUSE

“And I have on my glasses and really, really unattractive grey pants and an old grey sweatshirt and bright green socks for some reason. And my hair is still incredibly hairsprayed because I was doing some TV stuff in New York yesterday.”

Flynn sounds far too nice and happily domesticated to be the person who penned one of the darkest and most disturbing books about marriage.

Her thriller Gone Girl debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in 2012, rose to No. 1 the following week and has since stayed in bestsellers’ lists around the world and sold more than 8.5 million copies. The recent release of the film adaptation took more than $74 million at the global box office in its opening weekend (including more than $5 million in Australia), which also made it director David Fincher’s biggest ever opening.

A story packed with intrigue and suspense, Gone Girl begins on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary and both the book and the film open with the sinister reflection: “When I think of my wife,” Nick says, “I always think of her head ... You could imagine the skull quite easily. I’d know her head anywhere.”

Nick is the obvious murder suspect when the beautiful Amy goes missing, but as the police and media zero in, the story twists and turns like a writhing poisonous snake.

Flynn assures Weekend she’s happily married to Chicago lawyer Brett Nolan, it’s just that she can’t help trying to figure out the worst-case scenario.

“I’m not naturally a pessimist at all, certainly a little bit cynical, but I had spent time thinking a lot about marriage and why marriages go bad,” she says.

“No one sets out to have a bad marriage but we certainly know so many of them; how does that transformation from a good to a bad to a toxic marriage happen?

“I felt comfortable in my relationship, which is why I think I was able to go to those darker, scarier places.”

Flynn says the protagonists in her first two novels, Dark Places and Sharp Objects, were lonely, isolated and incapable of forming relationships.

“I liked that idea of doing the opposite (in Gone Girl) and creating a mystery where the marriage was at the centre, and you can’t solve the mystery without solving the marriage.”

But writing Gone Girl did mess with her mind: “I’d write some of those toxic scenes and I would realise that at the end of the day I was carrying it upstairs with me and inflicting it on my husband, and thinking, ‘why am I in such a dark, dark mood?’ ” Flynn says. “I learnt very early on to quit work about 15 minutes before I went upstairs to my family and do something cheerful and fun, which usually involved watching cuts from old Hollywood musicals or something.”

Flynn’s love of film stems from her father, a film professor. She wrote about movies for a long time for Entertainment Weekly, and she fought hard for the right to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of the book, a role rarely given to an author.

“I was a big bookworm, but equally important to me were movies, that’s what my father and I did at least once a week, a kind a father-and-daughter date to a movie and then talk about it. I have a lot of respect for film,” she says.

“I was thrilled when Gone Girl was bought to be a film, but especially the day (director) David Fincher came aboard because he’s a filmmaker that I have loved for so many years.”

Fincher, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for previous films The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network, was equally impressed with Flynn.

“Gillian is astutely aware of what it is that she’s doing,” he told Time Out Hong Kong last month.

“At the same time, she’s a popcorn-munching, sitting-in-the-third-row, craning-her-neck movie fan. The fact that she had written this elaborately marbled novel initially gave us all pause: you know, would she be able to slaughter her darlings? But she didn’t just tree-trim — it was a deforestation!”

Fincher and Flynn have now teamed up to hit the small screen with a HBO-produced remake of the British Channel 4 series Utopia.

Flynn says her training as a journalist taught her not to be precious about her words and accept that not all of the novel could fit into her screenplay.

“I was fairly ruthless and pragmatic all the way through,” she says. “I had a bright pink sticky note above my laptop that said, ‘It is a movie’.”

She says the prerelease rumours that she changed the ending in the movie are false.

“One site picked it up and the rumour become bigger — ‘Gillian Flynn says she’s changed the ending.’ I never said that. Obviously it’s not note for note, but it’s still extremely close to the book.”

Flynn was in rehearsal with Affleck, Pike and the other Gone Girl actors for almost a month before shooting began.

“It was a decadent amount of time to be able to have the screenplay finished, but be able to play with it more, tailor it to them. Particularly with Ben. Ben is an incredibly sharp-witted, funny guy. I was using his personality and things that he was throwing out in rehearsals to make certain scenes balance a bit more with Nick and blend in Ben’s personality.”

She even changed the script to accommodate Affleck’s chin. In the film, Amy jokes that Nick has a “villain’s chin” and he covers his chin dimple with two fingers when he wants her to believe he is being sincere.

“That was inspired purely by Ben’s beautiful, handsome chin,” Flynn says. “I thought I have to write a part for that chin, the chin is a star.’’

Flynn says she wanted to be a writer from a young age. She grew up in Kansas City in Missouri in the “wholesome” Midwest, but her journey to dark side of life began with the grisly uncut version of Brothers Grimm.

“I had a definitely very middle-class upbringing. My parents were both teachers. It was a very calm, good way to grow up, which is why I think I can go to those dark places,” she says.

“People either want to look at what is under the rock or they don’t want to and I was the kid who wanted to look under the rock. I wanted to see what the bad thing was. What the worst-case scenario was, why people did bad things, what was behind the drawn curtain. I just had that kind of imagination.”

At secondary school being a novelist sounded too lofty, so she went on to study journalism. She became a film and celebrity reporter at Entertainment Weekly, indulging her penchant for the macabre by writing two novels in her spare time. She received a $70,000 advance for her first two books and they both sold modestly well.

Her first novel, Dark Places, was about the satanic massacre of a family, while the second, Sharp Objects, was about a newspaper journalist returning to her home town to report on a series of brutal murders.

The Midwestern setting has been an important part of creating the feeling of menace and foreboding.

“The Midwest is considered a fairly wholesome place, within the stereotype within the United States,” she says. “It is where the farmland is, it’s where people are good neighbours. But there have also been some incredibly dark murders that have happened that have become famous.”

One of her favourite books is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which details the 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife, and two of their four children.

“What has always interested me is that most people don’t know the Midwest. In a way there is more room to play and write about it than if you were writing about New York; everyone has a sense of what New York is even if they have never been there.

After she lost her job at Entertainment Weekly in 2009 due to budget cuts she started writing Gone Girl.

This time she stayed clear of following the tried and true structure of crime novels, making the detective a secondary character and taking the reader inside the heads of the main suspect and victim.

She received a $150,000 advance from her publisher, who hoped it would do a little bit better than the first two.

But not only did it do better, it became the biggest literary phenomenon of 2012 — if you take the Fifty Shades of Grey series out of the equation.

Flynn is still coming to terms with her success, but clearly it didn’t happen overnight.

“Where I am now is what I always wanted to do with my life, but it was very much baby steps all the way. I never ever thought I’d write a best-selling book.”

In addition to the Gone Girl film, an adaptation of her second novel, Dark Places, starring Charlize Theron, is due to be released next year

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Flynn has been accused of being a misogynist because all her female characters in Gone Girl — from the psychopathic Amy to the needy young mistress Andy and passive-aggressive mother Marybeth — are negative portrayals of women. She says she is frustrated by the idea that women are innately good and nurturing.

“In literature, they can be dismissably bad, but there’s still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish,” she says.

Flynn says people have to remember her books are fiction. In her real life she has strong positive women around her and she loves being a mother herself.

She has a close and loving relationship with her parents and in-laws, who have all gathered around to support her with juggling a new baby and publicity for the book and film.

“I’m very lucky, my husband and I say this all the time, that not only do we like each other as parents, our parents like each other too. My mum and his mum get along like gangbusters, so we’re really lucky that way. I’ve come to learn that it’s not always the case.”

Flynn is looking forward to writing her next novel and readers can expect more emotional dysfunction, brutal killings, foul language and explicit sex.

“I want it to be a big folkloric tale of American murder, that kind of resonates, kind of take one moment of violence and blow it out large,” she says.

But right now she is enjoying being back home with her family, where her son’s favourite book Cat in the Hat is on “high rotation”.

She ends the interview where it started, with a picture of domestic calm and cosiness.

“I better go and start bath time and bed time and all that good stuff,” she says.

 

MOVIE: Gone Girl is now showing.

BOOK: Gone Girl (film tie-in edition), Gillian Flynn, Hachette, rrp $20

 

ARE YOU MARRIED TO A SOCIOPATH?

Could your partner really be a master of manipulation? FRANCESCA HORNAK reveals the warning signs

JUST when fiction’s creepiest couple, Nick and Amy Dunne, had slunk out of our subconscious, they’re back — on the big screen. With the release of Gone Girl the movie, we’re faced again with the book’s central question: could your spouse be a sociopath?

It’s not an unreasonable concern. Experts estimate sociopaths account for 3-4 per cent of males and 1 per cent of females. To put that in context, 1-2 per cent of the population has red hair. Sociopaths do a great job of appearing normal. Not just normal, but so charming that even their psychiatrists talk of feeling “duped”.

Sociopath is a slippery term. It’s used conversationally to describe someone a psychiatrist would probably class as a psychopath — in essence, lacking a conscience. And while we associate the word with serial killers, psychopathy exists on a spectrum of severity, so we all encounter low-level psycho/sociopaths (but ideally not in the conjugal bed).

Kevin Dutton, a research psychologist and author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, encountered his first case study at home, in his father.

“I was second in my class according to a star chart on the classroom wall,” he remembers, “and my mother promised me a Monopoly set if I could get the extra three stars needed to make me top. When I didn’t make it, my dad sneaked in and tampered with the chart. My mum got me the Monopoly set, and he secretly gave me a book of spare sticky stars, saying they might come in handy.”

A confusing message for any child, but typical psychopathic behaviour — cunning, reckless and favouring fun over marital solidarity.

So how can you spot one of these charmers before you fall prey to their master plan? Diagnosed sociopath and author of Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight, M.E. Thomas, has these tips: “Although sociopaths wear a mask of normality, there is usually something a little off about their emotional reactions, particularly to extreme situations — they do not panic in a crisis, they hesitate a little too long to give ‘heartfelt’ condolences when you’re grieving, and they often don’t say things in the ‘right’ emotional way. They’ll go, ‘Oh, by the way, my dad had a heart attack.’ They also typically maintain eye contact longer than is socially appropriate.”

Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard Taylor confirms that psychopaths are rife among us. “The ones who go undetected are the charmers who have more of the unemotional traits. They’re the corporate psychopaths, siphoning money off their firm’s account, having serial affairs, promising the world to their children and then letting them down”.

“At 6ft 4, middle class and plausible, one of X’s many games was extreme car blagging,” Taylor says, describing the typical behaviour of a white-collar psychopath. “He once walked into an Aston Martin showroom wearing a black polo neck and convinced staff he was a Saatchi & Saatchi advertising exec who needed to borrow a car for a photoshoot. That kind of brazenness is pretty high-level psychopathy, but it’s on the same spectrum of conning and manipulative behaviour as sitting in a bar getting everyone to buy you drinks, which would be low-level sociopathy.”

The really bad news, if you’ve had the misfortune to marry a psycho, is there’s not a lot you can do about it.

Encourage them to get professional help and they’ll sleep with their shrink. Take them to the divorce courts and they’ll charm the pants off the judge, leaving you bankrupt. Run away and they’ll come after you to get the last word. Marriage can be a killer.

The Sunday Times

 

HOW TO SPOT A PSYCHO SPOUSE

AFTER seeing a recently bereaved friend, they complain about what bad company the friend has become.

THEY think it’s hilarious to feed the baby Tabasco sauce, to “see its face”.

HAVING aggressively cut up a truck on their cycle to work, they give the driver the finger.

THEY spend the last money in the joint account, destined for school fees, in the Apple store.

THEY casually mention the cat has died in the garden.

CONFRONTED with a spider, instead of the “glass-and-card trick”, they favour a heavy book.

AT parties, you hear them telling new acquaintances about their past as a professional polo player in Argentina.

THEY’RE cagey about their tax return, passwords and bank statements.

THEY take pleasure in sending their assistant emails marked “urgent” on Saturdays.

Originally published as Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn reveals her family life is nothing like the book