Come anticipate David Fincher's "Zodiac"

ARGH! I just read Black Dahlia and am now reading Zodiac. Will this never stop? I always tend to (unknowingly) read books that are/have just turned into movies. :-(

I've worked with some of the production crew. The location manager was my boss on 'Teh Game'.

Any bets whether this is less, shall we say, frantic, stylistically, than Mr. Fincher's other work?

they built a funny fake BART station platform at the Church St MUNI station for this

At Duboce Park you mean, right, Shakey?

Heh, my first thought was Neil Stephenson's Zodiac.

argh yes Church and 18th

"Frantic" as in Se7en could be OK. However, the screenwriter has done what became actioners for The Rock and Travolta, so let's hope they weren't his fault.

Let's hope Jake doesn't turn soft with puppy dog-ish glee as Brad Pitt did (Se7en is the quintessential Pitt performance: he has moments when he's so embarrassing you have to leave the room and moments when his stiffness works in his favor).

i hope he makes SF look as pretty as he did with the Game, again. it was so gleaming and shiny.

fincher isn't particularly frantic.

but i'm anticipating this like a motherfucker.

haha Michael your worked on TEH GAME??! I built the website for that movie! Did you ever see it? It won awards and stuff. Each of our team members (4 people) were given little business card cases with "TEH GAME" etched into it and a little card inside with the "CRS" logo and the address of the website.

youall have such cool jobs.

The trailer.

This is actually the second movie made from Graysmith's book. This is the first

I don't doubt that this movie will be better, but it'll have as much to do with the actual Zodiac case as the Black Dahlia movie does.

(looking forward to this too!)

Saw the trailer at Casino Royale, looks good.

this didn't even register on my radar with 'the black dahlia' coming out, but now i want to see it even if it's only to wash the taste of that steaming pile out of my mouth.

bet it won't be as good as the zodiac killer

Is it me or does Jake look more cleancut and contemporary than his costars?

downey looks awesome, really seedy. jake looks and sounds like he wandered in out of a wes anderson movie.

Which is probably the point.

ive been waiting for a remake of all the presidents men, i just wasnt expecting one with serial killers in frisco

this looks good! or at least watchable. i love a good dramatization of real-life unsolved horrible event!

I saw the trailer last night.

Shades of Stanley Kubrick!



Lights, Bogeyman, Action
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER


NEW ORLEANS

DAVID FINCHER, impolitic as ever, is ridiculing the notes he’s been getting from the studio executives overseeing his latest film, “Zodiac.”

“ ‘It’s easy to get lost in all the details,’ ” he intones, reading their critique of one scene from his laptop. “ ‘Are there any trims you could make here to cut down on the information and focus it even more’ ” on two main characters?

“I love this,” Mr. Fincher says, leaving no doubt as to his sarcasm. “It’s this weird shell game where they go, ‘Can you focus it more on the people by making it be less of them?’ And of course what it really gets down to is that they want me to audition their cuts to them.”

But he won’t. Instead, he says, “you just rope-a-dope.”

That same uncompromising attitude extended to his relationship with the cast, led by Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal, who endured multiple takes of 70 shots and beyond. Mr. Downey affectionately called him a disciplinarian, while Mr. Gyllenhaal, saying that as a director he “paints with people,” added, “It’s tough to be a color.”

At 44, Mr. Fincher remains Hollywood’s reigning bad-boy auteur, and his impatience with meddling has become as famous as his tendency to test his actors’ patience, stamina and preparation. But not as famous as his films, the most celebrated among them “Se7en,” the 1995 thriller that grossed $350 million worldwide, and “Fight Club,” his over-the-top answer to young male anomie.

After five years of withdrawing from one project after another, Mr. Fincher will present “Zodiac,” about the serial killer who terrorized San Francisco in the late 70s, on March 2. Then, in 2008, comes “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the screenwriter Eric Roth’s epic reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story about a man who ages in reverse. (Of more interest to some fans, “Benjamin Button” will reunite him with the star of “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” Brad Pitt, and amounts to a sharp turn for Mr. Fincher into romanticism.)

To trim “Zodiac” to just over two and a half hours, Mr. Fincher said he had to make painful cuts. Gone, for example, is a two-minute blackout over a montage of hit songs signaling the passage of time from Joni Mitchell to Donna Summer; in its place, artless but quick and cheap, are the words “Four years later.”

Mr. Fincher has always been outspoken, but if he takes this movie a little more personally, there’s a reason: For him, the Zodiac murderer, who terrorized the Bay Area and was never caught, isn’t just any old serial-killer story.

Raised in Marin County, Mr. Fincher was only 7 when the area was seized with fear in 1969. “I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now,” he recalled in December in an interview in New Orleans, where he was editing “Zodiac” while filming “Benjamin Button.” “And my dad, who worked from home, and who was very dry, not one to soft-pedal things, turned slowly in his chair and said: ‘Oh yeah. There’s a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who’s threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus.’ ”

“I was, like, ‘You could drive us to school,’ ” he recalled thinking.

It was that same sense that initially drew him to “Se7en,” he said: the fearsome power of the stranger among us. “That’s what Zodiac was for a 7-year-old growing up in San Anselmo. He was the ultimate bogeyman.”

“People ask me, ‘When are you going to make your ‘Amarcord?’ ” Mr. Fincher added, with a little laugh at the comparison to Fellini’s autobiographical tour-de-force. For now, he said, “It’ll have to be ‘Zodiac.’ ”

Much has been made of Mr. Fincher’s “dark eye,” his gloomy palette and dim view of human nature, as seen not just in his hits but in his lesser films “The Game” and “Panic Room.” And he’s had a reputation for cutting-edge special effects and innovative camerawork since, at 22, he directed his first commercial, for the American Cancer Society, featuring a fetus smoking a cigarette in utero, an ad that led to an early career as a top music-video director.

But the source of his dark-hued lens on life, Mr. Fincher suggested, might be as simple as that original bogeyman. “It was a very interesting and weird time to grow up, and incredibly evocative,” he said. “I have a handful of friends who were from Marin County at the same time, the same age group, and they’re all very kind of sinister, dark, sardonic people. And I wonder if Zodiac had something to do with that.”

Mr. Fincher was first approached about “Zodiac” by Brad Fischer, a producer at Phoenix Pictures, with a script by James Vanderbilt. It was based on two books by Robert Graysmith, a former San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who became obsessed with the Zodiac, and who built a case against one suspect, now dead. Mr. Fincher said he wanted Mr. Vanderbilt to overhaul the script, but wanted first to dig into the original police sources. So director, writer and producer spent months interviewing witnesses, investigators and the case’s only two surviving victims, and poring over reams of documents.

“I said I won’t use anything in this book that we don’t have a police report for,” Mr. Fincher said. “There’s an enormous amount of hearsay in any circumstantial case, and I wanted to look some of these people in the eye and see if I believed them. It was an extremely difficult thing to make a movie that posthumously convicts somebody.”

Mr. Graysmith said Mr. Fincher’s team found evidence that investigators had missed. “He outdid the police,” Mr. Graysmith said. “My hat’s off to them.”

With a finished script and a $75 million budget, Mr. Fincher and Phoenix approached Sony, then invited other studios to bid. The most aggressive, Warner Brothers and Paramount, decided to team up. At the same time Paramount invited Warner to share the $150 million budget for “Benjamin Button.” So Mr. Fincher agreed to do the two movies back to back.

The result has been a marathon. “Zodiac” required 115 shooting days, about twice the average, though it came in under budget; “Benjamin Button,” which is still shooting in New Orleans, will take 150 days, not counting months to complete the illusion of Mr. Pitt’s metamorphosis from newborn old man to demented, dying baby.

Perhaps most challenging for “Zodiac,” Mr. Fincher said, were the adjustments he made as a director — both in adopting a quieter visual style and in trying to get the most from his cast.

“It’s as unadorned a movie as I’ve ever made,” he said. “It’s just people talking, and it’s hard to make an audience realize that they have to be paying attention. One way you do that is by not doing very much.” There are none of the “perceptual games” that he said he played in “Fight Club,” where the subject was “the most unreliable narrator possible,” for example. “It was like, cast the movie right, get the script right, shoot the scenes as simply as we can and get out of everyone’s way,” he said.

Mr. Fincher said the last thing he wanted was for an audience to seize on period details like an avocado-colored rotary phone, or an actor’s sideburns, and miss the point of a scene. In several days on the set in San Francisco and Los Angeles in late 2005 and early 2006, he could be seen constantly retaking shots to dim a lamp, remove a too-colorful car, or alter the costume of an extra whose garb seemed lifted from a fashion layout rather than what people really wore.

Mark Ruffalo, who stars as the lead detective, said “Zodiac” was unlike any other Fincher film. “He’s just completely gone for the character and the story, and has sort of made that the rule, and not the look,” he said. Near the end of filming, Mr. Ruffalo recalled, Mr. Fincher said he’d watched a rough assemblage of about half the movie. “He said: ‘I think it’s great, but I’m in territory I’ve never been before. I just don’t know if they’re going to get it. And that’s exciting news: ‘Here’s my brand, and I’m stepping outside of it.’ ”

More difficult was changing the way Mr. Fincher worked with, and made demands of, his actors. On “Panic Room” he grew frustrated with his process — detailed storyboarding and previsualization to diagram a movie shot-by-shot — because it left little room for discovery, Mr. Fincher said. “It just felt wrong, like I didn’t get the most out of the actors, because I was so rigid in my thinking,” he said. “I was kind of impatiently waiting for everybody to get where I’d already been a year and a half ago. And I’ve been trying to nip that in the bud. I felt like I needed to be more attentive to watching the actors.”

He added: “Every once in a while there are actors you can defeat.”

For Jake Gyllenhaal, who stars in the movie as Mr. Graysmith, Mr. Fincher’s attentiveness was a mixed blessing.

Mr. Gyllenhaal said he came from a collaborative filmmaking family: “We share ideas, and we incorporate those ideas.” He added: “David knows what he wants, and he’s very clear about what he wants, and he’s very, very, very smart. But sometimes we’d do a lot of takes, and he’d turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there” — the movie was shot digitally — “ ‘Delete the last 10 takes.’ And as an actor that’s very hard to hear.”

Mr. Gyllenhaal, 26, partly blamed culture shock; he’d just finished “Jarhead” for Sam Mendes, who gave him a much freer rein. Mr. Gyllenhaal stressed that he admired and liked Mr. Fincher personally. And he noted that other members of the “Zodiac” cast had far more experience, adding: “I wish I could’ve had the maturity to be like: ‘I know what he wants. He wants the best out of me.’ ”

That said, Mr. Gyllenhaal spoke candidly about his frustration with Mr. Fincher’s degree of control over his performance.

“What’s so wonderful about movies is, you get your shot,” he said. “They even call it a shot. The stakes are high. You get your chance to prove what you can do. You get a take, 5 takes, 10 takes. Some places, 90 takes. But there is a stopping point. There’s a point at which you go, ‘That’s what we have to work with.’ But we would reshoot things. So there came a point where I would say, well, what do I do? Where’s the risk?”

Told of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s comments, Mr. Fincher half-jokingly said, “I hate earnestness in performance,” adding, “Usually by Take 17 the earnestness is gone.” But half-joking aside, he said that collaboration “has to come from a place of deep knowledge.” While he had no objections to having fun, he said, “When you go to your job, is it supposed to be fun, or are you supposed to get stuff done?”

He later called back and said he “adored the cast” of “Zodiac” and felt “lucky to have them all,” but was “totally shocked” by Mr. Gyllenhaal’s remark about reshoots.

Robert Downey Jr., impeccably cast as a crime reporter driven to drink, drugs and dissolution, called Mr. Fincher a disciplinarian and agreed that, as is often said, “he’s always the smartest guy in the room.” But Mr. Downey put this in perspective.

“Sometimes it’s really hard because it might not feel collaborative, but ultimately filmmaking is a director’s medium,” he said. “I just decided, aside from several times I wanted to garrote him, that I was going to give him what he wanted. I think I’m a perfect person to work for him, because I understand gulags.”

Mr. Ruffalo too survived some 70-take shots. “The way I see it is, you enter into someone else’s world as an actor,” he said. “You can put your expectations aside and have an experience that’s new and pushes and changes you, or hold onto what you think it should be and have a stubborn, immovable journey that’s filled with disappointment and anger.”

He said Mr. Fincher was equally demanding of everyone — executives, actors, himself. “He knows he’s taking a stab at eternity,” Mr. Ruffalo said. “He knows that this will outlive him. And he’s not going to settle for anything other than satisfaction, deep satisfaction. Somewhere along the line he said, ‘I will not settle for less.’ ”




Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

There was a Zodiac Killer flick released in 2005, starring Justin Chambers (Grey's Anatomy glowering intern bohunk as glowering drunk cop), Robin Tunney (his wife, mailing in her Drunk Cop's Wife role from the East Coast), & Kieran Culkin (son of Drunk Cop, doing some REAL investigative work). Except for the very last scene (where the actor playing the ZK reads from the last letter the ZK sent to the press, with only an artist's rendition of the ZK onscreen & no music in the background - very creepy & effective!), the flick's a pisspoor Son of Sam ripoff.

Nathan Lee and David Edelstein wrote excellent-to-warily-positive reviews. Anyone seen it yet?

This is nearly 3 hours long. It can't suck worse than his other films I suppose.

At least it's not nine hours before edits like Birth of a Nation, and then later to suffer with extended cuts.

I rly want to see this! Oh Jake. Oh crrepy pseudo-true-crime. le sigh.

it's amazing.

"le sigh"?

"le sigh" is the new SQUEEEE

time out new york gave this six out of six stars. i'm pretty stoked. (i mean, that isn't the reason why, but that just kinda fueled my already-existent total enthusiasm for this movie)

i am excited about this. i love fincher. and it seems like even reviewers who have given him bad reviews in the past have done so somewhat grudgingly, understanding that he's an incredibly talented director but one who doesn't always make very good movies, and with this movie they've found something solidly plotted enough that they didn't have to slog through a lot of filmic vocabulary to praise it.

calling the plotting "solid" is a bit misleading. it's a very twisty labyrinthine movie with lots of red herrings and LOTS left unexplained and no real payoff. some people will probably find it unsatisfying. i think it's awesome.

visually it's unbelievable. one of the best-looking movies i've seen in a really long time. when fincher turns his visual chops to pure period stuff he's incredible. it's especially impressive to see the art direction & visuals slowly change over the several decades the movie takes place. san fran hasn't look this good since vertigo.

i am creaming for the visuals already. i KNOW what he can do, and that's the main reason i keep wanting another fincher movie. they look SO. FUCKING. GOOD.

Ebert: "Alien 3 is the best-looking bad movie I have ever seen."

from what i understand this is the first hi-def hollywood big budget movie that's all video. and it just kills.

plz to make george lucas go eat a monkey's butt k thx

oh wait i'm wrong. it's the first h'wood movie not to shoot to film or tape.

and i can't make him do anything he wouldn't actually do when he's not hypnotized.

maybe if we put our collective psychic powers together we can make him grow a chin,

smoke some more pot kenan

hey, it don't take drugs to start wishing that george lucas had a chin. that poor bastard. it's sad, really.

time out new york gave this six out of six stars.

This is generally not a good sign (nor is using a 6-star scale, wtf).

Mark Ruffalo calls Jake's NY Times complaints "weird sour grapes":

http://www.thereeler.com/premieres_events/finchers_going_to_eat_you_for_breakfast.php