Gillian Flynn adapts 'Gone Girl' novel for the big screen

NEW YORK, Sept. 29 (UPI) -- Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn admits she lobbied for the job of adapting her 2012 novel into a screenplay for the film, then felt anxious about the task once she was hired.

The book and the psychological thriller it inspired begin with the vanishing of beautiful Amy Dunne on the fifth anniversary of her wedding to Nick, a handsome, laid-off magazine writer whose ambivalent attitude regarding his wife's disappearance attracts the attention of both the police and the media, making him the prime suspect in the sensational missing-person case.

Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck play Amy and Nick. Rounding out the cast are Tyler Perry as Nick's brilliant, press-savvy lawyer and Neil Patrick Harris as Amy's wealthy, creepy ex-boyfriend. The movie was helmed by David Fincher, the director of Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

"It was a very tricky proposition and the entire time when it was about to be purchased for a film, I was like: 'Only I can adapt it. It has to be me. It has to be me. It has to be me!'" recalled Flynn at a weekend New York Film Festival press conference. "And then they were like, 'It's you,' and I was like: 'No! No!' It seemed to be a little too much to take on once I started getting into it," she said of boiling her book down to a screenplay. "For me, the important thing was to not be slavishly devoted to exactly every plotline, but to make sure that it ultimately felt like the book. I was very concerned with the tone and keeping the dark heart of it and not turning it into a pure whodunit. ... Keeping the relationships and the weird nuances intact."

Gone Girl opens in U.S. theaters Friday.