Blur Studio, the creator of the vivid opening, was given a mandate by Fincher to make the two-and-a-half-minute sequence a conceptual re-creation of Larsson’s full Millennium trilogy — and to completely turn the idea of title sequences on its head
The oil-drenched title sequence that opens David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo includes mesmerizing details from all three of Stieg Larsson’s books about hacker heroine Lisbeth Salander, not just the one upon which the movie is based.
That might seem like an odd choice, but it was intentional.
Blur Studio, the creator of the vivid opening, was given a mandate by Fincher to make the two-and-a-half-minute sequence a conceptual re-creation of Larsson’s full Millennium trilogy — and to completely turn the idea of title sequences on its head.
“I got a call from him, it was the middle of the night in Sweden and he was on some shoot that was going really bad,” Tim Miller, Blur’s co-founder and the creative director behind the sequence, said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “And he calls me and he says, ‘Look, you’re going to do this thing and it’s going to redefine titles for our generation the way Se7en did and that’s all there is to it.’”
So, as happened with Se7en‘s title sequence, a song produced by Trent Reznor (in this case a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” with Karen O and Atticus Ross) became an eerie opening soundtrack, and Blur set about bringing Fincher’s primordial-ooze fever dream to life. (See the Dragon Tattoo opening title sequence above.)
To get what Fincher wanted, Blur worked with the director to pick out general and specific moments in the trilogy that could be demonstrated visually — a pressed flower, wasps, the instruments of hacking, Lisbeth Salander’s father being set on fire, and, of course, the dragon alluded to in the title.
Blur ended up with 26 moments approved by Fincher, then composed them into 252 shots of 24 frames or fewer. Each piece was created electronically using 3ds Max, RealFlow (for the oily goo), Softimage and other software, as well as 3-D scans of principal actors Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig (to get their likenesses right).
It was a tall order, but the crew at Blur’s Venice, California, headquarters completed the project in a few months. (Watch a clip of Blur’s computer renderings coming together below.)
So what was it like for Miller, who has known Fincher for a while and worked on other projects with him, to create something for a director infamous for his meticulousness? He admits he had fears the Dragon Tattoo intro would get nit-picked — or “pixel-fucked” — to death. But as it turns out, the opening title sequence came together with very few snags.
“It was pretty smooth-flowing,” Miller said.
Update: An earlier version of this story contained a quote from a press release that was attributed to director David Fincher. After publication, the publicity company informed Wired.com that the quote did not come from Fincher. The quote has been removed.
