'The Breakdown': Rainn Wilson on Gillian Flynn’s 'Utopia' To me, she boiled down to a question we all ultimately have in an existential way, which is: “Why am I here?” She was this dangerous child with one mission. She had kind of an arrested development from around age 12, but she could also completely eviscerate you with a sharp edge of a toothbrush. She was raised to assume that everyone was out to kill her. I liked that she was an incredibly dangerous warrior-child - that she had never been given the grace to grow up entirely or to have relationships in a normal way. She actually very much reminds me of Libby. The Comic-Con I invented completely I liked the idea of the search for this important manuscript being hidden among that kind of chaos.Īnd I loved Jessica Hyde. After I watched Dennis Kelly’s Utopia I took a couple of notes about what pieces I liked and how I could incorporate them, and then I never looked at it again. Jessica seems like one of your fierce women. She reminds me of Libby from your book Dark Places, who survives her family’s murder and becomes an obsession for people at crime cons.
I was wondering what drew you, specifically, to Jessica Hyde. When I was pitching it, I was actually calling it Goonies meets Marathon Man - maybe the weirdest combo ever, but it felt correct. I took all my cues from those great Seventies conspiracy thrillers that came out after Watergate - you know, stuff like All the President’s Men and Parallax View. I wanted it to feel very, very realistic. And I liked the concept of being able to write about where we are and feel it - feel that sense that I think we all do, that we’re kind of on the edge of choices that are really going to make a difference in the future. I kind of hooked onto the idea that the end of the world is coming, and that the answer is in something as silly and as easy to disregard as a comic book. I really wanted to do my own version of it. How did you want to differentiate your version from the original?ĭennis Kelly’s version is really sleek. In addition to walking around the Gone Girl set and this place that had been in my head forever, we were kind of setting up what the next thing might be. And that’s when he talked to me about Utopia. So, I rented an obscenely awesome muscle car - like an orange and black striped Dodge Charger convertible - and ate my way down to Cape Girardeau with all sorts of horrible gas station food. And I’ll direct every episode, and you’ll write every episode.” I’m like, “What is it?” And he’s like, “Come down and we’ll talk about it.” He kept saying, “Come down and see the set.” And I was like, “It’s really hard to get there from Chicago.” I was just being lazy.Īnd then he sends me this intriguing text message one day that was like: “Hey, you know, I got something for us to do next after Gone Girl. We were still working on Gone Girl at the time and they were down in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, filming it. Rolling Stone spoke with Flynn leading up to the premiere about writing for television, the future of thrillers, and why she wasn’t cut out to be a police reporter.
UTOPIA BOOK GILLIAN FLYNN SERIES
The Amazon series was instead directed by Toby Haynes, Susanna Fogel, and J.D. The pair were set to collaborate again on Utopia, but Fincher did not go on to the final project. She also penned the screenplay for a 2014 film adaptation of Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher.
UTOPIA BOOK GILLIAN FLYNN TV
The show is Flynn’s latest foray into TV since co-writing HBO’s Gothic mystery series Sharp Objects, which was based on her 2006 debut novel. Girls especially need that particular skill set of fierceness - the willingness to push back.”įlynn famously instills that ferocity into each of her female leads - from the scheming, brilliant Amy Elliott Dunne of her breakout 2012 novel Gone Girl to the ice-veined heist squad of the 2018 Steve McQueen film Widows to Jessica Hyde, the nearly feral protagonist of Utopia, a new Amazon Prime series debuting September 25th and based on Dennis Kelly’s original British show. “There’s an instinct to tame, I think, and I try to resist that. “She could go feral very quickly, and I say that with all affection,” the bestselling thriller writer-turned-showrunner tells Rolling Stone. The girl is affectionately known as “Kick” - after what she used to do in the womb while the author was working away on the TV series. Gillian Flynn’s new show Utopia has been in the works since roughly the time her 6-year-old daughter was conceived.
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