How Blade Runner Inspired Rooney Mara's Look In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," is not like any role Rooney Mara has played before or since — particularly when it comes to costuming. Lisbeth has facial piercings, disheveled black hair (it changes from a mohawk to a side cut over the movie), shaved eyebrows, and is always dressed in some shade of black. This goth punk fashion sense contrasts with her lithe frame, but she still looks like someone you don't want to mess with. It helps that her face is girlish but not quite innocent — those big eyes and sharp nose meld into a piercing glare that pushes you to look away.
Director David Fincher recruited Mara from her scene-stealing appearance in his last film, "The Social Network." Interviewed for a retrospective on his most famous films in the November 2023 issue of Empire magazine, Fincher called Mara's face "an exquisite thing" and recalled how he photographed it in Lisbeth's most pivotal scene.
Said scene is Lisbeth freeing herself from her sexually abusive guardian Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen). After videotaping one of his assaults, she knocks him out with a taser, binds and gags him, and gives him a taste of his own medicine (delivered as a suppository). Blackmailing him into giving her financial independence, she then ensures he can't hurt anyone else by inking "I am a rapist pig" down his torso — a much less flattering tattoo than her dragon.
Lisbeth dons some extra makeup before exacting her vengeance: black eyeshadow painted along her upper face like a domino mask. According to Fincher, this look was "an homage to Pris," the android, or "replicant," played by Daryl Hannah in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner."
The letterbox stare
In the sci-fi dystopia of "Blade Runner," Pris and the other replicants are escaped slaves trying to extend their preprogrammed expiration date. This makes her and Lisbeth both women in search of liberation, and Fincher was particularly fascinated by Pris's look. Her face is adorned with chalk-white paint, but she has a raccoon-like blueish-black stripe across her eyes and nose ridge. Fincher was quite taken with how this reshaped her face, explaining:
"I thought that was the most amazing shot, when she takes that airbrush and connects the two orbital sockets with this line right through. It's such an interesting thing because we're so used to the nose being the division of a face. This makes you feel like someone's looking through a letterbox. It's scary eyes looking through your letterbox."
Fincher added that "the biggest question" with Mara's casting in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was, "Can she scare us?" So, he gave her that "letterbox stare" to keep his audience focused on Lisbeth's eyes. While torturing Nils, Lisbeth is always shot from a low angle. The purpose is obvious: to convey that she has all the power over him. For most of the scene, the shots are wider; the camera is looking up at Lisbeth as she walks around the room. Fincher had framed one of Mara's audition tapes like this, noting that while most people wind up looking "ghoulish" when shot with a camera looking up from the floor, she was the rare exception.
Once Lisbeth finishes her demands, the camera goes to a close-up of her face; she's ostensibly staring right at Nils but in effect she's looking at the viewer. Ergo, her declaration "I am insane" is all the more effective. Fincher said of the shot, "It's designed to say, 'Look at her face. Do you think she's f***ing around?'"
However, inside her unbroken stare is a visible eye light — Lisbeth Salander is scary, but she's not soulless.