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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
― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, 21 February 2007 20:47 (seventeen years ago) link
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