20 Things You Didn't Know About Gone Girl

It's been almost six years since the director's previous effort, Gone Girl, hit cinemas.

Adapted from Gillian Flynn's New York Times Best Seller - with a script also penned by the author, no less - Gone Girl revolves around Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a man who becomes the prime suspect in his wife Amy's (Rosamund Pike) disappearance.

Criminally nominated for just a single Oscar - for Rosamund Pike's magnetic performance - Gone Girl may not be Fincher's best movie, but it's certainly a measured, technically astonishing adaptation of a script which, in lesser hands, could've easily come across as too silly for its own good.

Despite its brain-breaking plot twists and divergences into unapologetic soap opera territory, it's grounded at all times by Fincher's patient direction and the immaculate performances of its killer cast.

And like basically every Fincher movie, its conception is at least as interesting as the film itself, with Fincher and his cast providing a ton of fascinating stories about Gone Girl's production...

David Fincher is noted for his perfectionism as a filmmaker, and during principal photography on Gone Girl that extended to filming a staggering 500 hours of footage over the course of the 100-day shoot.

That's an average of five hours of footage shot per day, an extremely high amount for a major Hollywood movie given the enormous complexities involved with lighting and blocking a scene before filming can begin.

Given the film's 149 minute runtime, that's a shooting ratio of roughly 200:1 for footage which actually ended up in the final film.

For comparison's sake, Fincher's own The Social Network saw the director film 324 hours, so this is quite an extreme uptick even for him.

According to producer (and Fincher's wife) Ceán Chaffin, he filmed an average of 50 takes per scene. Wow.