A Mulligan for The American Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Despite the brilliance of Noomi Rapace in the original Swedish Film version of Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, it seems that Producer Scott Rudin and Director David Fincher have cast British actress Carey Mulligan as Lisabeth Salander in the US remake, reports The Sunday Times this morning –

FOR Carey Mulligan, who sprang to fame last year in the hit British film, An Education, Hollywood has come knocking. She is set to play Lisbeth Salander, punk heroine of the bestselling thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Mulligan has won the approval of David Fincher, the director, and also the family of the late Stieg Larsson, the Swedish author who created Salander. The choice follows weeks of casting rumours, with producers sifting through nearly 5,000 potential candidates.

Hollywood insiders say Mulligan can expect to be paid up to £10m for the three films covering Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which has sold 1m copies in Britain and 25m worldwide. This will make her one of Britain’s best-paid actresses.

Mulligan has made no secret of her desire to play Salander, a fierce “biker chick” computer hacker who helps an out-of-luck journalist investigate a long-missing woman in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the trilogy.

“I am obsessed with those books,” she said last month. “I would love to do them. I am not going to lie about that. I would love to play Lisbeth Salander.”

Since then Scott Rudin, the Hollywood producer who shared an Oscar with the Coen brothers for No Country for Old Men in 2008 and been nominated for 13 other Oscars, has won over the family of Larsson, who died in 2004. They had been wary about the prospect of a Hollywood film.

“They now understand what kind of film he is making and they like Carey,” said an industry source last week.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has already been filmed in Swedish under its original title, Men Who Hate Women, with Noomi Rapace, a stage actress, playing the bisexual Salander. It was popular in Scandinavia but its subtitles have prevented it becoming a mainstream hit in America, where it opened last month.

The new version may be relocated to Canada as a compromise for American audiences. It will not reach cinemas until all three books have been turned into Swedish-language films by the team behind the television hit Wallander.

The final decision on casting will be made soon by Fincher, director of Fight Club, Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He has been talking to Mulligan’s representatives at Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, which has been seeking a “breakout” role for their young British client.

Read More from The Sunday Times Here

Larsson in Washington

In today’s Washington Post is a lengthy feature on the Stieg Larsson Phenomena which now has infected the US. Thanks to Knopf Publishing –

"He takes you to a darker side of Sweden," says Paul Bogaards, director of publicity at Knopf. "A lot of Americans, when they think of Sweden they think of Saab and Volvo and Absolut. There are much darker undertones to Swedish society that Larsson hints at in all his novels."

Bogaards says the "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" has sold 200,000 paperback copies in the United States and orders are already coming in for the sequel, set for release in July. The third installment is currently being translated into English. A movie based on Larsson's books, featuring a tattooed computer hacker and a disgraced journalist, will hit screens in Sweden later this year.
Larsson never got to experience the success.

"He would have been overwhelmed, just like us, and proud and happy," says Eva Gedin, head of publishing at Swedish publisher Norstedts.

Gedin, who worked closely with Larsson, recalls how the author delivered the manuscripts of the first two books in a plastic bag as he was about to finish the third. Norstedts signed a three-book contract right away ¿ an unusual deal for a debuting fiction writer.

"He had a great deal of positive responses from us at the publishing house and ... by key people in the book store industry who said that this was brilliant," Gedin says. Larsson is the latest of many Swedish crime writers to win international acclaim, from the team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in the 1960s to the more recent Henning Mankell, creator of the gloomy detective Kurt Wallander in such books as "Faceless Killers," "Sidetracked," "Firewall" and "Before the Frost."
The Scandinavian crime writing tradition also includes Denmark's Peter Hoeg, whose "Smilla's Sense of Snow" became an international best seller in the 1990s and a movie starring Julia Ormond, Vanessa Redgrave and Gabriel Byrne.
Set in a scenic Nordic landscape of serene lakes and lonely red cabins, Larsson's trilogy follows computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomqvist as they get entangled in a series of murder mysteries. Like Mankell, Larsson weaves in social commentary, with democracy and women's rights as prominent themes.

That, the exotic setting and an introspective streak are what set apart Swedish crime writing in a genre dominated by U.S. and British novelists, says Maxine Clarke, a critic at the Britain-based Web site Euro Crime, which specializes in European crime literature.

In Swedish crime novels, Clarke says, "one gets to know the characters' domestic lives and concerns as background to the plots ¿ one feels they are real people rather than, in some other thriller genres, characters who only seem to exist to take part in the novel's main story."

Swedish crime literature has become a phenomenon in Europe, so much so that the Germans have invented a new word for it: "Schwedenkrimi." And the southern town of Ystad offers popular "Wallander" tours, showing visitors the neighborhoods where Mankell's sullen detective solves one grisly crime after another.

Still, Mankell dislikes talking about a Swedish crime fiction genre, saying that above all he has been inspired by Sherlock Holmes and classical Greek drama.
"Of course, I also read Sjowall-Wahloo but one must not forget that they in turn were very influenced by Ed McBain, and who influenced Ed McBain? He was absolutely influenced by Sherlock Holmes," Mankell says.

As for Larsson, he primarily drew inspiration from British and American authors such as Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid and Elizabeth George. Salander's character, however, was inspired by the strong-willed redhead Pippi Longstocking in the children's books by the late Astrid Lindgren.

Read the full piece here

Larsson 'Down-Under'

The first review from Australia for Stieg Larsson’s ‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’ is out and is an insightful reflection on the novel as well as the state of thrillers –

It's fashionable at the moment -- maybe the influence of best-selling authors such as Lee Child and especially James Patterson -- to have everything in motion, hurtling towards the climax and resolution with carefully calculated cliff-hangers. Too many new authors seemed to have taken notice of Elmore Leonard's famous remark that he leaves out the bits that he knows readers will skip.

But Larsson is interested in more than the answers to the riddles his novels create. It's the process of solution that is the point. And his stories articulate a moral interpretation of the suffering and conflict he presents in what are really social crime novels.

On this level, The Girl Who Played with Fire is a police procedural in the tradition of newly resurgent Scandinavian crime fiction, especially the books of Henning Mankell, creator of Sweden's Inspector Wallander. That cop, carrying a Strinbergian weight of gloom, has been a mouthpiece for growing insecurity, anger and healthy insights about the relationship between the Swedish welfare state and democracy.

Read More from The Australian and the Shots Review of ‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’ here