Rooney Mara & Daniel Craig Interview For ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is the first film in Columbia Pictures’ three-picture adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s literary blockbuster The Millennium Trilogy. Directed by David Fincher, the film stars Rooney Mara as the troubled but brilliant computer hacker and investigator Lisbeth Salander, and Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist, investigative journalist and publisher of ’Millenium’ magazine. The film also stars Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgård, Christopher Plummer, Joely Richardson, Steven Berkoff, David Dencik, Yorick van Wageningen, Bengt C.W. Carlsson, Mathilda von Essen and Goran Visnjic. ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is out now in the US, and December 26th in the UK.

This is obviously based on a book that millions and millions of people have read, people have this vision of what these characters are. What did you guys want to do in order to make these characters your own and not what people have imagined them to be?

Rooney Mara: To be honest, I didn’t really think much about what other people imagined it to be, I used what I imagined it to be. I had read all three books and I had a really clear picture of who this girl was. Luckily, David Fincher’s idea was pretty similar, I didn’t really think much about what other people thought of her.

Daniel Craig: Exactly. In this industry, the less you think about what other people are thinking about, the better and more original you can be (laughs). You can’t go into a project thinking. “How will these people like it? How will those people like it?” You want to be single minded about it. You can’t please everybody.

The dynamic between Lisbeth and Mikael, which is obviously a big part of why people love the books and the original movies. It’s not a conventional relationship, there’s a big age difference first of all, but it also seems that because she doesn’t like intimacy, she wouldn’t fall for him, even though she seems to. Can you talk about your take on the relationship, why it happens, and how it revolves the way that it does?

Daniel Craig: I think it has a lot to do with honesty and trust. I think that is what was so great in the books. They shouldn’t have a relationship and they shouldn’t even meet in life. They come from different social classes and whatever. I think that Salander has never really gotten to trust anyone, or there are few people in her life that are straight with her and he is. He comes in and she has broken the law and has hacked into his life. He walks in and says, “Forget that, I think you’re great and I would like to work with you and I’ll walk away.” I think that this appeals to her.

Rooney Mara: I agree. It is that and also I think that he is one of the first people in her life to ever just appreciate her for the way she is. He is one of the first people to ever treat her with any sort of decency or respect.

How was the process of collaborating with David Fincher? Did you guys get together in rehearsal to work out your characters? 

Rooney Mara: We did do a lot of rehearsal, a lot. David and I read through the script a few times with just us together. Then all of us sat around together and went through the scenes with Steve Zaillian and Stellan Skarsgård. We started off shooting in Stockholm with just doing exteriors, it sort of felt like we had 3 months to really rehearse before we went back to L.A. and shot the sort of meat of the movie. So there was quite a lot of rehearsal.

Daniel Craig: Yeah. The more preparation you do and have the better chances you have on the day. Steve Zaillian wrote great words, so it’s there to say. All you’re doing in rehearsal is trying to tweak it and make more sense of it and to make sure that everything ties up and you know where you are when you get to it because we didn’t shoot one thing in sequence. We shot the end of the movie first and then whatever you always do. Then that day on the set we do a lot of takes and you try to make it better.

How was it like shooting those stunts and action scenes as a sort of common man? What was that like for you? Did you get to hold back?

Daniel Craig: The most important thing about this character for me was to make him as real and as believable as possible. Obviously, there is another person that I play that would deal with it in a different way (laughs). It wasn’t like I was ever thinking about that, I wanted to put the reality into this. He gets shot and runs away screaming like anybody else would (laughs). That was really the key and it was dead easy. Just to be sort of by the by, but that is what I love about this character and the relationship he has with Salander. He doesn’t have to prove that he is a man. He is a guy and he doesn’t have to go around beating his chest and he is very happy to fall into this relationship where she is literally wearing the trousers.