Movie Clip

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011): Opening Title Credits Video

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Title Credits

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Opening Title Credits. Tim Miller‘s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) Opening Title Credits Video was created by Blur Studios and feature Trent Reznor and Karen Oh‘s cover of Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song”. From other sources, I had read that the title credits sequence was a representation of Lisbeth Salander’s nightmare. I would have never known otherwise.

Remember I spoke of the title sequence in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) Film Review:

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The title sequence for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo outclasses most if not all James Bond title sequences to date, setting the tone for a great film and a compelling drama/thriller that is never delivered.

The title sequence is what the entirety of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo should have been and what it briefly achieves at times before frustration sets in again. The title sequence is dark, moody, intricately designed, flowing easily from bleak creation to character’s face. There are characters in bondage, in pain, and subdued by restraints. The viewer can’t stop looking at it. It is a black poem come to life, burning tar given wings aflame.

On the title credits sequence:

We spoke with co-founder of Blur and the title sequence’s creative director, Tim Miller, to uncover what sort of secret messages are hiding inside Lisbeth’s nightmare.

Now the man himself has shared how he and Fincher collaborated to bring this real-life fever dream to life

Tim Miller: [The title sequence] was always supposed to be a very abstract version of key moments in the book and about Lisbeth. It was really supposed to be her nightmare sequence. Being a hacker is such a big part of her personality and who she was, we needed some imagery for that but it’s kind of hard to represent that abstractly. So the ones we came up with were the keyboard elements.

Why did you decide to go with the oozing black tar look?

Everything was supposed to be a fever dream of Salander’s. David wanted this to be her personal nightmare, flashbacking through all these moments. Early on, we knew it was supposed to feel like a nightmare. When we originally started out he wanted to find some sort of defining creative pulsar that we could head towards — like for Alien, it was [H.R.] Giger’s work. It was the aesthetic that guided that whole movie.

We looked at a bunch of fine art, but nothing really tweaked. But there was this artist who would paint himself black and stand in the middle of a gallery, David really responded to that. And it worked with the dream sequence as well. So we gravitated to that. And, for whatever reason, a lot of the vignettes I wrote had liquid in them. Which was a big part of the story, the drowning, the river that separated the island. And David said let’s just put liquid in all of them and it will be this primordial dream ooze that’s a part of every vignette. It ties everything together other than the black on black. It became a goal early on and I rewrote all of them with some kind of gooey component that would unify them. Really, if you [freeze frame] every shot in there, you’ll find that virtually everyone liquid somewhere.

Watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Opening Title Credits Video and leave your thoughts on it in the comments section below. For more The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo photos, videos, and information, visit our The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Page.

Source: i09, Comicbookmovie

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Rollo Tomasi

Rollo Tomasi is a Connecticut-based film critic, TV show critic, news, and editorial writer. He will have a MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 2025. Rollo has written over 700 film, TV show, short film, Blu-ray, and 4K-Ultra reviews. His reviews are published in IMDb's External Reviews and in Google News. Previously you could find his work at Empire Movies, Blogcritics, and AltFilmGuide. Now you can find his work at FilmBook.
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