I've Had My Hollywood Fun

Gillian Flynn has gone from literary sensation to one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters. But as her latest film Widows is released, she tells Hannah Flint why she’s ready to leave movies behind.

- Hannah Flint

WHEN GILLIAN FLYNN released Gone Girl six years ago, it wasn’t just the plotline – compelling, disturbing and unpredictable as it was – that led to two million people buying it in its first year alone. It was the woman at the centre of the twists and turns who had us all enthralled.

Amy Elliott-Dunne – later played by Rosamund Pike after Gillian sold the rights to the film for $1.5 million and wrote the screenplay – was beautiful, manipulative and really quite sociopathic. Gillian has routinely been described as a ‘misogynist’ for daring to show a woman so far from perfection, claims that were repeated earlier this year when her debut book, Sharp Objects, was transformed into an eight-part TV series. The main character Camille was equally difficult to digest: scarred – emotionally by her past, physically by self-harm – and drinking to numb her pain.

Gillian has always defended her female protagonists by arguing that she wants to represent ‘every kind of woman’, pointing out it’s all just fiction anyway. And yet. Gillian’s women aren’t just slightly deranged: the point is often that it’s their anger that makes them so. At a time when women’s anger is fast becoming a political force for good, can Gillian still play the fiction card? ‘We’ve reached a particular playing field where Amy’s anger is exactly appropriate, unfortunately,’ admits Gillian, speaking from her home in Chicago, where she’s just done the school run with her two children. ‘That anger is increasingly normal. I mean, how could it not be, considering what’s going on?’