On 'Gone Girl,' Reese Witherspoon and the Perfect Nick: 3 Questions for Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl has spent the summer doing to book clubs what Amy Dunne does to Nick: dividing them against themselves. With the Fox/Witherspoon deal fresh, we put three questions to the author.

On adapting it herself: 'I spent years as a critic watching adaptations lose the thing that made the book work. In this case the thing is structure — the his/hers whiplash. If someone's going to break it, it should be me.' On Witherspoon producing: 'She read it fast and got it completely — Amy is a performance of the perfect wife, and Reese knows exactly what that performance costs.'

On the perfect Nick: Flynn wants 'a golden retriever you slowly stop trusting' — an actor whose likability can curdle on camera. 'The reader has to want to defend him and doubt him in the same paragraph. Casting that is the whole movie.'

Update: the golden-retriever brief went to Ben Affleck, whose press-conference smile became the film's scariest special effect; Flynn's own screenplay made the structure sing for David Fincher. The results — and the novel that started the argument — are cataloged here.