Zodiac

[pete]

eff!  I thought I was posting under the 300 section.  I meant 300 will be unrated and gory.

[SiliasRuby]

The Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey, Jr. thriller, Zodiac, will be getting a DVD release from Warner on 26 June. The David Fincher film will come with a 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, a Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix, and extras to be determined. Retail is $29.98.

Mac, not to question your info but where di you get that piece of DVD information? I went on Video ETA and it said July 31st, it also says that on DVDaficionado. Actually I'm quite hopeing it comes on June 26 rather than July 31st, because I really can't wait.

[MacGuffin]

Mac, not to question your info but where di you get that piece of DVD information? I went on Video ETA and it said July 31st, it also says that on DVDaficionado. Actually I'm quite hopeing it comes on June 26 rather than July 31st, because I really can't wait.

DVDFile. DavisDVD also had a June 26th announcement.

[Pubrick]

Man, can't wait to see what they do for the DVD.

I can't wait to read it

Anyway, I can't wait.

I really can't wait for the DVD.

because I really can't wait.

silias.. do you have a terminal illness?

[Pozer]

ha ha!  also reads funny as one complete quote:

Man, can't wait to see what they do for the DVD - I can't wait to read it... Anyway, I can't wait.  I really can't wait for the DVD, because I really can't wait.

[Xx]

...

[The Red Vine]

Best Looking film of 2007!

[sickfins]

it'll be unrated.

it's frightening how close you were

[tpfkabi]

 

[polkablues]

I always worry that maybe we're getting too jaded about this stuff, but then that happens, and I realize that we might still not be jaded enough.

[MacGuffin]

Fincher made exception for 'Zodiac'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- "Zodiac" director David Fincher said he promised himself not to make another film about a serial killer after 1995's "Seven." But he said the script for "Zodiac" was too good to pass up.

"Really, it's only about a serial killer for the first 35 minutes," Fincher said Thursday during a press briefing after the film's In Competition screening at the Palais. "After that it's a newspaper movie and a movie about the reactions to what was happening."

Does that mean he's back to staying away from serial killer films in the future?

"I'd do another newspaper film like this one," he said. "But a straight film about serial killer film? It would have to be pretty interesting in some way."

The early Thursday screening of the 158-minute film was full and well received, with star Jake Gyllenhaal the main attraction at a lighthearted briefing afterward. One two-part question posed asked Fincher if he felt Gyllenhaal was one of the best acting talents of his generation -- Fincher said he was -- with a follow-up to Gyllenhaal about working with co-star Robert Downey Jr.

Gyllenhaal at first deflected the question. "I'm sorry," he said, "I was still thinking about being one of the best talents of my generation."

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Gyllenhaal ponders Downey Jr: mad or genius?

Jake Gyllenhaal compares acting with Robert Downey Jr. to playing jazz and says he had no fears about being upstaged by his flamboyant co-star in the murder thriller "Zodiac."

The film, in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, is based on the true story of the unlikely quest by Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist on the San Francisco Chronicle, to identify a 1960s serial killer known as the Zodiac.

Graysmith's character, played by Gyllenhaal, gradually moves to the centre of the picture but much of his time is spent jousting with the newspaper's dissolute crime writer Paul Avery, played with palpable relish by Downey.

"A very good, typical actor has about 25 really interesting choices and ideas within a minute. And then there's Robert Downey Jr. who has, I would say, 500 to 750 ideas," Gyllenhaal said after the press screening of the film at Cannes.

"Some people would call that madness. I would call that genius," he said.

"You're running around an actor and then they're chasing you, all of a sudden -- that's a wonderful thing where rhythms are all over the place, it's like playing jazz with somebody."

Downey's character, sarcastic and whining by turns, is a stark contrast to his strait-laced colleagues in the newsroom and he dominates the film until his drinking and general excess prove too much.

GRAND THEFT LARCENY

"Zodiac," which has already opened in the United States, has had generally positive reviews, despite disappointing audience numbers and Downey's performance has attracted special praise.

"His cast is uniformly splendid, but if the Zodiac killer got away with murder, then Downey ought to be charged with grand theft larceny given how often he steals his scenes away from his competent co-stars," the Hollywood Reporter wrote in its review.

"Zodiac's" recreation of the atmosphere of San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s is meticulous and it conveys a huge amount of information as the investigation tails off and Graysmith, who wrote the book the film is based on, carries on alone.

Gyllenhaal joked that director David Fincher told him for the first part of the movie he would be "an extra" and much of the film is centered on his deepening obsession with the case and the way it gradually takes over his life.

Fincher, who made his name with the dark thriller "Seven," said he had initially been reluctant to do another serial killer movie, but had been won over by the film, which described events he had lived through as a child in San Francisco.

"I don't think this is a serial killer movie, I think this is a newspaper movie," he said.

"It's not a process by which somebody dismembers other people. It's not that kind of movie. It's a movie about the search for some kind of truth, the human mind's need to make sense of something that's randomly chaotic," he said.

[MacGuffin]

Life with a serial killer
In Cannes, director David Fincher talks to Andrew Pulver about the unsolved case that inspired his latest film, Zodiac - and why he has been drawn back to murder
Source: The Guardian

Like it or not, having your film selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes really means something. Most obviously that the French, a nation of unashamed cinematic snobs, have taken a shine to you, and that you are considered worthy of admission to the elite group of auteurs that Cannes reveres. And, considering the love-hate relationship between the two countries, if you're American it means lining up alongside Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Gus van Sant and - yes - Vincent Gallo. Has David Fincher joined the ranks of the super-directors? Is he facing a future where "Fin-shair" is as ubiquitous as "'Itchcock"? David Fincher strokes his goatee beard as he stares out over the Mediterranean and wonders what it all means.

Not much, as it turns out. "I never really thought about film festivals before," he says. "I don't think of myself as making festival pictures. I was shocked when they said they wanted the movie for competition. I thought it was a little too ... lurid." Fincher says he initially offered Zodiac, his account of the serial killer who terrorised northern California in the 1960s and 70s, to Cannes for an out-of-competition screening, thinking that's where they normally dump product they sneer at but want the stars to decorate the red carpet. But no: with his sixth feature film, Fincher was in. "I don't know. It's an odd choice. It doesn't seem arty enough."

Zodiac may or may not be arty, but it's certainly artful. Fincher's source material was a book written in the mid-1970s by Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist on the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper to which the Zodiac sent a number of his mocking, threatening letters. Mindful of his past form - in the shape of his second feature Seven, one of the best-known serial-killer thrillers of the 1990s - Fincher went out of his way to establish clear water between that undeniably lurid carve-em-up and his far more sober true-crime project. "I knew people would think: why would you make another fucking serial killer movie? There's plenty of reasons not to. When I sent it out, I just said, read this, tell me what you think. It's not that Seven thing. We already did that."

Instead, Fincher turned to the downbeat tropes of docudrama and historical account: "If I'm going to recreate murder scenes, I just want the facts. I'm not interested in prurience." He cites earlier film treatments of the same story, particularly Dirty Harry and its "Scorpio" killer. "I remember going to see Dirty Harry when I was 12 or 13 years old and thinking: 'Wait a minute ... that's Zodiac. You can't just take people's suffering and turn it into a plot device.' I didn't want to do that. My movie ... my movie made the audience suffer." Fincher grew up in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, at the exact time of Zodiac's operations in the same area. He says it was impossible not to be affected. "In northern California we were at a major fork in the road. I was seven and it was the first time it ever occurred to me that people could derive satisfaction from hunting other people. It was very scary.

"Growing up around Zodiac warped your little mind. I don't think it's coincidence at all that during the peak of the pharmaceutical and sexual revolution in California a guy with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses started shooting kids who were newly sexualised. In some way it was a lashing out, gaining control. I don't think it just happened."

Much has been said also about the effect Fincher's film may have on finally identifying Zodiac. Graysmith's chief suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, died in 1992 and, unlike the case of John Humble and the Yorkshire Ripper hoax, DNA testing hasn't established a connection between Allen and the Zodiac letters. Fincher says he certainly didn't go into the project to try to solve the murders; he was just making a crime film, he says. He waxes much more lyrically on the subject of the high-definition digital filming system he used, which allowed him (surprisingly, perhaps, for a film so evidently grasping at realism) to entirely dispense with fake blood on set, which saved valuable clean-up time. "We just had little air cannons for people to react to."

As a film-maker, though, Fincher really needed Zodiac. His talents have never been in doubt, but Zodiac is only his second film in eight years, since Fight Club put him firmly at the head of the New Hollywood pack. The intervening period has been a series of aborted projects and missed opportunities. He was down to direct The Black Dahlia, as well as Mission: Impossible 3, Lords of Dogtown and The Lookout - any of which would have been a good match for Fincher's special brand of savage visual panache. The only film that did emerge was Panic Room in 2002, a strangely conventional affair, and not the most propitious follow-up to the extraordinary Fight Club.

"You do things for different reasons," says Fincher. "It's not often you get an opportunity like Fight Club and, quite honestly, not a lot of people went to see it. If all the people who later discovered it on DVD had been there on the opening weekend, we would have been looking at Fight Club 2. Fact of the matter was, after Fight Club, nobody was saying to me: 'We'll do anything you want to do.' I waited three years to find something. I liked the discipline of Panic Room, the limitations. Everybody involved in it was slumming a little bit, but for the right reasons."

The uncomfortable reality is that, while Fincher was at the forefront - along with Paul Thomas Anderson and David O Russell - of a new Hollywood wave in the mid-1990s, he quickly found himself in danger of being eclipsed by another wave of American directors - Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne - who prized quirkiness and wit over Fincher's high-octane muscle cinema. He has always had a more conventional, overtly commercial approach than these younger film-makers: handed the third film in the Alien franchise as a young director, following Seven with the pumped-up chase movie The Game ("a glorified Twilight Zone episode"). Panic Room and its $30m opening weekend, he considers, is like "lesser Hitchcock", which perhaps is pitching it a bit strong. Zodiac hasn't got anywhere near it in box-office terms, but has got Fincher his best reviews for a long time. At 44, he's far too young to be a has-been; thankfully for him, Zodiac looks like it's given him a whole new lease of life.

[MacGuffin]

Taking no prisoners
Director David Fincher is hard to please . . . as Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr found out many times, writes NEALA JOHNSON
Source: Sunday Herald Sun

ROBERT Downey Jr wanted to garrotte him. Mark Ruffalo was intimidated by him. Jake Gyllenhaal was exasperated, saying that after 90 takes of the one scene, he didn't know how to give him what he wanted.

Welcome to the set of director David Fincher's latest film, Zodiac.

"I don't know what my reputation is with actors," says Fincher, the man behind Se7en, Fight Club and Panic Room.

"I know with some actors, some of 'em don't like being told what to do or where to go or how their work's gonna fit into the whole. It's your responsibility as the director to have an idea of what this world is supposed to be like -- you're not supposed to make it up on the day.

"I mean, how am I supposed to tell people how many days it's gonna take to do something if it's just 'Oh yeah, I dunno, what do you think should happen?' It's my job to say this is important and this is not."

It would come as no surprise to Downey -- who also says that he was the perfect actor to work for Fincher "because I understand gulags" -- but Fincher, 44, doesn't enjoy making films.

The director famously described filming Panic Room -- basically Jodie Foster trapped inside a metal box for 90 minutes -- as a "drag".

"All movies are a drag to shoot. Anybody who tells you different is a liar, trying to make them sound interesting," Fincher says.

Zodiac -- the true story of the hunt for an infamous serial killer in 1970s San Francisco -- was a drag because it required so much exposition.

"It's people walk into a room and talk, that's basically all that happens," Fincher says.

"So it was hard, because it got boring. It got boring to shoot, you were like, 'Oh my God, I have to figure out some other way . . . Can't I have one car chase?'," he says.

But, just as he won't let his actors off the hook, Fincher didn't allow himself a car chase.

"I just thought to myself 'Well, that's not very disciplined of me to feel that way'."

Why, then, has Fincher made filmmaking his life? After all, when he's not making films, he's making commercials or music videos for the likes of Nine Inch Nails -- "playing in the sandbox" as he puts it.

"I really like pre-production. I like the people I get to meet. I like rehearsal. I like casting. I don't like the actual shooting," he says.

"I like the editing though, that part's fine. On set it's like, you can't get the wall where you need it to go, you can't get what you need done. It's always compromise. You sit there and you go, 'Well I'm spending $70 million, how come I can't do this? What's wrong? Is it me?' "

SOMETIMES, of course, it's not Fincher, it's the actors. And that's where Gyllenhaal's multiple takes come in.

But how does a director get a better performance on take 43 than on take seven, with his actors surely getting progressively more frustrated with each take?

"Well, I think the question becomes then, what's better?" Fincher argues.

"It doesn't always seem to me that the most excited or the most virgin a performance, the better it is."

He points to the fact that, in Zodiac, Gyllenhaal and Downey are playing newspaper men, professionals who should look and sound at home in their workplace.

"These guys know everything they're talking about, there's not a line of dialogue they haven't said 30 times, so you want it to look like they can deliver this stuff in their sleep.

"So you're going for something different than in some cases what the actor's going for."

Fincher will admit to a top tally of 56 takes on a scene in which Ruffalo -- playing the long-suffering detective assigned to the unsolved Zodiac case -- lets Gyllenhaal's idealistic cartoonist in on a few trade secrets.

"We shot 56 takes on the first day of Jake and Mark because we needed to get them to understand 'This is the tone of this interaction. You will be expected to deliver this information with this kind of specificity at this kind of speed'," Fincher says.

"Maybe they weren't ready for that. We shot a lot of takes of Jake's stuff because there's a very fine line between naive and disingenuous. Sometimes it looked disingenuous.

"But, you know, 20 to 21 takes, that can be a lot. But sometimes we did stuff in nine takes, depending on who was in front of the camera."

Fincher does not push for no reason -- he knows exactly what he's after in these takes.

"I'm waiting to feel 'Bingo!', that's my whole thing. For me, it's all about that thing you get a hit off of, you go 'OK, that was it'. And most of the time, if you don't have one that you go 'Yeah that was it', you probably didn't get it."

Fincher is now filming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an effects-heavy film starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

He had already started filming it while editing Zodiac, trying to "make a dent in the length".

The length of the film -- the version in cinemas clocks in at 158 minutes -- was a big battle, but not the only one on Zodiac.

"Marketing was a big battle -- like should they sell the movie like Se7en? Should they sell the movie like an adult procedural? Will anybody come to see an adult procedural? There was a lot of that," he says.

"But most of the insecurity has been about the length, because it's a lot to ask of an audience. But that was the reason I was interested in it. I didn't really wanna do it if it was gonna be, I dunno, the trite version."

Indeed, Fincher went to great lengths for Zodiac. Though he had two books on the murders to work from -- written by Robert Graysmith, the character Gyllenhaal plays in the film -- he didn't just adapt for the screen.

Along with screenwriter James Vanderbilt, Fincher spent about a year on research, digging into case files and meeting those involved in the Zodiac case, including survivors.

"We did all that stuff because we felt these were real people, real people lost their lives, this is not a big joke. It's not an entertainment in that respect," he says.

And when the Hollywood duo turned up on a survivor's doorstep?

"Rightfully so, they think you're a scumbag," Fincher says.

"I don't blame them. They suffered. And when somebody shows up and says 'Hey man, we'd like to make a movie about your suffering' you're gonna be . . . reticent."

Similarly, the Benjamin Button project has been on Fincher's radar since 2001.

If making any movie is a drag, six years of one flick must be hell. How does Fincher stay inspired now he's actually making the film?

"Inject steroids into the base of your skull," he deadpans.

"I dunno. I don't know how you . . . I don't. I don't! Again, the thing you realise, if you've made any movies at all, by the time you're done reading it, as far as your enjoyment is concerned, it's over.

"It's not about you, it's about this whole other experience, and everything that surprises you about it the first time you read it is gone by the time you cast it and look at all the wardrobe . . . You're basically just along for the ride."

At that point, it's just about giving that initial excitement he felt at reading the script . . .

"To somebody else, I hope," Fincher says.

"Sometimes it doesn't work out that way. You know, I've made movies where I went, 'Oh, you bought tickets to that thing? I can't apologise enough'."

[I Don't Believe in Beatles]

Yeeeeeah, check out the page before this.

[The Red Vine]

Fuck.