A former Entertainment Weekly scribe, Gillian Flynn has an EW cover story of her own this week with her novel/adaptation Gone Girl adorning the magazine's front page. Intriguingly, she reveals that the final act of the film will deviate substantially from the book's ending.
The departure was requested by David Fincher, who was chastened by the failure of **The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo **to bottle the book's lightning and felt that he "may have been too beholden to the source material". Clearly there was something in Gone Girl's final throes that the director felt needed a similar jolt of cinematic electricity.
According to Flynn, the changes required a nuts-and-bolts reconstruction job. “There was something thrilling about taking this piece of work that I’d spent about two years painstakingly putting together", she explains, "with all its eight million LEGO pieces and take a hammer to it and bash it apart and reassemble it into a movie". Excitingly, this means that it is now officially impossible to accidentally spoil the film.
The story of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), Gone Girl probes into the darkest recesses of marriage, relationships and lives in a state of drift and discontent. It's got shades of classic noir - urban sophisticates transplanted to the suffocating spaces of the boondocks - and a central mystery that has just become even more mysterious.
If you haven't read it, Gone Girl follows the fate of Amy and Nick when she goes missing on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary. Nick (pictured below) becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance, and he does himself no favours by acting shifty and suspicious. But then her diary reveals that she had a secret inner life and the plot takes another turn. **Gone Girl **gets a US and UK release on October 3.