Even with Moneyball and a lot of other things I've done, there's not a clear movie narrative to it. It's more like nonfiction stories, chapters about various aspects of a certain subjects. This is a story. It's actually quite cinematic to begin with, so I think the way I approached it is a little bit different.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS

SPOILER FOR THE MOVIE VERSION OF GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO AHEAD

"I've never done a project based on something as well-known as this." That might sound surprising coming from a screenwriter like Steven Zaillian, whose credits this year alone include an adaptation of the bestseller, and also wrote the screenplays forand. Butis no ordinary book adaptation, based on the Stieg Larsson novel that has sold 65 million copies worldwide, and has already been adapted into a Swedish trilogy of films. And it's not just the popularity that madea very different beast for Zaillain. As he put it:When I talked to Zaillian last month, I wanted to get into the details of how he wrote a fairly faithful adaptation of Larsson's book, while also changing key details and working with David Fincher, the director who has openly said he doesn't care much at all about the mystery element of the story. Zaillian, on the other hand, said the mystery definitely interested him, and "I think that's why we complement each other well." Zaillian had completed a draft of the script before Fincher signed on, but together they had "many , many conversations" to hammer things out, including a focus on stripping the dialogue down to a bare minimum. For more on how Zaillian changed the story-- including a few-- read ahead. The interview won't make much sense to you if you haven't read the book or seen the movie anyway, so pick this up once you've seen, in theaters everywhere now.I've been doing it for a long time, so I think I have a sense of that. When I'm reading a book for the first time I'm trying to see the movie as a whole, and I'm trying to cut things as I go through it for the first time. I twas tricky with the family, because it's a big family, we want enough suspects in the thing so there's a little bit of mystery of who the bad guy is. So we worked on that quite a bit.Well I knew that I wanted a scene with [Blomkvist] at the end when he had to go into this guy's house [Harald Vanger] and ask for something, so the idea of knowing enough about that character, being this reclusive Nazi, was really there in order to set up that last scene. To have him come in and see these photographs and try to have a normal conversation with this guy.Yeah, but again, you can't only focus on that. You need to have enough alternative suspects, so to speak. I think we actually trimmed out quite a lot of that, but at the end of the day you keep what you need and not what you want. Cecilia, if you read the book, has a much bigger part. If you ask me it's not much of a role. She sleeps with [Blomkvist] and has fights with him, they break up, they get together. To me that was an easy lift.Yeah, it's crazy. It just doesn't seem right. That's funny for me to say, it worked great in the book, but I didn't think it was going to work in the movie.Yeah, it does shift back and forth, the point of view. And it has to be balanced. If you look at the first half of the book, because they don't meet for the first half of the book, just like the movie, I would say that there's probably 70-30 in his favor, if you counted up the pages it's probably his story, and I knew that couldn't be. I knew we had to share the story 50-50 until they met. So more of his stuff came out than hers. All of her stuff stayed. There's certainly nothing that came out.I'm going to put her in the second one.It was very tricky, because there is going to be a second one and a third one, and how much of the back story to dole out. We didn't feel it was really important in this one to know anything about her mother or father or anything. There was a lot of talk about "Do we reveal anything about why she was locked up from the time she was 12?" There's that little scene in the movie where they're in bed, when she explains what happens with her father, and it's almost thrown away-- they could be talking about the weather. And that's it, we're done with that.I really feel that people need to know all the information they need by the end of the story, not by the beginning. I know that sooner or later Mikael is going to say, "So, why do you have a guardian? Why are you a ward of the state?" It will get answered. And that's something that I have been conscious of, when I do this, of not putting a bunch of back story into a film before we need it. Bring it out when we need it. Everybody doesn't have to know everything about a character when we meet them, they just have to know everything when it's over.No. I don't even think they reveal as much as we did in the first one. I don't think she ever says in the first one what happened [when she attacked her father]. So we brought that up from the second one. And then there's all kinds of flashbacks and things in the second book, getting specific. And I'm sure if we do the second one it will get more specific.You don't have to keep him, by the way. I like keeping him, but you don't have to.Oh yeah, but what you don't need necessarily is the payoff to that story, all of that [with Lisbeth stealing the money]. I like that and we chose to do that. It's nice at the beginning because it puts [Blomkvist] in a kind of situation that will lead to him saying yes to taking this assignment, and it's nice to start a character off who has just been humiliated. We felt that the Wennerstorm character represented a financial villain that was worth dealing with, just like all the other villains in the story. The guardian, the killer, and here's a killer of a different kind.Yeah, I felt the same way you did reading the book, and everyone I've talked to felt that way-- "Come on, 100 pages!" It was a very easy fix. You realize all you need is to see him come out of a courtroom then have a thing on the TV saying "This is what happened" and you're done.Because it was showing her dealing with something just like she dealt with her guardian. This idea, it's an important line where she says "What's going to happen to him?" In my mind, she's doing it for him. This guy's not going to pay, he's not going to jail. The idea was she wasn't doing all of that to fatten her bank account, she was doing it to make this guy pay for what he did to this guy that she likes.The specific thing about Armansky, I thought that was an odd way in. I like Armansky as a character, but I didn't want any of that he's vaguely attracted to her or all that. I didn't want every character to be that way. I liked the Armansky character a whole lot, but he's certainly not the way into her story. She's the way into her story.I'm always a little reluctant to talk about it because it's one of the few surprises there are for people who read the book. I felt that this character had been described by Henrik Vanger and other people as really bright, and that they could see her running the company some day. I didn't want to see that person running a sheep farm in Australia. I wanted to see her as an investment banker somewhere else. That's what she would grow up to be. She wouldn't grow up to be a cowgirl.Oh yeah. And then the idea that, I thought would be fun, and even for those people that are familiar with the book, that [Blomkvist has] actually met her before. You get to have at least one surprise.