Stieg Larsson

I mean, it's, it's, it's sort of as if someone does leave something unfinished, the desire to finish it is almost overwhelming, which is why you do have to have some control over it sometimes.

So someone like Stieg Larsson, who did the, you know, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo-

Yeah

...

the Millennium Trilogy, and they were published posthumously.

Stieg Larsson died having, having delivered that, um, that trilogy, and they became such a huge, like an enormous success.

Uh, and the family then, uh, the estate got David, uh, Lagercrantz to do another book in the Millennium Trilogy, and again, Stieg Larsson's widow was not happy with that.

And you can sort of see, I mean, it was so enormous, and of course the money does go into the estate-

You have to bring in an unpredictable, asymmetric threat.

Which brings us to the icy, unforgiving expanse of Sweden and Stieg Larsson's 2005 global phenomenon, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Such a massive book.

Huge.

But worse than that, he strongly suspects that the killer is a member of his own family.

And the Wanger family serves as this microcosm of extreme privilege, hidden history, and deeply rooted corruption.

Stieg Larsson weaves in the real history of Swedish neutrality during World War II and the hidden Nazi sympathies among some of the Swedish upper class.

It's so dense and layered.

Oh, yeah, she's cool.

From Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.

Yeah.

Do you remember the Millennium?

Great book.

That's Stieg Larsson, right?

Yeah.

Um, not gonna lie, the R-ing scene fucked me up bad.

Huge author.

You have the Swedish author Stieg Larsson, who wrote the absolute juggernaut that was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Everyone was reading that.

Everyone.

It is better to drop incidental hints about her past along the way, maintaining our intrigue, than to explicitly reveal her past which may satisfy our curiosity, but which may also reduce our fascination with the character.

Stieg Larsson constructed his trilogy around Lisbeth's character and backstory, so that she is the element around which the themes pivot.

But I would suggest that in the cinema, the themes are the essential element, to be explored by a character made incidentally human and intriguing, rather than have the character become the focus.

It seems to me that this mistake has been made with the James Bond, Doctor Who and even Jason Bourne franchises.

...

Stieg Larsson, is it, who did the-

Sherlock Holmes has a few.

Yeah.

Um, I am ...

I'm currently reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson.

Ooh.

Yeah.

Uh, so the Swedish version, uh, you know, to the extent it can be, uh, re- remains quite faithful to the text.

The American version has flipped much of the focus away from Lisbeth, uh, Salander, the main character, to- The male, uh, investigative journalist, um, Mikael Blomkvist, he's, he's the man, he's the centerpiece of it, and she kind of does his bidding to some extent and is, you know, wishes that he was more interested in her, which is a, a, a completely different sense, let's call it, of that relationship than, than is in the original book and in, and in the Swedish version of the movie.

So there's no doubt that from a cultural point of view, I don't know if that was inevitable or whether the screenwriters of the English version thought, "We better reassert a little bit of the, of the US gender preferences in these relationships, uh, uh, to the one which, um, Stieg Larsson, mm, conceptualized in, in, in the book."

Mm.