Watch David Fincher, Gillian Flynn And The Cast Talk About Making 'Gone Girl'

David Fincher, author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn and the cast of Gone Girl have been all over the place in the past couple weeks to promote the film. They did a big panel at the New York Film Festival, and Fincher just did a Film Indepenent event in LA, and they've done various television press to get word out for the film. Now they've done a session at Cinemax for the "Max Final Cut" and the panel talk offers them the chance to talk seriously about the material and to drop some great anecdotes. There's a very comfortable camaraderie here, which isn't always in evidence in a full-cast interview.

If it doesn't go without saying, this is probably best for those who have at least read the book, and even better, for those who have seen the film.

In three parts, here is about eight minutes of Fincher, Flynn and the cast talking about the film and the process of making it.

Some of the best stuff here is in the third section, where the cast talks about Fincher's famed practice of using many takes, and how it worked for them.

[via Cinemax]

In addition, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth has talked to HitFix about making the film. Cronenweth has a lot of experience with Fincher, having shot Fight Club, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and The Social Network in addition to doing other work with the director. The interview is extensive and very good, but here's the specific material about Gone Girl (total spoilers here):

Gone Girl was, you know — there's a whole bunch of things going on. There's these two nonlinear, parallel journeys of these characters and their demise emotionally, and certainly as a relationship. And then their discovery and coming back to this point of conflict. So that combined with the notion that all this strife, a lot of it is environmental, so you want to make sure that the harmony of their relationship started in New York when they were young writers and everything was going great, and then something happened. They end up in Missouri in the summer, and it's imperative that you feel the heat, the loneliness, the isolation, the change, so color choices at that point — and then as they segue Nick gets accused or starts being the primary suspect, he closes himself off to the world and hides in this big, isolated, impersonal house. And so that sets up this whole thing of this catacomb, this cave he's hiding in, this isolation, and then the loneliness — which also played when they were there together in the flashbacks. It's a sterile — you know, it's a beautiful, huge house that has absolutely no personality and in a way kind of fights the opportunity to have any kind of passion in this relationship, because it's such a cold place to be.

So once he starts spiraling out of control, he wants to hide himself from the paparazzi and he wants to hide himself from the police and journalists, so the notion of pulling down all these windows and creating all this isolation and the shadows and playing with the kind of structure and then letting him relive some of these spaces was fantastic. And then for her, she starts off owning her situation and then quickly it falls apart, and she falls apart. She's thinking that she's going to end it all after she gets her revenge and that changes and things change on the way. So we chose different kinds of palettes for her. We chose different lensing for her to kind of not be as complementary and flattering at this point, because she was actually losing it and gaining weight and choices of wardrobe and makeup. So without, like, extreme choices but subtle choices, there are differences in their journeys visually and optically as well as, you know, anything that takes place in front of the camera.