NEW YORK - Director David Fincher is often seen as the genius who has frequently subverted the thriller genre and proven himself the master of killer cinema with films such as Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

This makes him the perfect fit to helm the screen version of Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn’s much-talked about bestselling novel about a missing wife, her potentially murderous husband and the multitude of twists and turns that is their marriage. Flynn, who was at the 52nd New York Film Festival two weeks ago where Gone Girl premiered said that she had hoped that Fincher would be the one who would direct the silver screen version of her book, of which she also wrote the adapted screenplay.

“I think he’s known for the dread in his movies and the claustrophobia and sense of place and all these things, but he’s underrated for these weird bursts of humour that are in his films. And I thought this would be the guy to keep those in there, and I think those moments are really important, particularly with the media,” she said.

Leading man Ben Affleck who plays Nick Dunne, the grieving and possibly guilty husband who sweats it out under national spotlight when his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) is declared missing, echoed Flynn’s sentiment.

“We wanted to give truth to Gillian’s really dark look at marriage and David’s subversive take on that,” said Affleck. “It’s all about the director ... I would have done the phone book with David, so you can imagine my relief when I read Gone Girl and it wasn’t just an alphabetical list of names,” he joked.

“It was great to work with him and I learned a great deal ... I would do it again and again and again, a million times. It was a joy. David, despite his reputation, is a very funny and nice guy. Not just a demon. That’s the pull quote.”

With so much love and rave coming from his fellow collaborators, we jumped at the chance to pick the brain of this Oscar nominee and navigate our way through all the usual Fincher trademarks of technical mastery, thriller terrain and gripping story-telling. Here’s what we found out:

David Fincher loved reading the book

It felt like Gillian was on to something that I hadn’t seen before. I felt she had identified this notion that there’s a narcissistic projection not only of who we want to be seen as, but who we want to be seen with. And that can become a very resentful relationship as soon as one of those participants decides, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m no longer interested in being the spouse of your dreams.’ That seemed a salient and modern look at interpersonal relationships. All of the twisty, turny, crime fiction aspect of it was good and I enjoyed the plotting, but that wasn’t the thing that I thought, ‘I haven’t seen this before’.

David Fincher doesn’t think the book has a cynical take on how people present themselves in relationships.

Is cynicism a concern? No; I think that, for the most part, people who are concerned with something being overly cynical are usually timid. I think that’s just reality. Why are 50 per cent of marriages failing? That’s not me being cynical, that’s just math. I know what I’ve seen and I know what I’ve been involved with, and I know how tricky it can be. It’s not a sociological treatise, it’s a thriller, but it’s on that foundation of: ‘How do we know who we’re with at night? How do we know what they’re capable of?’

David Fincher didn’t feel the need to make his Gone Girl characters more ‘likeable’ for the screen.

I think likability has become sort of synonymous with obsequiousness. And I do not really know what’s to be gained from addressing or defining the ‘likability’ of characters. The question is ‘Are they compelling?’ I think that both these characters seemed realistic to me. I knew people that were like them.

David Fincher liked collaborating with Gillian Flynn.

It an incredibly nourishing process of being able to work with someone who was totally committed to make sure their story was told not just in the most complete way. It was never about page count with Gillian. I think that she writes for Gillian Flynn, 15-year-old movie fan sitting in the third row, scarfing down popcorn and following the story. And that’s a rare thing. A lot of times people will throw the baby out with the bathwater and often people will dig in their heels and say, “This is really, really important to me ....” when no one can figure out how to include it. It is not about finding somebody who is going to maul their own work. You need to be able to have a conversation with the writer to say, “I cannot have this little kernel, which is a great idea and perfectly positioned and phrased in the novel, because I cannot show it”. And she was always about, “What if we show it this way?” So I think that was the great news. We had somebody there who was more than capable of, more than enthusiastic about, saying, “How do I show instead of say?”

David Fincher thinks the film is about modern relationships, the media and tabloid sensationalism.

I think that the film is first and foremost, a ripping yarn and that secondarily, it has just enough medicine to make it pertinent. Our biggest concern was to do justice to the very delicate alchemy that Gillian was able to achieve, which is that it has all the sort of lurid trappings of a mystery/thriller, but that it has salient things to say about interpersonal, intersexual politics, and expectations. I felt like (the story of Gone Girl) was sort of ripped from the headlines of the 24-hour cable news cycle. I think that the story is kind of oddly not the purview of cinema. In a weird way it has its roots more in reality television, and tragedy vampirism.

David Fincher thinks Ben Affleck is perfect as Nick.

I was looking for something very specific. I felt that the most important attribute that he had to have was, in a guileless way, to be able to put both feet in his mouth and commit character suicide in front of the onslaught, the pressure of the press that’s coming after Nick. I felt that it was incredibly beneficial to have somebody who had been through that kind of media scrutiny and knew what it was like to be a character in a narrative that one has no control over. And Ben has great wit about it. He can speak to that state of things in a way that is frustrating and horrifying and intensely humorous, and not a lot of people can. So that was a real benefit.

David Fincher thinks Rosamund Pike is perfect as Amy.

Rosamund had two things that were of great interest to me. The first was her opacity. I had seen her probably in three or four movies, and had no real read on her. That’s a rare thing for me. I sort of pride myself on being able to pick up on how many arrows an actor has in their quiver, and what their mechanism is. If you’re in the business of watching people’s behaviour on TV, which is basically all directing is, you learn to read people very quickly as it relates to the things that they fall back on, the tricks that they tend to use. But I didn’t have a read on her, and I thought that that was interesting. The second thing was that I knew Amy had to be an only child. When I met Rosamund, she was a dyed in the wool only child. I mean, she just exudes it. She’s an orchid. And you get that. She was socialized with adults, and I thought that was really interesting.

David Fincher loves collaborating with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Well, this is going to sound weird. I told Trent And Atticus, after showing them the movie, ‘The movie’s about facades. The movie is about the appearance of the good neighbor, the good husband, the good wife. So I want you to do your version of spa music. The kind of music that one hears when one goes to get a massage. I want it to be that music that reassures us that everything’s going to be okay’. But, of course I want it to be the Trent and Atticus version of that, which I don’t think will ever make anyone feel okay…

Gone Girl opens in cinemas tomorrow.