When you head to theaters to watch The Girl in the Spider's Web, don't be surprised to see quite a few changes from the source material, the novel by David Lagercrantz. While, overall, the movie follows the story told in the book, there are a number of details and plot points that have either been changed or dropped altogether.
Of course, that's not necessarily unique to this particular film. Most book adaptations change things up to fit the narrative of the movie or simply to keep a film from running 19 hours long.
For Fede Álvarez, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Jay Basu and Steven Knight, the changes are an important part of showing who this movie's Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) is and it all started with the very first draft of the script. "We started with a draft from Steven Knight, a brilliant British writer, and he did that part of choosing what part of books were going to be made into a movie," Álvarez told GameSpot.
From there, he sat down with Basu to shape the story. "When we wrote it, it was more about choosing the themes and focusing on the themes I care about personally, which had more to do with family and guilt and secrets and shame," he explained.
Those themes are not only central in The Girl in the Spider's Web but to the kind of films Álvarez prefers to make. As he told GameSpot, "I'm interested in seeing the real human being behind the flawed human being." With this film, he's giving audiences the chance to know Lisbeth as a flawed human being and how she got to be that way, beginning with her family and childhood.
However, he's also spending time on the importance of the person she's become because of those influences. Throughout The Girl in the Spider's Web, Lisbeth is more of a computer hacking vigilante than anything else, righting wrongs as she sees fit.
While it remains to be seen how fans of the book will take to the changes in the film, it's clear that Álvarez knows exactly what his vision for Lisbeth Salander is. You'll be able to see her when The Girl in the Spider's Web hits theaters on November 9.
