Via phone, Lewis Beale interviewed Director Niels Arden Oplev and got some great soundbites…just wait till you hear what he has to say about Hollywood’s intentions to do an American version….

He initially decided that Lisbeth Salander, the hacker, was the most interesting character in the book and bumped up her part. Then he reckoned that the scenes of violence and torture in the novel were integral to an understanding of Larsson’s agenda — in Scandinavia, the book is titled “Men Who Hate Women” — so Oplev knew he needed to keep them in.

“I wanted this violence against women to be a profound part of the film,” he says by phone from a Portland, Ore., film festival. “That’s why the rape scenes are so brutal and horrific. I knew we were going to make something like a Scandinavian ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ It’s a great [book] that dares to do darkness and drama, it is character driven, and that’s what attracted me to it.”

It’s easy to see why the Swedish-language film, which was released in Scandinavia early last year and has already grossed more than $100 million, has been such a hit throughout Europe. Worldwide sales of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which includes “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and two other novels with the same characters, have surpassed 20 million copies in 41 countries, and it has been estimated that one of every three Swedes has read at least one of the Millennium books. That means a seriously large potential audience, or, as Oplev puts it, “The book is an enormous locomotion for the film, and once you have a film that fulfills the audience expectation, when you have that first wave of readers that goes, ‘Wow!,’ you pull in the non-readers.”

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