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Morning Joe crew interviews Steven Spielberg about his new film “Lincoln.”

There’s plenty of buss around The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the new film from director David Fincher. Wired has a great profile of Fincher, with some interesting stories about his obsession with detail.

For much of the past year, Fincher has been filming The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, his roughly $100 million adaptation of the macabre Swedish mystery that centers on a punk-hacker heroine with distinctive skin art. On one of the first nights of shooting, Fincher and his crew were in Sweden, filming a murder scene that takes place alongside a gloomy dock. But after a night’s work, Fincher didn’t have the shot he wanted, and the film’s ultratight schedule meant he wouldn’t be able to return for months.

When Fincher began planning the reshoot, he learned that the property had been sold to one of the guys in ABBA. Apparently, the new owner—either Benny or Björn, it’s not really clear—wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of having his evening stroll interrupted by a simulated drowning, and he refused to let the crew come back. Rather than find a new location or make do with the footage he had, Fincher decided to build his own Swedish dock.

Which is why, on a late-summer afternoon, we’re standing on a Los Angeles soundstage, examining a replica of a rural-Scandinavia mise-en-scène: mossy rocks, foliage-fat trees, and—perched high above the docks, turtlenecking out of the woods—a squat, deceptively cozy faux cottage. Like most sets, it looks a bit weird naked. But once the lights hit and the smoke drifts in, we are suddenly in the land of stunted summers and moderately high suicide rates.

I guess his approach is a bit different than that taken by Clint Eastwood, who loves going with the first take when he feels it’s good enough.

Martin Scorsese is profiled in a recent feature in Fast Company. The in-depth article offers some insight into the way he makes movies and his respect for past filmmakers.

His latest film “Hugo” is not quite what you would expect from this great director. But it’s beautifully shot as you can see from the trailer above. Scorsese and the film were nominated for Hollywood’s Critics’ Choice Awards and the film received a Golden Globe nomination for best drama. We’ll see if he gets acknowledged this year at The Oscars.

This is pretty funny. Olivia Munn let loose with some allegations, and then Brett Ratner responds in an interview promoting “Tower Heist.”

Director Steven Spielberg is honored as Commander in the Order of the Crown by outgoing Finance Minister Didier Reynders at the Hotel Amigo in Brussels ahead of the world premiere of Spielberg’s new film – “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.”

Jennie Tabroff has a fascinating profile of Woody Allen in a recent issue of Newsweek. He’s still superstitious, he’s still terrified by death, and he’s still a depressing person.

But go to meet the director in hopes of a “Tuesdays With Woody”-style affirmation of late-life contentment, and you will be quickly disabused of that illusion. At 72, he says he still lies awake at night, terrified of the void. He cannot reconcile his strident atheism with his superstition about the banana, but he knows why he makes movies: not because he has any grand statement to offer, but simply to take his mind off the existential horror of being alive. Movies are a great diversion, he says, “because it’s much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.”

Despite his depression, he seems to get along fine. He doesn’t dwell on such things with his family as he tries to spare them from his depressing view of the world, and he manages to keep making films. Not that he enjoys it very much.

“I can’t really come up with a good argument to choose life over death,” he says. “Except that I’m too scared.” Making films offers no reward beyond distracting him from his plight. He claims the payoff is in the process—”I need to be focused on something so I don’t see the big picture”—and he is indifferent to reviews. “I was never bothered if a film was not well received,” he says, admitting that some, such as “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” are not great. “But the converse of that is that I never get a lot of pleasure out of it if it is. So it isn’t like you can say, ‘He’s an uncompromising artist.’ That’s not true. I’m a compromising person, definitely. It’s that I don’t get much from either side.”

Very strange.