I was willing to do anything for him, be naked, whatever. I just wanted to be in his film because I believed that it was going to be great. After that, I grew to love him as a friend and love spending time with him, and you’re really lucky if the people that you get to be around for work enrich your life. I learned an enormous amount from David. And I was experienced enough to pay close enough attention and to know enough to really learn more, because I had directorial context with which to appreciate what he was doing.
One of the things I learned was that, through repetition, he creates a sense of total freedom—because he’s going to do it so many times that you just lose any sense of artifice. I often said to him, “Are you looking for perfection?” He was like, “I’m looking for mistakes.” That was incredibly revealing and telling, but he’s also incredibly prepared and hardworking. I’ve never met anybody that I respected, or worked with anybody I really respected, who didn’t work exceedingly hard. I understood from him that the harder you work, the likelier you are to get the outcome that you want. The higher a standard you hold yourself to, the likelier you are to have a result that you’re happy about, that correlates with what you’re trying to do.
In terms of Rosamund, I don’t know that I ever really got to know her. She always remained kind of enigmatic and mysterious to me. She does to this day, which I think helped the movie.
You already started this thought, but Gone Girl and Animals both have a dynamic within the marriage of needing to get on the same page for the story you’re going to tell the media about your marriage and your public life.
Both movies liken marriage in interesting ways to criminal conspiracies. That notion, to me, is very David. Animals does not go to the extremes that Gone Girl went to, but they’re both asking the question: How close do you need to be? How intimate? How vulnerable do you need to be in a marriage? What does it mean to be married to someone and to tie your fates together, and how incredibly painful betrayal can be in that most intimate of unions because—if you have children, like we did in Animals, but even without—marriage is the sum of what you have put together, all of your resources and your reputation, into one big thing. It’s the scariest thing we can do, because we’re the most vulnerable when we combine.
Both Gone Girl and Animals are about married couples who aren’t telling each other the whole truth, or being their true selves with one another. In a way, the “cool girl” speech in Gone Girl applies in a slightly different way: these are two people wanting to show one another the appealing side of themselves, the attractive side, the side the other person will like or approve of, and are afraid to reveal any of the other stuff because the risk and reward are quite high. The reward is, what if I could be loved for everything that I am, warts and all? Wouldn’t that be an even more wonderful feeling of intimacy and love? But then, what if I’m rejected for that?
Isn’t that even a more profound rejection? Both movies speak to how much we invest in that relationship, and use external factors in public life and all that stuff to raise and heighten those tensions. Now that I think about it, I probably owe a lot more to Gone Girl than I even thought.