'Gone Girl' Premiere: Ben Affleck and Cast Discuss Marriage, Moviemaking, and Muscling Up for 'Batman'
The 52nd New York Film Festival kicked off with a star-studded bang of a world premiere last night, as the cast of Gone Girl descended on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In addition to walking the red carpet and greeting throngs of festivalgoers celebrating the NYFF’s opening night, stars Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry joined director David Fincher and Gone Girl author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn at a laugh-filled press conference. Here are some of the highlights from the conference:
Batfleck began during Gone Girl
Affleck landed the role of the Dark Knight in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice around the same time that Gone Girl went before cameras and had to promptly start getting into Bat-shape. So during production Pike watched as her schlubby, puffy onscreen hubby steadily morphed into Gotham’s own Caped Crusader. “Throughout the movie, Ben was becoming Batman. By the time we were in the shower [in one scene], I was with Batman.”
The two stars were like a bad old married couple
In their real lives, Affleck is happily married to Jennifer Garner, while Pike is in a long-term relationship with boyfriend, Robie Uniacke. In the movie, though, they get to play out the worst-case scenario of a marriage. “We really put a marriage under a microscope, from the giddy early days right though to the more toxic stages,” Pike said. “The movie seems to be about intimacy really, and the wonderful things that can go with intimacy and the treachery that can come with intimacy.” Affleck added: “The book asked really hard questions about marriage and relationships. It didn’t want to gloss over the things that we don’t like to look at about others and ourselves. Sometimes you find out ugly things when you ask hard questions.”
Cast members David Clennon, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Rosamund Pike, Ben Affleck, David Fincher, Emily Ratajkowski, and Missi Pyle at Friday night’s ‘Gone Girl’ premiere in New York City.
The director and screenwriter were on the same page
From the moment she sold the Gone Girl film rights, Flynn wanted Fincher to direct the movie almost more than she wanted to write it. “At first, I was like ‘Only I can adapt it. It has to be me, it has to be me.’ And then they said, ‘Okay, it’s you,’ and I was like “‘No, no!’ It seemed like a little too much to take on; [eventually], I realized the important thing was not to be too slavishly devoted to every plotline, but that the script ultimately felt like the book. I was very concerned with keeping the dark heart of it and not turning it into a pure whodunit.”
