CS Video: Charlize Theron Heads to Dark Places

Stars Charlize Theron and Christina Hendricks join Gillian Flynn and Gilles Paquet-Brenner to discuss this Friday’s Dark Places

Before she wrote Gone Girl, novelist Gillian Flynn had a hit with her 2009 best seller, Dark Places. The story of a woman forced to return to an intensively-traumatic childhood event, the thriller comes to the big screen this week from A24 Films.

Directed and adapted for the screen by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, the filmmaker behind 2010’s Sarah’s Key, Dark Places stars Academy Award winner Charlize Theron in the leading role of Libby Day. When she was seven years old, Day’s family was murdered and it was her testimony against her own brother that helped convict him as the killer. Now, approached by a group fascinated with interesting crimes (the “Kill Club,” the membership of which includes Flynn herself in a brief cameo), Day finally begins to look back and question what really happened on that life-shattering day.

Sitting down with ComingSoon.net, Theron joins Flynn, Paquet-Brenner and co-star Christina Hendricks to talk about their big screen version of the book. With a story unfolding in twin narratives (one in present day and one 25 years in the past), Hendricks plays Patty Day, mother to the seven-year-old Libby. In the player below, you can watch as the cast and crew discuss their approach to telling a story across dual time periods. Also, find out what Flynn did to give French helmer Paquet-Brenner a literal taste of the American heartland.

Also starring Tye Sheridan, Drea de Matteo, Nicholas Hoult, Chloe Grace Moretz, Corey Stoll, Sterling Jerins and Shannon Kook, Dark Places hits theaters in a limited release Friday, August 7 and is available now exclusively on DIRECTV.