SHOOT STORY | THE G I RL I N THE SP I DER ’ S WEB
LEFT Claire Foy on set as the film’s protagonist, Lisbeth Salander.
P edro Luque almost became an into architecture, but suddenly a friend of mine said he was going to start something. A film school.” To Luque, this made sense: he’d been interested in art photography since early childhood. “My dad is an architect and my mom is a psychologist. At home, there were always pencils and pens and paper, and I used to draw a lot. I started to go to comic book classes when I was thirteen or fourteen, and when I was 16 I used to go to painting classes... I was a fan of sci-fi, of literature in general, of comic books. And my dad gave me a camera, a Canon FD he had... I figured that film had a bit of literature, a bit of comic books!” “At that time,” Pedro continues, “Uruguay didn’t have a film industry at all. We shoot a lot of commercials there now, though I haven’t lived there in five years. But in the year I started at film school, my painting mentor was asked to do the production design on a small movie.” Pedro was invited to get involved, and as a result “never stopped working and studying at the same time... by the end of film school, I think I’d shot 25 short films or something like that, almost everyone’s short. Then, when we were twenty, I met [director] Fede [Alvarez] – he was editing and I was a camera assistant shooting commercials.” Soon, Pedro and Alvarez found themselves collaborating as cinematographer and director on commercials and music videos. A move to the USA was prompted by a successful viral short, directed by Alvarez, and the prompting of cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (of Hellboy and Pacific Rim fame) during a chance encounter. Pedro’s projects with Alvarez include 2016’s Don’t Breathe and, now, The Girl in the Spider’s Web . The film is described as a soft reboot of the Dragon Tattoo series, which was first adapted in the 2009 Swedish architect. “I’m from Uruguay. When you’re eighteen, you have to choose what you want to do. I was leaning
I used to go to painting classes... I was a fan of sci-fi, of literature in general, of comic books
production directed by Niels Arden Oplev. The films, and their misfit protagonist Lisbeth Salander, are perhaps better known in the English-speaking world from David Fincher’s 2011 English-language adaptation, in which Salander is played by Rooney Mara. NOT STIEG LARSSON The Girl in the Spider’s Web is the first in the series not based on a novel by the late Stieg Larsson, instead having been adapted by the director from a book by David Lagercrantz, who continued the series after Larsson’s death in 2004. Taking place almost exclusively in Sweden, the story follows Salander (played for the first time by Claire Foy) and her journalist acquaintance Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) as they pursue stolen military technology and uncover uncomfortable facts about Salander’s background; the film is tagged “discover what made her the girl.” Production took place in Berlin and Stockholm for three months, ending in early April 2018.
18 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 20 1 8
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