Best-Seller 'Gone Girl' Heads to Cinemas | Wall Street Journal 

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Gillian Flynn swears that she wasn\'t casting Ben Affleck in her mind while writing "Gone Girl," her best-selling novel about a woman named Amy who goes missing and her husband, Nick, the prime suspect in her disappearance. But right down to the cleft in his chin and, as the book says, a face so handsome and at times so smug that "people want to punch you," the novel\'s Nick looks a lot like Mr. Affleck, who plays him in the movie.

Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Ms. Flynn, "Gone Girl" will open this year\'s New York Film Festival. Like Mr. Fincher\'s "The Social Network," which opened the festival in 2010, it comes with that mix of artistic credibility and mainstream box-office potential.

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More than 7.7 million copies of the novel have been sold world-wide. Readers seized upon a tale that is part crime story, part scathing account of a media frenzy and mostly a portrait of a marriage that turns lethally bad. The relationship sours when the economic collapse forces the couple to leave their upscale New York life for small-town Missouri, where much of the film was shot.

Rosamund Pike plays the golden-haired Amy, who has plenty of secrets of her own. But "Nick is the trickiest role in the film," Ms. Flynn says. He has to project "that duality where you think this guy may have killed his wife, yet you never lose affection for him. I knew Ben could pull that off—he\'s a smart-alecky kind of guy with an inherent likability."

Ms. Flynn did have the director in mind from the start. "There are scenes in the book that I wrote specifically from having watched way too many David Fincher movies, like the mall scene," in which Nick and his friends look for Amy in a dark, abandoned shopping center taken over by homeless people and drug-dealers.

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Fincher movies often have murders, such as the serial killings in "Zodiac" and a scene in "Seven," in which Gwyneth Paltrow\'s severed (but unseen) head is famously put in a box. But Mr. Fincher also directed the blackly comic "Fight Club."

"It would be very easy for the book to be turned into a straight procedural thriller," Ms. Flynn says. "I was worried about losing the dark humor of the book, and I knew David Fincher wouldn\'t shy away from that."

The movie echoes the novel\'s structure, a dueling literary narrative that alternates between Nick\'s first-person account and Amy\'s diary entries. But in the film, as Ms. Flynn puts it: "Certain characters have come to the forefront," including Nick\'s twin sister and confidante, Go (Carrie Coon, who plays Nora Durst on HBO\'s "The Leftovers"). Other supporting roles include Tyler Perry, who plays Nick\'s media-manipulating lawyer, and Neil Patrick Harris as Desi, a former boyfriend of Amy\'s who may have turned stalker.

Already, a kerfuffle about the movie\'s ending has erupted online. The convoluted origins are in an interview where Mr. Fincher noted that Mr. Affleck said Ms. Flynn had revamped the third act. The director was referring to the screenplay, pointing out that Ms. Flynn was open to revising scenes and dialogue. But the takeaway became: She changed the ending! The filmmakers have teasingly leaned into the hype, declining to confirm or deny any changes. As Ms. Flynn says, "That\'s why people say, \'Don\'t tell me the ending.\' "

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