Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Director Niels Arden Oplev Knows What Women Want (to be): Lisbeth Salander

November 5, 2010, By Christine Spines in Word&Film

Every so often, something bubbles up in the pop culture reservoir and seeps into the global groundwater, transcending every cultural, political, religious and geographical divide to saturate the pop consciousness and instantly become iconic. At one end of the spectrum, there’s “Harry Potter,” “Twilight,” and, oh, what the heck, Michael Jackson and “American Idol.” At the other end of things that make life worth living, to quote Woody Allen in Manhattan, “there’s Groucho Marx…Louis Armstrong…Willie Mays…Swedish movies, naturally.”

Swedish crime fiction has also earned a spot on that list, thanks to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, which continues enthrall readers and moviegoers worldwide. The books have sold over 30 million copies and counting. The combined grosses of the Swedish-language adaptations of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl who Played with Fire,” both released stateside earlier this year, amount to $17.5 million, placing them among the top five indie films of the year.

Now that “The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the third and final Swedish adaptation recently hit theaters here (and filming underway on David Fincher’s adaptation of Dragon Tattoo), we set out to distill what it is that’s so infectiously appealing about this series of detective stories about a socially conscious journalist and his secret weapon — a fierce-gothette-hacker-vigilante named Lisbeth Salander (played by breakout Swedish actress, Noomi Rapace). Since the primary source is unavailable — Larsson died in 2004 — we tracked down Niels Arden Oplev, who directed the original “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” who graciously hunkered down with us for over an hour to dissect all things Stieg.

Word & Film:
So what’s your take on Millennium’s addictive ingredient?

Niels Arden Oplev:
The key to the whole Larsson success is Lisbeth Salander. You have a rich family on an isolated island and in comes this classic investigating journalist with a flair for women. If you read crime novels, there’s nothing new about that. But then Lisbeth comes in. That’s his stroke of genius. She’s this punkish squatter who looks like she walked out of Berlin/Copenhagen in the 80’s.
At the same time she’s the best hacker in Sweden, which is also certainly a cliché, but she gets away with it because she’s a woman with the worst past you could ever imagine. And instead of making her a victim, he makes her a fighter. She’s the violent dark angel of revenge who draws the line in the sand that says, ‘Whatever man dares to cross this line, I will fuck you up bad.’ Women respond to the fact that she’s not a victim.


Everything bad happens to that girl. She’s raped, violated, and anybody who was ever supposed to take care of her betrays her. But she keeps going back for revenge. She took revenge on her stepfather because he beat the crap out of her mother.
She has this guy who seems to have absolute power over her and still she finds a way to get him. She’s a female Charles Bronson that takes the law into her own hands. For women to experience wanting these bad guys to die is both frightening and exciting. It illustrates to women that they too are capable of violence.

The full interview and video clip at Film&Word