Original subtitles

Hi. Hello. I'm Fede Alvarez.

I'm the director and one of the writers of this film.

Next to me is Mr Jay Basu.

- Hi there. - My co-writer.

Hello, everyone.

We wrote the movie together,

but also, we kind of started from a draft that Steven Knight wrote.

Yeah.

So, we took kind of the bones of his adaptation from the book,

The Girl in the Spider's Web...

and we kind of adapted that script into a more cinematic experience

that we thought the movie should be, compared with the book, right?

Yeah, I think that's a fair way of putting it.

And we wrote it, kind of, over... Probably around two months, I think.

- Well, a lot more than that. - No, no, no. I mean the first draft.

Oh, my God, yes.

- Then it was many, many drafts after that. - It was a year of work. Yeah.

Yeah, it was pretty quick.

I remember like, we worked together on the story level,

what the movie was going to be about

and basic themes and the structure and then...

and then you kind of went away and did the first part...

I went away and feverishly wrote the first part.

Well, it was done in two seconds.

Yeah, and I was kind of...

Day and night I was living and breathing Lisbeth Salander.

So, what I love about this beginning,

which we'll find through it,

is as a way to see the movie, at least for me,

a little bit like a fairy tale.

So it does start with this image which is clearly, kind of,

"Once upon a time there were two sisters."

And like we're gonna see, they had an evil father, very powerful.

Almost like a powerful king.

Right? And one of them ran away and the other one stayed.

And that, kind of...

You know, it's kind of those unconscious things we did, I think.

But we never talk about this, write it in, that it was some sort of a...

- Fairy tale? - Fairy tale, really.

Because it has this structure all added,

starting, kind of, in a magic place.

Then going, after this opening scene, we go back to the city

and then go back to the mundane, like usually a fairy tale will do.

And then eventually, end up back in this same place,

running in the woods, and the snow,

- chasing the lady dressed in red. - That's true, yeah.

And the ending, as we'll see, has a kind of fairy tale...

I always thought, visually, has a fairy tale kind of language.

And it has the moral of the story at the end, that you'll find.

I mean, it takes me to the Grimm stories, right?

- To the Grimm Brothers' stories, like... - It is.

It's like a dark, Scandinavian fairy tale.

I mean, we always knew that we wanted this story to come down

to this quite, almost mythical tale of two sisters.

Yeah.

And, it's really that idea of two princesses and a king, right?

Yeah.

And how...

How much he means to them and how powerful he is.

He can do whatever he wants.

We took care to never really say what he's gonna do there

and never really show it.

And we will leave it to the audience

to obviously imagine the worst possible scenario, but...

And like, how we just hinted at the bag in the bed...

- There's the bag. - Yeah.

Which eventually will be the same bag that, for people who have seen the movie...

I'm sure, when you watch the movie

with the commentary, you've seen the movie already.

It's fine to spoil the whole thing.

At the end, when Lisbeth is inside the bag,

that's the same bag that we just saw there, on the bed.

And the same creepy vacuum cleaner.

Spoiler alert.

This actor's amazing.

You know, he used to have a lot more dialogue, remember, like...

- Yeah. - He had all these big lines.

Well, he's the sort of Marlon Brando of Sweden.

- He's the Marlon Brando of Sweden. - He is an amazing actor.

And we gave him a whole monologue. Mikael Persbrandt.

And he... I remember on the day he was like,

"Do you want me to say all the things?

They're gonna get cut out, but I can say them."

He was so right.

I was like, "I don't think they'll get cut out."

- That's the voice of experience there. - Yeah.

So here you go.

Also this opening sequence period like, "Once upon a time..."

- You know like, story-telling time. - Yeah.

And this is...

And this was always our idea in the script,

to have a title sequence that would kind of...

gives the sense of Lisbeth's story.

And it gives my composer, Roque Bafios, the chance to really show some flair.

- Yeah, to do his Hitchcock. - Yeah.

His Bernard Herrmann strings.

- It's a fantastic theme. - It is, really.

Like magical and big, but again, really to that fairy tale story, again

I think it's telling me, "This is not the real world.

This is a fantasy land."

And everything will be a symbol of something like that rebirth of Lisbeth.

I mean the whole intention of this,

was to really tell what happened to that little girl

between that opening scene and next scene and it's very abstract,

but after watching it a couple times, you'll see that

she runs away from the house, she ends up living in some home,

she finds technology there.

Through technology, she's transformed.

- And there's this history of violence. - Violence and abuse.

She's reborn into this dragon right on her.

You know, the struggles of her youth give her the strength

to become the character that we're about to meet in this scene.

This is one of my... It's my favourite shot in the movie, I think.

You know, one of the things that you cannot really plan too much for...

We designed it on the day, with Pedro Luque, my DP.

You found that amazing location, right? That apartment.

This is actually on top of a bunker in Berlin.

- Bunker, yeah. - Yeah.

Some guys had this apartment and they would let us in just one day

to be there and shoot it and then never let us in again.

They didn't care how much money we paid them,

they would never let us back in.

They really took good care of the place.

Something also very interesting, from a script level,

I realized about the scene is

we open the movie with a character doing exactly what the hero will have to do.

If you think about it like this,

journey of Lisbeth will be one of atonement and redemption

and having to apologize for her sins.

And this guy, which is completely a bad guy in this movie,

he's doing it right off the bat. He's saying,

- "I'm sorry for the things I said." - That's true.

But it's empty. He hasn't earned it yet.

It's empty, but he's able to go and say,

"Maybe I was... You know I feel a little insecure sometimes."

Like, he's really in touch with his inner feelings.

And doing what the hero is not able to do.

And won't be able to do for the majority of the movie.

I thought it was those things that...

Again, we didn't really discuss it writing it, but it's clearly there.

That's interesting.

We open the movie with the thematic theme of guilt

and the only way to redeem from guilt by just atonement and apologizing and...

And trying to do right by the person you hurt.

But the person he hurt is like, "Wait, there's no way to undo that."

And he's offering her a drink on the floor,

trying to undo that damage by doing something...

He can never undo.

That's exactly what the third act in the end of the movie will be.

I just thought that was fascinating, like, watching and analysing it.

- How... - It's true, yeah...

I mean it's true, very true that we always

wanted, at some level, this film to be about guilt and shame

and the inability to face up to it.

Yeah, which makes Lisbeth

such a complex character in this one, I think, for me.

I mean, it's not... We didn't lean on the...

just violence of men against her,

yet the story is about that in a way

because it's what unites the two sisters at the end, right?

Their common ground is that they've both been victims...

of this man, this powerful king, right?

Which is represented by the father.

This was...

I think this is the first day I saw Claire on set.

This was very early, right?

- This was one of the first days. - Yeah, yeah.

Of make-up and full gear, full Lisbeth Salander gear.

It's always great because as a director, that's why you make these films.

When you go into a world that has been explored in the past before you do it...

to meet this character, to just be in that world with them

and get to know them personally.

It's the closest thing you'll ever get

to meet these, like, icons from literature or film

is when you're there and you do your own version of them.

Way more than if you just, you know, bump into Christian Bale on the street

and go, "I met Batman."

This is not that.

Here it's like you're actually with the character in the scene,

you know, really close, right behind the camera.

It was really thrilling

- to get to see her like that. - And there was a feeling

that she was gonna be amazing.

That she was gonna inhabit Lisbeth.

- Yeah. - I remember everyone feeling it.

A little bit of trivia, by the way, on that previous scene.

The security code that Peter Ahlgren's wife gives Lisbeth is

- my daughter's birthday. - I know. I know.

I think We did that

- in more than one script. - 5-1-9-1-2.

That number is doing the rounds.

That's a rather macabre kind of ode to my eldest daughter. There you go.

When she's able to watch this movie someday,

she's gonna be, like, "What the hell, Dad?"

So all that we just saw was actually Stockholm.

All that, we shot

a lot of this movie in Berlin, on stage, in Babelsberg.

But all the exteriors you see, most of them are actually Stockholm.

And aerial photography done, ALEXA 65, like, this big format from helicopters,

it was one of the things that was beautiful to see on the big screen.

This is her apartment, that's Berlin. This is actually Berlin, as well.

It's actually where the techno music was born.

- Like this club with... - What's it called, The Kitty Cat?

- No, this is Tresor, in Berlin. - Tresor, that's right.

But this...

Actually this place she's walking in is where the first...

gigs of techno music in the world, when techno was being born, started.

It's, like, in this place. It's literally that place.

The owner was, you know... The late '70s or early '80s,

where really the techno started kicking in, was where it all started.

Yeah.

We thought it was cool to take Lisbeth down there.

We thought it was cool to take Lisbeth down there.

These are not there, those lifts.

- Those were added. - They look like they're there, for sure.

They look like they're there.

Even people in Stockholm thought that we put them there for the movie.

But, no. They're VFX.

We did build the big version of it.

We'll talk about that when we get to that scene,

where Blomkvist finds Lisbeth for the first time.

Yeah, that was Pal Sverre Hagen.

It's like this fantastic Scandinavian actor.

And I was so excited to work with him

and he had a lot more in the movie.

And then eventually, you know how these things happen.

You start cutting stuff out of the B plot, and he got cut out of the movie, almost.

But it's kind of a luxury that we have him there,

you get to see a glimpse of him.

- The guy with the hat... - Playing Levin.

Yeah, playing Levin, the guy that bought the magazine.

- He had a bit more... A bigger role... - He had a sub-plot.

Than that and he just ended up on the floor.

Yeah, we had a sort of sub-plot

where Levin was kind of trying to push Blomkvist into writing again

- and writing about Lisbeth. - Yeah, yeah.

Again, some of those Scandinavian things that we were most struggling with like,

how are we gonna present her, like, being married

and having an affair with him?

Is the American audience gonna be happy with that?

And that's in the movie.

And the audience always being very upset about the fact

that she was cheating on her husband...

They were like very judgemental.

But of course, a big part of the books and part of the...

Yeah, of course, it's in the DNA of the story. It is great.

And it makes you feel like

in Sweden it's okay. You can have a lover and a wife.

And people are cool with that.

No problem whatsoever. It's part of the society structure, which it's not,

but let's give them the stories that make you believe it is.

And here's Lisbeth with her current girlfriend.

- Andreja Pejic. - Andreja.

I mean, she's fantastic.

This is her first role, really her first movie role.

And she's a model. Her story's fantastic, really.

She was born a man,

then modelling women's clothes as a man.

And that was the whole thing.

And then eventually she went through a whole transformation.

And it was pretty amazing, and she was so cool to work with

and just fantastic.

It's really mind-blowing.

Someone that had so little experience in film...

How good she is in the film.

Particularly in that next scene, when she is in the bathroom with Lakeith Stanfield.

I felt like she really owned the scene.

- She's also seven feet tall. - Yeah, she is.

Intimidatingly tall, amazing, wonderful person.

Yeah.

Here again, I think we have many versions of this scene that we cut, I think.

There was... I think this is what ended up in the film. It was the longest.

It was all about...

The biggest challenge with the story was

how much are we gonna connect with other movies, the other stories?

How much backstory we need to give?

How much is too much and...

- and all that was always the challenge. - That was...

the big balancing act of this movie.

How much backstory do we need to put in?

The balance, the kind of tricky balance between making a sequel on the one hand

and starting again on the other hand.

It was always the tricky part of this movie.

I think it works here.

I think we did a short reference to the family, to the father.

She said, "I'm glad they're both dead."

And for people that have seen the Swedish movies

or read the first three books,

they will know that by the second, third book, really,

they tell the story of how Lisbeth re-encountered her father.

The father tried to kill her

and, eventually, they believe that Lisbeth killed him,

but it was actually SAPO that went in and murdered her father

at the beginning of the third book, I believe.

And she's been blamed for that crime, right? So...

There's a big story.

If you haven't seen those or read those books,

I encourage you to go there and discover more of that.

Of what has just been referenced there.

The fact that she's glad they're both dead

because she believes Camilla's dead

and she definitely knows for a fact that the father is dead.

Really, that was technically, kind of...

We can... Heading to the end of first act, in a way,

we can establish what's gonna get her new story going, right?

Yeah, this is where Lisbeth's mission kind of begins.

This is a stage? No, this is not a stage.

We actually built this screen room on, actually, a gallery,

art gallery, in Berlin and...

I remember, we changed this location many times.

Remember the original was gonna be a peep show?

That's right, yes.

And then we thought, "It's kind of wrong that the kid's gonna be at the peep show."

Yeah, we couldn't find a way to make the peep show work.

But I like this because it uses the...

You used the iconography of flames and fire

and that's a big part, of course, of...

You know, for the people who know the books.

- That's a big part of Lisbeth's story. - Yeah.

We shot that. It is actually it's a tyre.

It's a rubber tyre, like shot from underneath.

We actually shot that ourselves with fire. Just, like, set on fire

- in some sound stage. - Very cool.

Here's Holtser.

That again, this kind of intrigue of old kind of spy movies.

I think both of us, we got excited about that idea of the spy outside.

That is, who knows how long they've been following her?

Of him? You don't know though that at this point

who have they been following.

But they know she's gonna go after the thing.

And we know as an audience, we get ahead of the character now,

and I always love that, when the audience has more information than the character.

And you're just begging the character not to do what they're about to do,

because you know that they all mean trouble.

And in a very subtle way. You just know that some people were parked out there.

Build suspense.

- It's Hitchcock's bomb under the table. - Exactly.

Well, this again. This is something that I'm happy the way we did this scene.

Here she's actively hacking the NSA. And most people don't notice that.

That green screen on the left, if you look at it,

that's her hacking it because that's actually how you would do it.

Most movies would have her typing away, like a maniac on the...

Trying to fight someone trying to fight her off. And that's not reality.

Reality is that there's a software that will do it.

There's a pentesting or there's different kinds of software

that would just, like, keep trying to get in.

And that's what she's doing.

So, then, as she's doing that,

she's finding out what is the thing that she's actually gonna steal

by just investigating Balder's old lectures.

That's what you're seeing there.

Here, of course, suddenly, out of the blue, we just cut to the NSA.

And we're gonna meet one of, obviously, everyone's favourite character, Ed Needham.

- Ed Needham, Lakeith Stanfield. - Yeah, he's just brilliant.

- And he's comfortable... - Different from everything he's played.

He's so good.

We were always debating, "Can we pull off a character

who kind of presents as a nerdy guy, but then will end the movie,

spoiler alert, firing a giant gun?"

And I think Lakeith just pulls it off so well.

You really buy everything he...

He's really good at doing anything he does in this movie.

So you don't question for a second that he's actually good at that.

He's wearing a corduroy jacket,

- but he's also a crack shot. - But it's actually based on reality.

A lot of this world is changing when it comes to the NSA and CIA and...

Yeah, we were very interested

in the ways in which the analysts have become field operatives.

Talk about your amazing one-er. Look at this.

Yeah this... I'm really proud of this shot as well.

It's like... It's actually split in four.

I think it's four or five shots.

Originally, it wasn't gonna cut here. We ended up cutting to her.

I think after some tests,

where we thought people might not know that it's her doing it.

So we went back to her and cut the shot there.

But it used to be the full-on shot. What's interesting about it was that,

it's the shot that starts on a crane, then moves to Steadicam,

then goes back to the crane

because Steadicam cannot fly as high as it does when we present the place.

And then end up hand-held here.

It's like, when you watch it the first time,

you're like, "How does the camera manage to change all those...

From format to format?"

Of course there are hidden cuts here and there.

I'm really proud of how we tell the story of the hack in that one beautiful shot.

Here you find out obviously that Firefall has been moved.

People don't know what Firefall is at this point,

but just based on this guy's reaction, you just know

that it's definitely not nothing that he will happily let go.

Her doing her hacker thing.

Which is kind of silly, but at the same time...

It always gets a laugh.

Yeah, it gets a laugh out of the audience.

I think it's good that it makes it more personal.

Like, right away he's not just fighting some unknown hackers.

He's fighting someone that is telling him,

- "You cannot get me, you won't get me." - Yeah, someone with a personality.

She's definitely, you know, kind of challenging him, in a way.

Yeah.

- The sense of rivalry almost. - Yeah. There you go.

He just knows there's four miles radius.

Like, he doesn't know where she is.

And four miles in something like Stockholm is basically the whole city.

So it's, like, a huge place to try to find her.

But he's gonna go on his own.

There was a lot more story also why he goes on his own.

There was just only so much we could get into a two-hour cut of this movie.

But, there was a lot more. Right? We had a lot more ideas...

Yeah, I mean, there was always...

I mean, exposition is always one of the big challenges

in a film like this.

We always... In the end erred on the side of, you know,

the least we can say, the better, you know.

The more streamlined we can make it... I love what Claire does in this scene,

by the way. I love her reactions...

and her kind of, there's a kind of cheekiness to her

and a mischievousness, I think, in her face

before she opens Firefall, that I always loved.

Yeah. She knows that she shouldn't be doing this.

She knows she shouldn't be doing it.

She's tempted and she really wants to know what this thing does.

And in the end, like Balder said it on the video, he's like,

"You'll have God's power at your hand with this programme."

- And Claire always can express so much. - Yeah.

In her eyes.

There's a connection, too, from the script point of view.

As soon as you get into the mystery of the computer,

we just refresh the audience's memory about the sister and...

She finds a photo that her girlfriend left there on the floor.

She rips it off and then...

Yeah, that moment. I love that image, too. Their both faces make one.

And that is another half of her.

And I think the audience sees that,

and they know she'll have to deal with that. Then cut to the truck.

I think we tried to really plan every...

And here to tell the audience...

And I think the audience knows that she'll be back, right?

- The sister will be back. - The sister will be back.

And it's snowing outside. And I don't know how much people realize this,

when they cut to this, like,

that it's later that day or that night or it's actually a nightmare.

I felt great making this, this scene.

I really felt like I was back in the... Doing horror.

- Yeah. - It felt really good.

It was like, "Okay, good, on this scene I can just go full-on horror language

and light and that pace

and those push, those slow moves that Don't Breathe and Evil Dead

that were just, the whole movie were made out of this language.

I think the snow is a fairy tale.

- It brings back the fairy tale... - Absolutely.

Kind of aspect that we'll have at the end, too.

And this is a bag again.

That shirt... Actually, I'm not gonna say where it's from.

I'll let people try and find out.

But it's from a classic movie from the '80s.

Is it? I don't even know.

- You'll have to tell me later. - I've been waiting for people to realize

and find out what it is. No one has yet.

- Oh, really? - Yeah.

It's from a classic character from a classic movie from the '80s

that we had to clear, and there was all this mess.

There we go. Here comes the action in the movie. Boom.

(Rae's Bang.

Claes Bang, a great actor.

Also, he was in The Square movie.

I think few people realize that it's the same guy because he looks...

Completely different. Yeah.

This scene is also like... It has a lot of things that I love as a director.

Like, the crudeness, the way we did it where everything is real.

The muzzle flashes are real.

Like, no one does that any more these days.

Like, really actual muzzle flashes that are so loud

and it slows you down today.

And real squibs on the wall that blow up the wall

and they have to reset the wall.

You know those holes in the wall?

We actually blow them up instead of doing

- CG shots like everybody does. - Amazing.

And the fire,

I remember you insisted on shooting real fire, which is...

Which you can really feel in the film.

Yeah, we're coming up here for the big explosion in the film.

And again, you'll see, getting to have an explosion like...

It's shot also in a very, kind of unique way.

It's just the fact that the camera move during the explosion... because usually

when you do something like that, there can be no one on set,

so you cannot operate the cameras and complex equipment cannot be there.

So, we devised this system with pulleys and ropes to get this effect.

Just to get the camera to travel left to right, there and there.

That's why that makes that shot of her jumping in the bathtub so special.

I think it's because the camera is actually travelling

with a big explosion in the back, which they rarely do.

- See, and that's real fire. - Real flames.

You know, if she came out,

she would get burned, it was so hot out there.

It was this, like, massive fire.

That's a real fire that we're blowing right above her head.

It was insane. That's Stockholm as well.

And the practical effects crew...

I'm gonna blank on his name who ran the crew,

but also did Blade Runner and so on.

- Yeah, they were amazing. - They were amazing.

Yeah.

We really tried to do everything practical here.

There were very, very few CG elements.

Here, on the script level here, another one of those things...

I think we love to do.

The audience sometimes gets it or doesn't, but I think it's good that it's a mystery.

Like, you know, you out to Balder realizing she's not showing up.

He makes a phone call to someone, we don't know who that is.

And I always prefer the audience to just lean forward and go like,

"Okay, what was that? What was that call? Who did he call?"

And we'll find out, obviously, after this scene is done,

who Balder called and why did he say, "I think I made a terrible mistake."

All real, like real fire around,

bad smoke to inhale.

All, like situations that...

That I think it makes me happy on set when things are messy that way.

- Helps with Claire's performance. - Definitely. I mean,

she didn't want to stay there an extra minute.

She's really trying to get out of there.

- There's the lizard. - Oh, yeah, the lizard.

That shows you that she has a good heart, saving that little lizard.

It's actually a bearded dragon, right? That's what we put in the script.

It is a bearded dragon, yes. It is a dragon.

I don't know if technically the one we got was a bearded dragon.

But it might have been. I think it was.

It was on the page.

- Let's put it that way. - It was on the page, yeah.

And here's the ice.

Yeah, every shot you see here of the ice... This is CG ice, which is pretty well done.

- Yeah the ice is not there, which is... - Yeah.

Quite incredible.

All this is Stockholm.

This is actually our last...

This is our last week of shooting, actually.

Stockholm, Sweden. We...

I think Claire doing

a lot of this. Not her riding the bike, but we had this rig.

That's Claire right there.

She's moving this rig like, at a very fast speed among the cars.

She's being towed by this other car.

And this rig, called a Bickers rig,

which can have an actor on the bike doing the movements

and the banking, left and right...

but it's really operated from a car.

And do you wanna talk about how you shot that?

Because the stunt rider actually went into the water.

That's the only way to do it. We needed to get her to jump off the pier,

and we decided, "Let's just get the actor to jump in the water." And that's it.

The stunt double did it twice.

It was one of those situations where

if she had stayed an extra minute in the water, she would die. Literally.

- The things the stunt people do... - The stunt team was...

just for the audience is amazing.

- Intrepid. They're amazing. - Yeah.

Years from now, my memory is gonna tell me that...

I'm gonna believe that it was actually frozen,

because I think it looks so good.

- Like there's no way... - It does. I don't think anyone...

- Yeah. - Would imagine that...

Yeah, that it's not actually a frozen lake.

Which is technically impossible for such a wide river.

- Right. - Looks like a lake there.

That's why I think we get away with it,

but we had to stop for the cruise.

But we had to stop for the cruise.

Every other minute we had to stop for a little while

and wait for the big cruise to go through that river.

- Really? That's funny. - Yeah.

They're popping the pills.

Another good script detail there that we tried to keep alive.

- That office is also added in post. - Yeah, the office on the left.

Yeah, that sort of, desk, and so on was a CG element.

Stephen Merchant, he's great in this movie, because

he always cracked me up so much and he's so different here

and so sombre and dark and...

- Haunted. Haunted eyes. - And haunted. Totally haunted.

- But he just makes me laugh. - Yeah.

When I think about Stephen Merchant, he's so great.

Yeah, but in this, I think here, he really...

- No, he sells the pain... - He really embodies this kind of...

I can see him being happy as a nerd, like, really creating that software,

and now he realizes he'd done something bad.

Do you remember when we were casting Balder,

Stephen Merchant just did such a great read

that we couldn't think of anyone else.

- Yes. - It had to be him. He was just...

He was really good.

- So here... - Here is Sverrir.

Yeah.

Sverrir Gudnason,

I think does a great job as this young-looking Blomkvist.

He's not actually not that young.

I mean, he's the same age that Daniel Craig was

when he played Blomkvist.

He just happens to look just more youthful, I guess.

But it's a beautiful moment here. Like, I remember, we were at the office

and I went to the board and I did a little drawing...

- You sketched out this scene... - I sketched out...

when we were writing the script, working on the script.

Originally it was different. It was two elevators next to each other, remember?

And she would've stopped next to him.

- Was it? - Yeah.

And then when we scouted this location in the centre of Stockholm,

we decided, "Okay we're gonna put the elevators there

and it's gonna be like they look at each other across the street."

That's a stage. We actually built a massive version of that same building.

Every time you see it on the other side of the street, it's the same building.

We just built one and we put the actors on one side and then crossed

and did the other actor on the same side.

But I even fool myself now, when I look at it, that

all that wall, all that building, it's actually indoors.

It was very impressive, that stage that you built.

Yeah, it really fools you.

And again, this is...

Another big challenge in the story was

how to tell the audience how these two know each other

and have such a history between them,

but without making the new audience feel like they've missed something.

I think both of them did a great job and in particular, Claire, on that look.

- The way she looks at him. - Yeah, Claire does so much

- with very little. - Yeah.

She can convey so much.

And she's looking at him from across the street, right?

But it's so intimate, the scene.

Well, we always loved the idea that they were divided by glass.

There's something dividing them still, but there's an intimacy and...

Hopefully, that's what we worked through in their arc, as well. That there...

There's something dividing them that they have to resolve.

You can see there's something she doesn't want to talk about.

- Eventually, it's gonna come back. - Exactly.

Lakeith arrives to Stockholm.

This is actually Berlin.

That airport out there has been used in a lot of movies.

I think in Avengers, the second Avengers.

- Or no, it's Civil War Avengers. - That's right.

The, like, massive fight among all the Avengers

was right outside that same airport. Inside and right outside that window.

And here, we finally meet Grane.

Is that an American euphemism for "no accountability"?

You know, this set also is eventually where,

where he's gonna get... When he's gonna get deported,

he's gonna be there in the back in that glass cell that you see there.

I like those... you see those details on a second view.

That this is the room he's gonna end up in.

Not this same room, but right next door to this room

is where he's gonna be locked eventually by her.

And you can even see the guard that is gonna chase him eventually.

- You can? - Yeah.

The guard is gonna chase Lakeith eventually in the movie,

played my dear friend Christian Zagia,

who has been my actor in shorts since we were kids.

- He's that guy walking there. - I never noticed him.

- He goes from left to right, there. - There he is.

He's the one that's gonna give chase.

He's the one that finds the pink bag, and eventually,

the one that chases Lakeith in the airport.

Activities not listed in that book,

I'll have you arrested and put on the first plane back to Washington.

An amazing actress. An amazing actress, as well, from Scandinavia.

She was in Headhunters, that great movie.

- Synnmve? - Yeah. Synnave was amazing.

Here, of course, Lakeith, like any good American character,

- doesn't care about any authority... - Go straight to the guns.

After he's been threatened by the Swedish government,

and them saying, "Just be a tourist," he goes like, "Yeah, sure."

He has a CIA car waiting for him outside,

everything ready to go into his one-man mission.

You have to take care of this.

Okay-

A few pieces of trivia here, like that T-shirt from a Uruguayan band.

One of the first bands I loved as a kid in the '80s, Zero.

Like, a Uruguayan band there.

And even the music you hear when they open the door,

it's this heavy metal band and it's from Rodo.

Rodo Sayagues, my cowriter. It's his band.

- Rod0's band. - Enemigo.

It plays there at the beginning.

You can hear a little bit of that heavy metal

coming through the doors.

Well, the wound, right? You want to talk about this a little bit?

The wound?

Tracking of the wound in the story.

Yes, I mean I think...

I can't remember, I think it was possibly your idea.

But the idea that she would be wounded

and that, you know, symbolically it was the wounding of the dragon.

It was the dragon's heart that was to be wounded.

And then, over the course of the story, that becomes an important symbol

that comes back several times.

I mean, especially with Blomkvist and the radar tower.

And I love that when she finally breaks out of the bag at the end,

which we'll get to, you can see that scar still there.

That wound's still there, but she's kind of healing.

Someone said, "It's interesting that...

It's a way to see it, that what actually breaks the bag

is the staples on her back."

Because it breaks right there.

- And there's a line... - It does, yeah. It snaps over the...

People saw it as the same wound and the same thing that tracked her

would eventually set her free.

- But I love that concept of... - Yes.

Seeing the wound and then she's trying to patch it up right now.

She's trying to do, at a character level, the wrong way out, the wrong escape,

She's trying to do, at a character level, the wrong way out, the wrong escape,

which is just kind of glue it up.

- Just forget about it. - Yeah.

And then eventually in the middle, when the sister shows up, the wound starts...

- The wound reopens. - Reopens, yeah.

And she starts realizing there's nothing she can do, then.

There's no way to just quickly glue it,

that she'll have to go a little bit hard-core.

And she does, actually, when she's come for the staples.

But, eventually she's always trying to just cover it up in a way, right?

Like not really deal with it.

And just trying to fix it in a brute force kind of way, which I think is...

Yeah, she's kind of running.

I think... I feel like through the whole film

and through her life up to this point, she's been running.

She's been running from her past, and she's been running from pain

and the hurt that she has to face up to.

And the wound becomes a kind of symbol for that.

So here we have literally just jumped over a big scene

that you guys can find on the DVD, in the extras, in the deleted scenes,

which is a whole... Grane's house.

Originally, she needed to find out the address

of where Balder was heading and so

he had to go to the... Grane's house.

But we'll talk about that when we comment on deleted scenes.

But, that's what...

- It's a hell of a deleted scene. - Yeah. That's why we just jumped over it.

And we went straight to... We gave that job to Plague, to find out where...

We found that when we... I mean we'll talk about it,

but, it's just the story flowed much more cleanly...

- Yeah. - Without it.

It gets straight to the heart of the story quicker instead of...

dragging over something that was, kind of, too much like a B plot.

Here we establish, obviously,

the antagonism between those two characters.

I love that swag that Lakeith has, shooting at the camera,

telling her that he'll get her eventually.

And also, at the same time, like, Lisbeth,

now she's aware that the guy is in Stockholm

and she will do something that will be revealed later.

But she obviously... She's always two steps ahead

- of everybody else. - Yeah.

And we did originally have more conversation

between Needham and Lisbeth.

But we realized that it worked better if Needham really was a kind of hunter,

a silent hunter, kind of following after her.

And then they only really meet...

Yeah, because they have...

- at the end of act two. - They have one scene

- where they're together. - They don't talk.

Just one scene in the movie where they're actually together in the same frame.

No, actually, I'm wrong.

Then eventually, at Plague's house, they're there for a second.

She walks by him but they really have no interaction.

Interesting for two characters that end up doing so much together.

Yeah.

It always was a big thing, like, Lisbeth seeing herself in the kid.

I remember, like, we were writing different versions of this scene.

We always had this beat. Remember, like,

- Originally... - We did.

When she was gonna take down some guys out of a van, remember?

That's right, yeah.

She was gonna take some guys down and then see him standing in the window.

So we always had this idea, that there was gonna be a silent meeting between them.

Yeah. They always had that moment of them looking at each other,

and they kind of wink there,

and him knowing that whatever she is up to, it's good.

That she's a good soul and he'll recognize that.

Like kindred spirits, that there's some connection between them.

Yeah. Here again, we're about to set up again the fact he has those pills.

- The pills. Yeah. - Yeah.

He's popping them off.

- For those of you watching closely. - Yeah.

- And here are the drawings. Which... - Yeah, another hidden thing.

Which someone in the art department in Berlin worked on.

Yeah.

Doing all those...

Yeah, worked on it for a long time, doing those amazing drawings.

They're like math drawings, all done out of little numbers.

Mikael Blomkvist.

Deputy Grane.

Also, this is one of those scenes

that I think we talk and talk about on the writing.

Remember, like, we always loved this idea of like...

going from the shithole of Stockholm and Plague's apartment like...

Yes.

Really seeing that world and then cutting to the rich and powerful of Stockholm,

to those corners of the world and...

I think it really defines the world of these books,

a little bit of that contrast between power and the little man.

The sort of slick surface and then the kind of...

- underbelly. - That's Camilla, by the way.

- Anybody notice that's Camilla walking by? - There's Camilla.

But yes, we always spoke about how Blomkvist,

in a way what Blomkvist can do that Lisbeth can't,

is that he can mix in these worlds, in these sort of upper class worlds.

And Lisbeth is... Lives in the underbelly.

Yeah?

"It's me. I got a hit on the spider tattoo."

- Text it to me. - "Sure, sending now."

- This guy, I always thought he was great. - Yeah.

I love this little bit. This little section of the movie, I love.

Do you wanna tell the trivia about the building in the background?

Yeah. The building. The editorial. It was unintentional,

but it ended up having a big nod to the editorial company

that published these books, the Millennium series.

You Milos?

You know this man?

This is... I love this texture of Stockholm.

Actually, you know what?

Well, I missed it now but if you watch it back,

you'll see that you just missed my cameo in this movie.

When he walks inside the...

- Your one-frame cameo. - Yeah.

When he walks inside... When Blomkvist opens the door of the casino,

there, right behind his left shoulder

you can see me standing on the back alley that leads into this place.

Again, this place, I love this concept of.

Stockholm, kind of the spielhalle, they call 'em.

- Like, this, this... - Yeah.

- The arcades. - The casino.

- Seedy. - Like seedy corners of...

I love this scene. It's just pure creepiness and...

And over his left shoulder is

my father's football team that is in all my movies.

You always see it there.

And in Uruguay, it distracts everybody. Every time this movie's playing,

everybody goes like,

"That's Pefiarol. That's the shield from the team."

And there's another one right there on the left.

And then on the right. And over his left shoulder there.

Everybody gets distracted by that.

I always thought of this scene as a classic detective story scene.

Yeah.

It's a scene where the detective goes...

- You never see that coming. - And finds something...

monstrous.

- Really well done visual effects. - Beautiful.

This was Aria,

- our amazing script supervisor... - This is true.

Finding a YouTube clip of someone whose face had been...

- Eaten by cancer, I think. - Eaten away by some horrible...

Yeah, by some cancer.

And he showed us a reference of that, and many people have that condition

and they can get prosthetics like that.

We thought it was kind of a disturbing type of thing.

Pretty disturbing image.

To kind of show, promise the audience that these bad guys mean,

To kind of show, promise the audience that these bad guys mean,

they mean business and they're really dangerous and...

Seeing Blomkvist react to that, saying like,

"That might be coming to you."

I thought it was a cool way to present that.

I love, again, what Claire does in this scene.

It's a kind of alone-You get the sense of LisbetHs isolation, I think.

Yeah, while Blomkvist is having... He's enjoying his high life of...

- Wine and... - lovers and wine.

Lovers and wine.

In his fancy, European apartment. It's good to show that separation.

- Vicky Krieps, again, a fantastic actress. - Incredible actress.

Amazing to work with and I wish she had more in the movie.

She actually... I think she had just one...

She had a couple of scenes that got cut out.

There was a little bit more of Millennium story in the original cut and editing.

But this scene just was worth the whole casting of her.

- I think she's so good here. - She really is. Yeah.

It's captivating to look at, and she was such a good...

Such a good Erika Berger.

To him particularly and how...

You can see that she has a lot more power than he does.

It's like a little kid next to her.

Haven't heard of the spiders.

And again, this is one of those scenes, I think, we talk about so much, again.

We considered taking it out at some point but there are some things that just are...

- that just want to stay. - Necessary.

The whole like, "I don't want to ruin your evening," line

was that thing that everybody loved in the first draft.

Then, even if we felt like, "Well, we don't need this scene,"

it was always like, well, no one's gonna get rid of the

"I don't want to ruin your evening."

All of the scenes we discussed the most were essentially exposition scenes.

You know, the scenes where we had to get some kind of information across.

Always, we were trying to lean towards character moments.

To build the exposition into character moments.

It's always tricky with these kind of...

- I love that shot. - I love that shot, too.

The isolation of her in that little square there on the wall.

We actually went back to that.

We had wrapped that set, we were moving on to something else.

We realized that was a shot we wanted to do.

With Pedro we went back, took everybody back to that set to do that mirror shot.

Yeah, it was worth it.

I love this. I think they've...

- What was the name of the character? - The club...

Shady Punk?

- That guy. He was a perfect cast. - Maybe he was Shady Punk.

- Or Seedy Punk or something like that. - Yeah. Seedy Punk.

That was just Lisbeth that just walked away.

That was actually Claire.

You blink, you miss it.

I guess he is like...

Andreja Pejic really delivers.

And for someone who had never been in a movie, it's incredible.

The nuance of her performance.

How you can see everything in her eyes

and she's worried. She knows...

You can see that she's been through this before

because he doesn't even say, "Lisbeth Salander."

He says, like, "You know who I'm talking about."

And she knows he's talking about Lisbeth.

Now, listen, I know you think you're the only girl she's fucking in here,

all right?

We had also different versions of this, right?

We had different versions of the kind of leverage he has over...

This character, Sofia.

In the end, we decided to keep it personal.

As personal as we could.

We had set up originally that she was a bit jealous

when she said, "if you have another girl coming."

She might be a bit jealous of LisbetHs way of life.

But she doesn't... I don't think she even has a lot of girls.

That concept that pays off here,

I think it is a good structure of storytelling.

Like, to say that and then eventually here, she gives away the phone.

And you think, "She totally betrayed her."

- I love that Scarf ace background. Yeah. - Yeah, very Scarf ace.

- Taken straight out of that movie. Yeah. - Tropical.

Yeah, for such a cold Stockholm, to go with a tropical background.

Well, it goes with your...

I mean, we've always talked about the idea of cold outside and hot inside.

It's literally cold everywhere, I tell you.

Because even shooting in that apartment, it was cold.

It's the coldest town. Part of...

- Is that in Stockholm or was that in... - No, that's Berlin. Berlin.

That's Berlin as well.

Love this shot of the hood. And you're watching the place.

'Cause you're watching the place that you think it is,

but it's not actually the place he's going to.

And it's technically the same place that we actually shot,

but there's so many similar buildings in this...

Even Stockholm. This kind of block building...

- kind of a very Cold War kind of... - Was it actually the same building?

- It was actually the same building. - That's great.

But because there are very similar ones,

there was no point for us to go to different ones. I mean, there are...

The one that you see Lisbeth in is a better part of the same building.

Gotcha.

But the one that he's in is a more rundown version of it.

- But I figure... - Which kinda makes sense.

Even if he's across the street from her, which I believe he is.

If he's not in the same apartment, he will never find her in this place.

There's, like, millions of apartments.

There's many buildings that are the same.

I love that shot, where she walks into the light there.

That was another thing that I think we discussed,

at some point, cutting out.

But everyone loved it in the script, the switcheroo.

Yeah, we did talk long and hard about whether we should keep this sequence in,

- but I think it builds the tension. - It's crucial.

There's no way to tell the story without it.

And obviously, it has the first... I think, again, a great moment.

You know, performance from Claire like, how she...

- The burger. - Without betraying her character

and betraying the real mood of Lisbeth Salander,

she really shows that she's having a good time...

- Yeah. - Playing this guy,

and how everything went according to plan

and she allowed herself to have a little bit of fun in the middle of the movie.

- Right? - Absolutely.

And we always talked... You know, it was very important to us

that she always was a step ahead in this movie.

There's never a man or anyone else, apart from her own sister,

who is in a kind of dominant place over Lisbeth.

And that was very important to us.

That shot was...

Originally, it was designed to show a little bit more of the...

It's hard to see there, but the mess that that apartment is,

because we really wanted to show

that Blomkvist is in a really bad moment in his life.

And everything is messy. He's been drinking too much.

Like, he's been sleeping on the couch.

It's all this life he's leading.

So, you get to get a glimpse of the couch there and...

And where you know, you see there, like, his blanket's there.

- He's been sleeping on the couch. - CG magazine cover, by the way.

Yeah, we changed that. Originally it says, "The Zalachenko Affair,"

which is more canon.

Which is more canon.

But that's the article he wrote.

"The Zalachenko Affair" is what he writes at the end of the third book.

In a way, like, it's the story that tells

the whole deal that went down between Lisbeth and her father and SAPO.

But again, for the...

It was too complex for the new audience to understand.

So we went with the nod to the American title of those movies,

of the original of the first book, which is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Which makes sense, you know, if you think,

that that's the first article he wrote about her

and kind of made his career.

I don't know how long this is, but it's actually one of...

It's a super long...

- This sequence? - Action set piece for a movie, like...

Yeah the set piece goes on, 'cause it has several, kind of, sections to it.

Yeah. I remember being very excited about this, like, when we wrote it.

This idea of, like, remember, like,

there's gonna be this non-dialogue set piece...

- Long set piece in the middle of the film. - That's a Belmondo, by the way.

That's not Claire and that's Claire.

I mean, that was Claire when she was running and it's not Claire

- that jumps over the fence. - Wow. Really?

Actually, if you re-watch it, you'll see that.

We did a few of those in this movie. It's called "Belm0ndo."

Based on Jean Paul Belmondo, the French actor,

who invented it, I guess.

But yeah, this set piece was gonna start in a very pedestrian place

of Lisbeth finding the apartment.

Like, finally, she's gonna find herself face-to-face

with the antagonist of the movie.

And it was gonna go on, and go on, into a completely unexpected place.

And it does end on this, kind of, you know,

big Hollywood, you know, showdown, like at the bridge, right?

But you know, it's even hard to think of it as the same set piece, right?

But it is.

- Yeah. And it's, sort of, a... - It starts here...

- three-part set piece that... - and ends at the bridge.

Yeah, we always wanted the adrenaline to really rise at this point in the movie.

Yeah.

A lot of... The stunt team in Berlin was amazing

and did design a lot of this fight.

- Florian? - Florian, yeah.

And this details is a lot of...

That's what I liked to bring, like the toothbrush.

I would ask them, "Take this toothbrush and let's make it part of the fight."

So, she'd stab him in the leg with the toothbrush.

Then she'd drive the toothbrush deeper into the leg.

And then, eventually, I think, he removed the toothbrush at the end of the fight.

And Claire learned all this fight. It was incredible.

I mean, I think this... The British actors have all this training,

and they fence and dance and sing.

- They know how to do everything. - Shakespearean training helped.

Yeah. Yeah. She could... She had never done anything like that

and she learned all the moves very quickly.

She would nail the thing as a dance. She was very good at it.

And of course, Claes, who plays Holtser...

Yeah, yeah, it's like...

I mean he's the sweetest, least violent person...

- Who is really clumsy, as well. - You would ever meet.

He was really clumsy doing the thing.

He was good, he learned them. But he was so big and powerful that he...

I think he probably hit Claire a few times, like, unintentionally.

Claire was always nervous she was gonna get hit by him.

Yeah. But he really sold it.

- I mean, it really... - Well, that's what you want.

You want bit of reality of it...

Always, it...

If you do this right, like, someone always get hurt or hit

or something, on some level.

If no one does, it's you have played too safe.

The things you get excited with, on the script level, right,

the idea that she was... How does she get out of this?

Yeah.

So, the drug that she's been administered by the Spiders,

which I love that, how, also, we slowly untangle that

and at first we don't even know why they're called the Spiders.

And it's not really 'till the third act

that you see that on the syringe that Holtser has,

- it's actually, it is venom. Spider venom. - Spider venom. Yes.

And they...

And you can see the spider and the different kind of spider venom

that he has... find a way to take out and inject into people and...

That's why they're called the Spiders.

That was something that... I like when you give an answer like...

You just let the audience figure it out. We don't tell them,

like, "They called them the Spiders because they use spider venom."

But she's been drugged to get her heart to slow down.

And now she's speeding it back up with, just, that mix of drugs.

I mean, it's part of this sense that she just gets beaten down over and over

and then gets up again. Which is what I love about this character.

Wanted to see the set piece manage to do

and I love that you've managed to get her to this place where you think,

"Okay, you're done. They took the kid, you don't even know why.

Or why did they take the kid? But they took him. He's gone."

She clearly seems to be over her head,

like, she has no idea what's really going on.

And... But she still...

I think this shows what makes this character so great,

which is just that sheer will.

- Right? Like, she will never quit. - Absolutely.

She will never turn around and quit.

She will do whatever it takes and...

Every bit of strength she has on her,

she will do it to really try and turn things around.

- It's a CG car, by the way. - Is it?

- We didn't have the... - You keep surprising me

- with all the special effects... - Yeah.

I didn't know were there.

But yeah, Lisbeth, you know, in the books as well, I mean, she's...

You can't keep her down.

She will fight until her last breath and I think that's what...

- The dead body next to her. - Yeah...

Trying to get the dead body, and that's also, like,

something we got excited as...

We crashed a drone in that shot there.

I remember, like, the drone went over the car and then crashed.

And this is one of those crazy things that happen.

On the script, when we wrote it...

And... Still like that...

The script said,

you know, "They give chase. And she gives chase, they're going after them."

Eventually she starts catching up.

And eventually it says in the script that by the time they get to the bridge

that they're leading to, it was gonna start snowing.

- Right? Yeah. - Right. There was gonna be a blizzard.

It was, this blizzard had started

but it really didn't start until later, until they hit the bridge.

Because we didn't want to have to deal with creating a CG blizzard...

through the whole scene.

So, we said, "Well, it's gonna start snowing at the bridge."

And I don't, like, this, you know, how these things happen,

but in Hamburg, which we shot this part of the bridge, we...

This is Hamburg, in Germany.

It doesn't snow very often but then, suddenly,

as soon as we hit the bridge,

and we'd shot some of this bridge scene in the morning,

by noon, it started snowing.

- It started literally snowing... - Amazing.

Just like the script said, that it was gonna happen.

It was a little miracle. We were there going like,

"Wow, how did this happen?"

Like, it, literally, the script says,

"When they reach the bridge, starts snowing." We get there, it starts snowing.

And, I meant, you know, in practicality, it meant that we had to go back

and re-shoot some of the arrival to the bridge,

because we had done it without the snow and we had to do it again.

That's right. You had to dress the bridge, I remember.

- Yeah. - There's a lot of fake snow in this movie.

Very good, I think, very convincing fake snow.

- And there's a lot of real snow, as well. - And a lot of real snow.

All this is real snow.

And... It was, you know, that nightmare of shooting in the snow.

Which, you know, every step she gives there,

- it's new, it's pristine snow. - Right.

So, you do one take and then by the second take

the whole snow has been corrupted and you have to

- Yeah, nightmare. - Get it clean again.

And it's impossible to really clean it up. It's one of the things.

Next film, let's make sure it's in some kind of tropical...

Yeah, yeah. No snow. Well, then you have sand.

Which is the same.

Okay. Stay away from sand and snow. That's the...

You see those footprints there? You have to...

In CG, you have to come and clean every footstep from the previous take.

And it's, you know, it's one of those nightmares, shooting in the snow

that you never know until you actually do it.

You have to be very faithful to every step, every tyre track.

Now, remind me, we had this idea of the rising bridge in the script?

Or was it something that came through the, sort of, location?

Well, there were many versions of this scene.

Remember that, originally, she's...

You know, in one of the versions, Holtser was gonna get defeated here.

- And was gonna jump off the bridge. So... - That's right.

We... So, I think so, yeah.

- By the time we had a shooting script... - Did we come to the solution

of the, kind of, this kind of rising bridge,

or was that something that came from location, hunting for location?

- I can't remember. - I don't remember.

I think it might have been both.

I think it might have been something in pre-production

where we were scouting for the bridge and we found this bridge

and we came up with the idea of like, "What if?"

Yeah, because originally, like, it was gonna be...

She was gonna deploy the air bags and they were gonna have this...

This accident, right?

- It was gonna be this car crash. - That's right. It was a big crash.

Yeah. And then we said... We thought,

"Let's do something more original," and let's just get them to...

And then I remember you getting excited about the, sort of, idea of a wipe,

where the bridge wipes

- and you reveal Camilla and... - Yeah.

That became a, kind of, important image.

And we did it. We had a great shot,

but at the end it was better to tell it this way, I think,

than the thing we'd done after this long set piece.

Yeah. I love, I love this reveal.

Which is very interesting how...

I think the...

The VFX editor in the movie, when he saw it the first time,

he thought... He said to me,

he thought... He said to me,

"I thought that was a vision."

- I didn't think she was there. - A ghost.

It's a ghost.

Which is interesting, because I was like, "Really? A ghost?"

But, then it kind of makes sense, because the audience assumes she's dead

because we... I mean, you can see another car back there,

and so, you know, obviously a ghost doesn't travel in a oar, but...

People miss it but it's interesting how it's not until...

Some people it's not until she says...

She mentions to the kid eventually, she says...

Well, the kid says, "Who was that woman on the bridge?"

- Right. - They realize she was real.

But I think in a way she is a ghost.

- I mean she is this spectre from her past. - Exactly. Exactly.

That's what I think is interesting about it.

At this point, both versions work.

Either, even if you're just imagining her sister is doing it,

she's actually the sister. Both versions are great storytelling.

And also, I think, there's something about the way Camilla is styled,

the red costume, the... You know, Sylvia has this otherworldly...

- quality. - Very fairy tale-ish.

It's like she's the Black Knight

and then she's the Red Knight. And they both represent different things.

- Lambo. - Yeah.

Everybody loves this scene, always. Again, one of the things...

- Always goes down well. - Always goes down well.

If you can take any car out of a parking lot, just you know...

- why not do it in style? - Well, it's Lisbeth. You know, Lisbeth...

This shot is the same shot we had of the car riding away.

You know when I said it was a CG car?

Because we had this car, but we didn't have the other car.

So, we kind of took a different take of this moment, there,

- we put the other car. - I see.

It's also CG there. That tower is not there.

- The tower's in Berlin. - Yeah. That tower is in Berlin.

Outside of Berlin.

This is, I think, the only green screen in the movie.

- Pretty good. - Yeah.

I mean, no one cares about people in cars and green screens

but we try to avoid them as much as we can, but...

It was important to have a moment I think, between...

- Yeah. - The two of them.

This is all fake snow.

- All fake snow? - All fake snow.

- Amazing fake snow. - There was no snow on this location.

All this snow here, there's no CG, none whatsoever.

It's all real, practical, fake snow.

All this. We covered the whole thing up.

Pretty amazing. I love that, kind of, black tyres.

To have the black tracks of the tyres.

It's cool to see how Lisbeth suddenly is gonna have to be dealing with a kid.

Which she's obviously not great at.

Now we just force them, the two of them together into this situation.

Yeah. It was always interesting to us how Lisbeth would relate to

having to kind of be responsible for a... for a child.

It used to be that also this scene was blunter,

- like he would say, like, "The father..." - Yeah, she was ruder to him.

- She'd say, "Well, he's dead, who cares?" - She was tough on him.

And...

And it was one of the things we tested with the audience.

Everybody resented her for being too blunt.

It was always trying to find a balance of,

how blunt can she be without the audience resenting her too much?

Yeah that's a tricky... Another tricky balance. But I think...

Snow comes early this year.

- What Claire does really works. - Yeah.

And we will reveal, finally...

I mean for some of the audience that hasn't realized that yet,

that obviously he's the one that, that he's the key to that...

the kid is the key to open that programme

and that without the programme,

the bad guys have nothing and they really need him

to be able to make that computer work.

This is obviously Blomkvist doing his own research

based on what he discovered in the magazine,

who Holtser was, that he was related

to the father's network of Russian criminals.

- And... - Also Camilla's suicide.

I mean, there's a lot of back and forth about Camilla's suicide

and how much do we explain and

there was originally much more of a backstory around that.

And we realized, I think, eventually, that you didn't really need much, you know,

that really, what was important for the audience is the idea that,

you know, there was a sense

- that she killed herself and she didn't. - Yeah.

I mean, she did, right? I mean, well, she tried.

- That's why we... - Yeah.

Again we didn't try to overexplain.

There was this other version of the third act where she explained more of that.

And, at the end, we preferred to let it...

to the audience to pay attention and figure it out on their own.

But, she does try to commit suicide, I think,

based on what we're gonna discover later in the story.

But, we didn't feel that she had to say it again or like go back.

Right. Yeah. And she has scars, and you can see that there's a...

Yeah. It's just one of the things that you discover.

I liked to let, you know, left things for a second viewing

that when the audience sees it, it gets all those details.

It's such a complex story

and such a dense story with so many characters

with different agenda.

Even this moment here, like...

Grane, finally, you know, deporting him and what is she really...

Because she looks like she's happy to get him

and she doesn't look like someone that is upset that her main job,

which is protecting Balder, has failed miserably.

Like she should have... you know, she should be really upset.

And she looks happier that she got this guy,

because everything is going according to plan for Grane, right?

She's getting closer to get what she wants to get.

I like this shot.

I like that previous shot. Lisbeth looking over the city.

Yeah, thinking about how she's gonna approach this kid.

Great set design, by the way. This was all a set.

- Yeah. We wanna talk about Eve Stewart. - Let's talk about Eve, yeah.

- Incredible work. - A great production designer.

And although she's created, like, the sets that she built were amazing.

And, but, she was so flexible at really...

I mean, there were a couple of days where we needed a set

and we didn't have it,

and she will, in the morning, just create something for us.

She did it for that scene where Balder meets with Grane.

- That was gonna be in a parking lot and... - Right.

We wanted something better

and we realized in the morning we're gonna need something better,

and from the morning to the afternoon, she created that office for Grane.

It was incredible.

You know, some people are not just being great at their job

but also have the flexibility to keep up with the shooting

and really do, at the last second,

you know, do whatever it takes to make a better movie.

And again, these big heaters on the wall.

Again, this theme of "it's cold outside but it's hot inside."

That's a sort of running theme, psychologically,

emotionally as well as visually in the film.

That the idea that the surface is cold

but inside there's, kind of, raging feelings and passions.

- I think that's, that's... - I love the image of that.

You see, that's the Bishop.

The big piece like, protecting the small one.

- Every move there... - Very nice.

Is some symbol of the conversation they're having.

Never realized that.

But going back to the production design. It's like, it's a...

Something, I think, you have to do even more these days,

where the DP, Pedro Luque, works with Eve Stewart, the production designer.

They work together to design the set in a way

that then he doesn't, almost have... Doesn't need to put lights in it.

- Like the whole use of lights. - Right.

The lighting of the scene come from the practical lights

of actually the place, right?

So, those heaters are light.

There's skylights from above, the windows.

Everything is created in a way that then you don't have to be moving lights around.

Everything is created in a way that then you don't have to be moving lights around.

You just let the set be the dressing.

The lights are, like, practical lights on set

are actually the lights that you're using to light the scene.

That's something that...

That's why it brings this very natural and cool look to the film.

- That's all created by the set itself. - Right.

It's her.

Shout-out to Pedro, by the way,

who made this movie look absolutely gorgeous.

- He shot Don't Breathe with you. - Yeah.

I did many, many things with him.

We've been working together for 20 years now.

That's for you to keep.

She gives him the tracker, which... I think it plays pretty nice because

it feels... It plays on a character level

that she wants to, until the rematch...

That she's bummed that this kid was able to beat her at chess.

You know, in the books she's supposed to be really, really good at chess.

It's a number problem.

I like the... You know, we really wanted to pull back

in terms of her interactions with the kid and... You know, she's not...

Even though she might feel a connection with him,

she's not gonna express it very easily.

And I think, at the end, Claire does amazing work here.

Yeah, you see she cares but she doesn't know how to talk to him.

She wants to protect him because she knows it's the right thing

but at the same time she's not going to be cuddly and...

I think there's something heartbreaking about that, you know,

in terms of Lisbeth as a character.

She wants to reach out, she wants to connect, but she sort of can't,

- or she won't. - Yeah.

I tracked all of his ex-associates.

And every one of them seems to link back to Camilla Salander.

Another one of those images that usually directors and DP

will get obsessed with.

We look at the window, and her looking at what's coming

and having this moment of calm before the storm, of...

knowing that now she knows the sister is the one behind the whole thing,

and she knows that this is not a coincidence,

that she's doing that on purpose somehow.

To tell her she's bleeding and she knows...

And now, this next scene is, again, it's all about the DP and Roque Bafios.

I think it's Pedro and Roque doing this little dance here

and the light is amazing.

This showed great in the movie but the music is really telling the story.

This is one of my favourite scenes in the movie, personally.

It's a beautiful piece, one of my favourite pieces.

- The music, yeah. - Yeah, the music piece

that Roque wrote for this.

Because it really shows everything that's happened with her internally and

it's painful and sad, but she has so much desire

and longing for some relationship that maybe is never gonna be back and

she probably wants a hug, and she's in pain physically and emotionally

but she would never allow herself to be that vulnerable,

and to show that side to Blomkvist and...

And the audience is, like, "Come on, just kiss him,

just, you know, be together.

It's gonna make things easier." But she can't.

There's something in the past that just doesn't allow her to do it.

The light on their faces, I think, is so great.

The red light.

To differentiate them. Like, she's all red and still mad at him and...

Yeah, it's one of those stories that, again,

I wish we had more of it in the story, in the movie... But that arc,

that relationship between these two and what he did and...

Which is something that we got very excited when we realized that...

If someone would never be happy about being on the cover of a magazine

or someone writing about her, it would be Lisbeth Salander,

so there was a contradiction in the books, in a way,

the fact that he writes so much about her

and she'll be happy about that. I think she'll never be happy about that.

And I thought that was cool to,

to bring into the movie, right? To bring into the series,

to address that.

And there's also a way in which, you know, at the end of the first book,

he kind of wrongs Lisbeth, or at least he, sort of, steps away from Lisbeth.

And I think this is a way of, kind of, bringing that full circle.

Yeah.

You know, he wants her back...

but he has to realize his own responsibility

for pushing her away.

- Here's the airport sequence. - Yeah, I just love this shot as well.

It used to be a long shot as well, longer, then we cut it.

Just to show that it was Lisbeth in there.

Just to show that it was Lisbeth in there.

It was, for me, the inspiration for all this sequence,

at least from a directorial point of view,

is really Brian De Palma and those classic '90s and '80s set pieces, in an airport,

like, with the music doing most of the heavy lifting.

And the music and the camera is really doing the whole dance.

Leaping down, there is my friend, Christian Zagia.

- There he is. - You've seen him in Don't Breathe.

He had a short scene there

and he's been in every short I've done since we were 12 years old.

The bag and...

All this connection... You know tracking one element through...

I love this. That shot seen from the security monitors, panning around

and now you... There you go, you come through a door and...

And this was all a built set. Eve built this set, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's all built.

We recycled this set for so many things because it was this.

It was also the interview room for Grane in the beginning.

It was Grane's office, you know, where she meets with Balder.

- It also was the casino, actually. - Oh, really?

Yeah, we recycled it at the end to turn it into the structure for the casino.

- Ah, the dildos. - Yeah, the dildos.

I gave it to him as a gift when he wrapped,

- to the actor. - Oh, you did?

- But he didn't know what it was. - The suitcase full of them?

He didn't know what it was. I wrapped them.

I said, "Don't open it until you get home."

And they made him open it at the airport.

In front of everybody, he had to open it. And all these dildos fell out.

- That is genius. - True story.

The pink hat.

We didn't have a pink hat on the day,

but Claire and I suddenly got excited about this idea

that she would have a pink hat, it was completely not Lisbeth...

We never had a pink hat in the script, right?

There was no pink hat in the script but it became this whole thing

and I remember we were in the airport with 250 extras,

and I was asking everybody, "Does anybody have a pink hat?"

and, like, production going crazy, like, thinking,

"We're really going to slow down for a pink hat?"

And we wait and wait and wait, then some PA had a pink hat

and it was like, "Okay, that's the hat we're using."

- It went down in history. - Yeah.

- The pink hat has been immortalized. - Yeah.

It's good how she...

They're looking for a person in a pink hat, obviously.

- Then it's as easy as getting rid of it. - Works great. I wish we had written it.

But this sequence, I remember, on the script level,

we were having a lot of fun with it,

trying to, kind of... The sense of Lisbeth as a, kind of, puppet master

controlling this environment was...

Originally it was in prison, right? It was in a prison.

Right. At the very beginning it was a prison, yeah.

And then we changed it.

Like not a prison, but like just a...

- A detention centre, yeah. - The detention that...

That, again... This whole dance of many characters converging

in this set piece.

She hacks the PA, which I love, to send that text

and someone reads it without even knowing.

Passenger Needham, please...

Communicating with Needham.

I love when you manage to do something like that in the script,

to just connect that puzzle, that complex puzzle...

That of all the characters, all the plans she has.

You remember, at one point we had the idea that Needham would say that he's hungry,

tell the guard he's hungry, then he would walk past a vending machine

- and... - And she was gonna...

She was gonna hack the vending machine.

That was nice, it would have been great.

We thought it was a great idea but it was completely outlandish

and, you know, tonally wrong, but still a cool idea.

I need to get him back to the US and make sure that he is safe.

No, no, no, no. You're not...

And originally here, remember,

this was the moment to really reveal a lot more about Needham's...

Backstory.

Plan and backstory, what had been happening.

We had to reduce it to this line here when he says, "You don't understand."

Like, he's been waiting for a long time for Balder to deliver.

He's not gonna let go now.

But it was more than that, really. It was, it was, Needham had...

The reason why he goes on his own is his career's at stake.

- And he's... - Yeah.

He's responsible for that thing and he cannot go to his bosses and say,

"Hey, I lost this thing that can destroy the world."

He's on his own, and originally we had more of Lisbeth

explaining that to the audience

and explaining that to, well... Needham explaining it.

And Lisbeth realizing that that's what's going on.

That's why he was on his own. That's why it's just you.

We had Needham being, sort of, rogue at one point

that he was, kind of, gone rogue in order to get this thing back.

Well, he is.

I think he has support, but...

He has support from the NSA

- in some black-ops kind of way, right? - Yeah.

Like it's not an official mission, but he's on a mission, but...

I like that idea.

I kind of miss that part of him, to know more about why he's going rogue

- and why... - We didn't have much space.

He depends so much on this going well.

Because it's his life and his career and...

We reduced it eventually to, like, he's very personal...

You know, Firefall is very personal for him and it's something that

he'd been working on it with Balder and waiting for it,

and he cannot just let go.

But, I thought it was interesting

and I kinda miss that part, to know more about Needham

and why he's going rogue.

- But, you know, now you know. - Now you know.

He's gone rogue.

I mean, at some point we realized that

that Firefall and the story around the McGuffin

was not what should be really driving this story.

Really, it's an emotional story about these two sisters.

Yeah, it's just to know that the sister will come back and now you know.

I love this moment here.

We kind of betrayed Lisbeth a little bit by letting the audience feel

that Lisbeth wouldn't take the phone away from the kid.

But, you know, you get obsessed sometimes with some idea.

And I got obsessed with this idea of like,

getting a phone call from someone who is dead.

And seeing it on your phone, popping up like that, with a photo, like phones do,

and it's part of the world we live in.

- These days, when someone dies... - CGl.

And you still see them on Facebook.

Like their Facebook profile and those sort of things.

Yes. No, it's a great idea, a phone call from a dead person. It's chilling.

And for a kid, he'd believe that maybe he didn't die,

maybe he's calling him and he will definitely pick up the phone.

He would never think it's the bad guy who's got the father's phone.

I love this editing as well, like this sort of cut of...

you know, like parallel out in a way where you think...

Blomkvist just reacts to her, but we just literallyjumped in time...

- That was always part of the sequence. - A few minutes...

I remember, in the script, we always wanted this sense of...

- throwing the audience. - Yeah.

And then, finally, here, after big chunks of the movie, you see Camilla.

Which is again, one of the things we were very excited, when we...

we wrote it originally. It was always the final encounter,

like, what is she going to say?

What are they gonna say to each other?

And Sylvia Hoeks, who plays Camilla, she did a great job there

in setting that strange tone.

She's nervous,

- she's sitting there like a kid. - She's almost childlike...

- Yeah. - But she's terrifying. Yeah.

I mean it's a... She's quite otherworldly, as I said.

Here's when the fairy tale, kind of, comes back, in a way. Look at that.

- Yeah. Snow coming through the... - Like it's definitely, like, some queen.

Yeah, there's snow falling right behind her.

It's all this imagery, and it's pretty radical.

But she's really, kind of, the ice queen in a way, right?

They're so different, right? You can't believe they're sisters.

And we, I mean we took from the book.

In the books, Camilla is blond, she's very beautiful.

She's very beguiling. She's, sort of, the opposite of Lisbeth.

That's what we took our cue from.

She's also like...

Also, on a character level, she's talking about her feelings right away.

You see her there, she says, "I had all this speech, but now I'm nervous."

She's really in touch with the reality of her feelings

and why she's acting the way she is, and what she was hoping to say,

and she couldn't.

- She's totally the opposite to... - She's not repressed.

Lisbeth, who will never allow herself to say those things

and I don't think she'll even know why she acts in the way...

She's all, like, just instinct and sheer will.

But she will always hide her feelings from everybody else.

- Again, a great shot from the stunt team. - Amazing shots.

One thing that just goes by like that, but look at that.

The camera falls with them, and sliding down the hill.

We don't cut for a long way.

That was a massive rig

and one of the things that you go through when you make movies.

But then sometimes you just watch it, it's just simple.

But there's nothing simple about achieving that shot,

to be able to jump out of a door frame and continue down the ramp,

and then continue... It's a free fall for the stunt people,

like, to roll down that hill, and the camera is coming up to them.

It's one of the things that...

People don't understand those things when they watch it, they go,

"How the hell did you get that shot?"

- Literally, by jumping out of a window. - Yeah, by literally doing it.

Obviously, this is the end of the second act. All is lost.

We used to blow up her place, too. Then, she's gonna look up now

because... well, actually, she used to look up with the explosion,

- her radio tower. - Did you shoot that?

We set it on fire and that's why she has some light on her face.

We set it on fire and that's why she has some light on her face.

But we cut it out, we thought there was no need to blow up another place,

another explosion and every place she's...

I mean, it was this idea that Camilla is trying to destroy everything she has,

and every home and every place and leave her really in the streets, literally.

The creamer. The creamer gag.

I think this... I have to give the credit to you for the creamer gag.

Was that my idea?

I can't remember but I remember it that way.

But, I think it really helps.

- I mean, it's interesting... - I just love this scene.

Yeah, and we build this sense of a team, which I think is interesting,

around Lisbeth in the third act.

It's good when you have characters that find something in common.

- They find... - Two characters who seem completely...

- Exactly. - Out of different worlds.

Completely different worlds. He's an NSA guy and he's a hacker,

which would be the two more antagonistic characters.

And then suddenly they find they have a passion for computers

by referring to that laptop as "vintage."

And he knows.

And no one will refer to laptops as something vintage these days.

It's still something that feels new.

But I love how we set up that creamer, like that...

common ground these two have

and suddenly realize they have a lot of respect for each other.

Did they do any improvisation around that?

A little bit. Those two, they love to do that,

those two actors...

We should talk about Cameron, who...

- Cameron Britton. - He does a great Plague.

- American actor. He was on... - Manhunter.

- Manhunter, yeah. - Is that what it's called?

- No, Mindhunter. - Mindhunter.

Yeah, he played that psychopath in Mindhunter.

He was so good in it. It had just come out when we were casting this.

It was a, sort of...

We thought, "He's just so amazing and we've managed to get him."

Yeah.

And obviously, now we... Just all this section of the movie

when we had to physically travel to the coldest places in Europe.

Look at those eyes. Claire's eyes.

She knows what she has to face, where she's gonna have to go.

That's a quarry. Actually, the shot is part real, part CG.

The house is part real, part CG.

The rest is all real.

But the building itself, that's a real building

when you see it there from this angle.

I actually went to this location when you were scouting, I remember.

And, yeah, it's cold. I can attest to the fact.

And it wasn't snowing back then.

It was when we went back.

It was freezing. Like, the temperatures are insane.

There's no way to enjoy being out there. But that's why we do it.

We do it for the audience, to put the audience there.

To let them go there and travel to these places

that they're probably never gonna go.

Look at that. It's like old fairy tales.

It's interesting because talking about this movie, I realized that, for me,

I don't know for you, Jay, but as a reader,

and it's, kind of, really common for kids, like, the first stories you read,

when you start reading and start getting into storytelling, are fairy tales, right?

And are those Grimm Brothers stories

that are, like, dark and fucked up.

And they come from even older stories.

They are the most ancient stories and they're very strange.

And they're often very disturbing. And they're about our deepest fears.

Always, and they're dark but complex and...

- Surprising. - They're always about family in a way.

Money and power and family and, like, rich...

And they're kind of biblical in a way, right?

They're inspired by the stories of the Bible, in a way.

- Some are probably even older... - And from the myths before that.

- Yeah. - I mean they're...

You're right, they're always about family,

they're always about the big, the biggest forces in our lives.

- Yeah. - Death and betrayal and love and passion.

And they're very simple.

That's why I think when I try to justify why, to myself,

like why Camilla is dressed like that.

It's almost like it's kind of medieval, like kimono, like strange clothes.

- Well, that was Carlos as well. - Carlos Rosario, yes.

- The great costume designer. - Costume designer in this movie.

Did a fantastic job. I worked with him on Don't Breathe as well.

He had to come and create all these characters.

And I think he did an amazing job.

Together with Camilla, it's kind of that... piece that is just fantastic.

Yeah, you're right. There's something sort of mythical and fairy-tale...

And the music, and now you go back to this land. Look at that.

- The Scandinavian land of snow and... - Folk tale.

It's totally folk tale, yeah.

And going back to the house, right? It's the... you know.

Like Hansel and Gretel kind of thing. You go back to the...

Even the way that you came up with her entering the place,

this, kind of, tunnel, this icy tunnel...

- Because the building is... - To me it looks like complete fantasy.

Is a mix of what used to be a quarry.

So that they used to load things from underneath

but then they made it into a hotel.

So its structural reality is based on the reality of that place.

That's why they have a chimney there.

It was an amazing location. And yeah it was...

The concept was that it would turn into a hotel

and that's why you see that Blomkvist, later, will be taken into a sauna room...

Yeah, because when the father lived there and took over that place,

it was because it was a hotel by that point.

But all this is, like, West Germany.

The deep end of nothingness.

Like, really, almost no one lives in that place.

There's a little, small town a few minutes away, but there wasn't a lot

- around there. - Slightly terrifying place.

Totally terrifying. It was old concentration camp land.

All that area where we were was...

- Dark history. - Yeah, dark history of Germany.

That's a set back in warm Berlin.

- This is a set? - Yeah.

We did a great reproduction of the scale of the place and structure.

And Eve Stewart did a great job. Like, this is supposed to be the tower

that rises from underneath.

I love that retractable taser that we created for her.

Here we go again. This is... One of the things we did with this movie,

we really tried everything to be based on reality.

Even the whole technology, all that hacking she does.

And then, when you see it, it comes across as too easy.

But the reality's just like, we're too naive.

Yeah. Some people think that it looks like made-up tech.

And it is, but it's all very much based... I mean this, even this...

That is all real. I mean you can do photogrammetry based on multiple cameras

and multiple angles on a place.

And they, you know.

You'll see in the future how this is war technology.

This is gonna be used on, like...

The military is gonna start using it, if they're not already.

It's just because it gives you a 3-D perspective on a space, and...

So we'd like to really... We're a little bit ahead of what's happening.

But I'm 100% convinced this is something...

And you were actually a programmer, at one point, is that right? Or you were...

Yeah, because I come from visual effects.

And I did a lot of visual effects in my 20s and...

So, as you know, I love to play with these things,

with photogrammetry and, like, PointCloud and those things.

It's all based on reality. It feels a little movie-like.

But it's way more realistic than you think.

And this is another scene that we had different versions of, I remember.

Yeah, Blomkvist finally realizing Grane...

At one point we had Grane killing herself. Do you remember that?

Blomkvist confronted Grane and sort of led to a confession.

And we sort of then changed it fairly late on to this idea

that Grane, in fact, had sort of hired Camilla.

Yeah it's a combination... I think what's in...

What happens here I think is, which I love,

is that Grane is being used by Camilla, right? It's a...

Right. She thinks she's in charge.

If you see the deleted scenes, they're lovers,

and Camilla is a seductress, and she's being...

Like in the book, she's always preying on a lot of people.

And she has preyed on Grane.

As powerful as Grane is, Camilla is her weakness.

And she's using Grane, we'll find out later.

But Grane thinks she's doing a good thing.

She's taking away this tool from the Americans,

a nation that, like she says, "never missed a war."

And she prefers to have Sweden to have it, that's a nation that never went to war.

One of the things that I think... It was...

You can play it many ways, but I like the idea.

Obviously Camilla has hired her.

Not hired her, but gotten her into being an accomplice on this because...

Grane has hired Camilla.

But Camilla has been the one pulling the strings, really.

Camilla has been the one manipulating Grane from the beginning.

Which, we always liked that idea.

- "Itsy Bitsy Spider." - "ltsy Bitsy Spider." Yeah.

I think Sylvia Hoeks, like she...

There was a version that we didn't use, that she'd sing it in Dutch.

And it's pretty strange.

One of those songs that exists in every language in the world.

- It should be a special feature in itself. - Yeah.

This is your... I always think of this as your ode to Korean...

the great Korean, sort of, action movies.

Yeah, it's kind of raw and violent, and...

The gas masks and the... This is just visually very amazing.

And we reveal now that she has the tracker,

and she is the one that is ahead of everybody now.

And Lisbeth's tracker is there. And now it's a trap.

Gas popping up from everywhere.

Get out of there!

This is one of the things I kinda regret having done now.

Because I was in those action scenes there.

That's me operating the camera, most of the stuff you see here.

So that's me inside the bathroom carrying a very heavy camera on my shoulder.

And, literally, I'm in pain right now as I'm doing this recording

because my right shoulder is like...

- Oh, really? - Yeah, my shoulder...

I remember you, like, were training and stuff. You got really...

You had to get pretty fit to make this movie.

I know, yeah, because if you're really gonna do all these action sequences

and be there with the actor, and, like, run,

and you have to learn the choreography yourself and...

Drop when they drop, like, pan fast when they hit someone, boom.

All that work, it's just physically very demanding.

But because we wanted the movie to look gorgeous,

we had to use this camera that's not really meant for, like,

to do hand-held work.

And I paid the price.

I can see how we slightly changed the colour of her mask.

It's slightly pink, compared to the red.

Just to let the audience figure which one is Lisbeth

in the mess of people fighting with the same mask.

It's a little video game-like, which it's impossible to deny the influence

that video games had on my generation of film-making.

Like, there's always a little bit of a video game element.

That POV, like, through the mask of her, and that kind of set-up,

a fight and a villain coming through the door.

It's a lot of that, I don't know...

I'm actually seeing it more,

noticing it more and more in contemporary...

Yeah. There's the shot.

This shot is one of my favourite shots in the movie because that's a real spider.

I told the crew that I wanted to do it for real.

And so everybody said, like, "That's insane.

The spiders will never do what we want."

And we did the first take, and the spider did exactly what we wanted.

Very well-trained spider.

It was one of those magic moments that I really, really enjoy as a director.

When you put forward an idea that sounds insane,

like doing that with a real spider,

hoping the spider's gonna go the direction you want, and suddenly it actually did it.

- And it was... Makes everybody happy. - That spider's got a big career coming.

He needs to open a programme for us.

The star spider.

This is another room also designed by Eve Stewart like overnight I think.

We didn't have a room for this.

It was gonna be originally in the father's room

that all this was gonna go down, and it felt like, just, like, not...

The stakes felt too low if you do it just in a room with a table.

And we asked Eve, "Can you give me a Firefall room,

some room where Firefall is gonna be activated?"

And she created this room, like literally, not overnight,

but over the course of two or three days, I think, they put the whole room together.

But all the interiors of the house are sets, right?

Yeah, yeah.

- The whole sequence inside is a set? - Yeah, it's a sound stage.

We love this idea

that Blomkvist is kind of the damsel in distress in this movie, right?

- Like he's the one that eventually gets... - That was very important to us.

Gets there, and gets kidnapped.

And the place that women have been given in movies for too long.

Yeah, Blomkvist is essentially... Yeah.

He's the role that women unfortunately often play in these kind of movies.

And we completely flipped the, kind of, the roles.

- The gender roles. - Yeah.

And we were very aware of that.

He finally gives a number which I think is accurate actually.

The number is the answer to the question, if you...

I think it was... I think it was slightly shorter than the real answer.

- Maybe, yeah. - I think the real answer was very long.

- It was too long. - Yeah.

I love that by this point some of the other plot is kinda done, in a way.

At least everything that has to do with the computer starts to die,

and what's very personal starts to come out,

which is the real motivations behind Camilla.

She's gonna show now, like, why she's doing all this...

that she really doesn't care about Firefall or whatever it can do.

I'll transfer the funds immediately.

You don't have to.

Why is that?

And here of course, this was related to a scene that was cut out,

which is to show that these two are lovers and Grane really trusts Camilla.

So this is making here

a way bigger betrayal from Grane's perspective.

She never saw that coming, that Camilla was gonna betray her in such a way.

Thanks for all your help.

Again, this is one of those moments I always enjoy,

going back to bloody things and having a little bit of gore.

There was a lot of blood, a lot of blood coming out of that wound.

I love that she's died standing up.

I remember talking with Synnave, the actress who played Grane,

about how she was going to die.

So, like, "I think she will die standing up," like, she's one of those...

- She said that? - Yeah. Yeah.

- She said that? - Yeah. Yeah.

It was like, okay, well, I don't think she can.

But I think it's interesting that, instead of collapsing to the floor,

she's gonna walk and find a chair and sit down and die with dignity.

- The bag. - The bag. That's your idea.

For people that love to blame me for this and say,

- "The classic Fede Alvarez." - Blame the Englishman.

In this case, I tell everybody it's your idea.

Although I think the vacuum cleaner...

Listen, the bag may have been my idea, but the wax, my friend, was your idea.

- The wax on the wood? - Yes.

In a way, it's actually, as perverse as it is, obviously...

it's also like a way to show now Camilla will put Lisbeth through the thing

that she escaped in that same room in that opening scene.

That's the same room that we saw in the opening scene,

where they walk in as kids.

And that's what the father did to Camilla as a kid, like we saw in the nightmare.

Now it's suddenly... That room, that day.

And now suddenly Camilla puts Lisbeth through the thing she has escaped from.

And that's something that she resents.

That, in a way, why was she spared somehow by that horror?

And I think it's also kind of Lisbeth's worst nightmare to be so constricted.

You know she's a character who has lived, you know, very, kind of, in her...

- A kind of anarchy and freedom. - Yeah, in a kind of freedom.

And to have it taken away like that seemed like a very nightmarish place to put her.

And at the same time also, like,

either it's that, or you put her in a chair like every movie has done.

Like, either tied to a chair or tied to a pipe on the ceiling.

We wanted to do better.

We said, like, "Yeah, we have to be able to do better than that."

I'm so proud about how we put together this imagery of her in the bag and floor.

And Camilla finally opens up about

what's been eating her, right, all these years.

A little bit, right.

She's really gonna reveal everything at the cliff at the end, but it's...

Absolutely. This is where we really start to understand Camilla's real motivations,

beyond just a computer.

It's not really about that. Always, again, it comes back to the emotional...

- I love this image here, like Pedro... - Very fairy-tale image.

Pedro Luque's photography here is amazing.

Just the colour, the subtlety of that. Looks like a painting, really.

And again, this is interesting how we went back and forth with

what was Camilla's motivation at the end of the day

and like, what she says now, "Now the world will burn,"

and what does that mean?

Because she has Firefall, and she doesn't really care about the world.

I mean, she probably knows that it's not gonna be good for the world

if she has it, even if she sells it or she uses it herself.

But it's not about destroying it, but it's about making sure Lisbeth...

- Suffers. - Suffers.

And makes herself responsible for it in a way, like she...

Remember there was a lot more dialogue about, like, okay...

That she couldn't deny that she stole Firefall, that she did it,

and that's a crime and that she did all those things.

And she was a big part of, you know, helping the bad guys in a way,

getting what they want

because they couldn't have been able to get Firefall from the NSA most likely.

- And to make her responsible. - Yeah.

To make her take... To face up to her own responsibility.

And so she was saying "You might deny that you did all the things,

but you won't be able to deny that you did this."

So the whole idea of guilt is a big thing.

So here's the start of the shoot-out, like...

Always gets a reaction, that...

This part for me, it's like, like Rodo told me.

Rodo, my co-writer, he said,

"Watching it is like, this is like the director's guitar solo."

- Where you just go... - That's a very Rodo thing to say.

You just go into a set piece built on images and sound

and, you know, camera techniques.

We're flying over the head of Needham, revealing...

That was all drones. We had loads of drones flying around, I remember.

Yeah. That's a composite, actually. It's a drone shot moving back.

But we never really flew over the head of the actor.

Then we did Pixomondo, the house in charge of the VFX in Germany.

There's a beautiful compose on it to bring the actor into it.

I need to get you out of here...

They're very slow bullets, if you think about it.

Were they on wires? Were they being pulled around on wires?

- The... The actors who were being shot. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Yanked around on wires. - We yanked them around.

Which was something we got very excited... It was from Stephen Knight's draft, right?

There was a little bit of shooting on that draft.

One of the things that stayed from that original draft.

It was a very, very different set piece, but there was...

- There was a sniper. Yeah. - Yeah. Needham with a rifle.

I don't know how many people died by that rifle, but we went a little bit...

- We killed more people. - We killed a lot more people.

This combination of... What I love about all this, I tell you,

is that, if you look at this...

I remember the editor, when she watched the first version of this,

she turned to me and said, like, "I don't know how I'm going to make this work."

I mean there's... It was hard to give sense to the scene.

Because we didn't have the photogrammetry, we didn't have... You, know it was...

A lot of the shots that you see here are not, weren't intended for the scene.

They were taken from different moments on different scenes in the house.

So, to really put it together, it's like...

I love it because it's one of those things that,

when every artist involved in the movie,

every part of, you know, the whole pieces,

the whole tools that the director has at his disposal,

the craft of film-making, like, if you use it correctly, you don't need a lot.

You just need the shots, you know.

If you look at it, it's kind of the same shot over and over.

It's like him, the house, inside. There's not a lot of complexity at that level.

But it's a beautiful shoot-out, to see it going down.

For Hollywood movies, where you've seen all kind of shoot-outs,

shoot-outs that go in the third act.

I think this one is a very special one.

And I love the way that Holtser gets his comeuppance. Again, to me, this is...

It's sort of like this fairy-tale logic.

That he gets stabbed by the same thing he was gonna stab the boy with.

- Yeah, the whole karma... - The blinding.

It's very myth, Greek tragedy.

Yeah, yeah.

House is clear. Where is she?

But, yeah, I mean, I remember on the page there was always a fear that this lot,

this end sequence was gonna be very busy.

But I think you just did such a great job of boiling it down to the elements...

to the, sort of, fundamental elements of it, and it works so well.

- I love this moment too, like, he stays. - Yeah.

- The man stays with the kid. - Exactly. He tells her to go.

How many times have you seen it the other way round?

Yeah, you go and be a hero. I'll stay home with the kid.

Yeah. We completely wanted to flip that.

It's interesting here, like, a piece of trivia.

Needham used to get shot and killed right here. Not here.

But he gets wounded there, though you don't see it.

He doesn't even realize in the moment that he just got shot.

So there was another version of the movie where he will die on the cliff at the end.

He'll get there, finally get the computer,

and die when he realized he was actually shot.

And then, people loved the character of Needham so much that we let him live.

But, technically, there, in that moment where that shooter catches up with him...

- He didn't need to die. - No, he didn't.

- We want to see Needham live another day. - Yeah.

So here's obviously him getting blind.

This car crash that's coming up...

we did it in a way that Hollywood had never done it before.

Which, there's not a driver inside the car, you know,

in this day and age of, like, self-driving cars...

we managed to do it with self-driving technology.

So, we drove the car at an insane speed, like,

that car there has no driver in it.

And we managed to drive down that road at, like, insane speed.

And, like, you know, like, 8O miles per hour.

Really get to do that stunt,

and throw the car to the trees,

and all that you just saw is real, and...

But done in a speed that is very uncommon for car crashes in movies.

Which usually are done slowly because they have a stunt driver inside.

But because this one didn't, we could really afford to go at crazy speed.

Here again, classic fairy-tale story, like, you get there, think they're dead,

but, almost like a ghost, there she goes.

- Running through the woods. - Yeah.

- I like this theme. - The theme.

The original theme comes back, yeah, from the opening scene.

We're back in the beginning of the story...

with the two sisters running, but now they're separated.

As all this...

Here we are, that's me operating camera,

at the end of the world, really, on that cliff.

Hanging from a wire 'cause...

You'll fall to your death if you fell out of that cliff.

And so actors are on a wire that's been removed digitally.

- Yeah, they've both got... - This is a drone.

But most of that coverage is just me standing next to the actors,

operating camera in this very reduced unit, because we couldn't...

The big unit, the big crew couldn't access this location.

So it was just five of us, I think. My AD, DP, myself with the actors.

To really get, reaching that cliff, this place in the world that...

you'll never go.

You'd never visit if it's not because you're shooting this movie.

This is the whole deal here, right?

This is why we made the movie, this scene right here.

This is what we always wanted. Yeah, this moment between the sisters.

And there were different versions of it, I mean...

What Claire does, and the take that you used,

I think was the most emotional.

She goes from, like, at the beginning of that shot,

from being still mad at her sister and not understanding,

and as she starts talking, you can see in a shot of like four or five seconds

Claire going from that to suddenly being heartbroken.

You don't even know how she does it. It's brilliant.

Yeah. It's a magic trick.

The snow is digital, by the way.

- Is it? - Yeah.

You gotta put that on my list of...

- Things you didn't... - surprising special effects.

But this is the whole deal.

And what's super interesting for me

is something that I experimented with in this film that...

Originally she would say something else.

Originally, she'd say she couldn't go back because she was afraid of the father.

And that's it. And Claire didn't agree with that.

She didn't think that was a reason why she wouldn't go back.

And she didn't know what was the reason.

She said she felt like she couldn't have done it.

She understood she couldn't. She didn't know the answer.

So I told Sylvia to ask her why, and I kept rolling.

I kept rolling until Claire would give an answer.

And Sylvia waited and waited.

And what comes here is the answer that came out of Claire Foy's heart.

What's the reason why?

The reason is, like, if he gets, you know, what she's gonna say now.

- "You chose him," and... - It's the only non-scripted line.

It's non-scripted, and it is the answer to the biggest question.

And I thought it was beautiful because it was more complex.

It was less obvious.

It meant she was alone in a way.

It shows him, like,

whatever twisted relationship they had, they had each other.

And from...

She didn't know for a long time whatever was the twisted thing, and...

she would just see it as, "I'm on my own, and my father and my sister are together."

And that's what she resents her for.

She couldn't really bring herself to help her, right?

What a tragedy. What a tragedy ending.

Like, I don't think Hollywood movies will do tragedies like this.

I mean, we really went to an extreme place if you think about it.

Like, for this kind of movie to end in such a Greek-tragedy ending, right,

where, when she's about to find some closure, it's too late.

Her sister dies, and she just...

I don't think... She lets herself fall, but she's dying anyways, right?

She's bleeding to death out of the car crash.

And she has that last moment of consciousness

to have that confrontation with her sister.

But, oh, my God, what a tragedy.

Yeah, I mean, we always were aware

that we wanted to put Lisbeth through a process

where she had to confront something very deep in her.

You know, how do you take a character that's very powerful...

and has already gone through the, kind of...

you know, fighting back for what has been done to her.

How do you make that more personal?

Yeah.

I love how you even forget about the computer after she falls.

- Yeah. - Like it doesn't even matter.

But obviously we have to close this loop and...

give some closure to that story, you know.

She obviously erased the computer, and I think Needham is happy with it.

He says, "Okay, it's fine." I think he...

- He's accepting it. - He's accepting it, yeah.

He came so close to losing it, then realized the power of that,

that I think he accepts the fact that it's gone.

And he'll have to deal with that.

I think there was a longer version of this final scene, and I'm still intrigued.

It makes me think why he deletes the article. He doesn't write it.

- Obviously she said, "Don't write it." - That's why.

Yeah. I think he understands some people might write about it.

And the press will do it.

I think in this day and age it was interesting to see that,

even if it was a fact and it was a true story,

that he felt some responsibility about what is the things

that he has to report on or not.

If he really has to because he knows,

or if it's something that he could let other people write about,

and if he felt he had a responsibility with her,

he won't do it, he will just delete it.

I think it's ultimately about his relationship with her.

Yeah, he put the friendship before the job, in a way.

I mean, we used to have, remember, a scene where he's waiting for her...

in a café.

- Yes, that's where he goes. - And she doesn't turn up.

Yeah. He'll end up on the floor of the editing room.

But he would go to meet her, and she wouldn't show up.

Because she's here, because she was...

And I think a waiter was gonna say to him, "Are you waiting for someone?"

- And he would say... - "Maybe for too long."

Yeah, "I've been waiting for too long."

So we are, like, just obviously, Lisbeth dealing with this,

not in a healthy way, I guess.

- I think it's, you know... - Just doing it her own way.

- A bit of fire. - Yeah.

Which I still regret not having done... What I wanted to do

I think you opposed, which was to cut now inside the room and see...

- Camilla. Yeah. - Camilla's body.

- Maybe. - I loved that.

I still believe she's in there, like, I'm just gonna throw it out there, like,

Camilla is probably in one of those rooms.

Like Darth Vader, like...

- Being cremated. - Being cremated inside the same house.

I don't know how Lisbeth got her hand on the body.

In the end, it doesn't matter, I think.

I like to believe Camilla is burning inside that house,

and it becomes some sort of funeral pyre.

- That was it, that was... - On that note.

That was The Girl in the Spider's Web.

- I'm Fede Alvarez, I'm the director. - Jay Basu, co-writer.

Thanks very much, guys.

- Thank you for listening. - Thanks for listening.