Zodiac

Started by MacGuffin, January 20, 2005, 01:26:15 AM

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Pubrick

Quote from: Gamblour consider le fountain on February 18, 2007, 07:05:21 PM
Wow, that was an incredible article. Thanks Mac. That made me really want to see this film.
ditto to all that.

the most refreshing thing i learned from it is that Fincher was tired of his old approach and tried to focus more on the characters and service the story through them. OK, but then why is it that Gyllenhaal is talking about Fincher using actors as colours? that was his old style! the only difference i can see now is that he isn't as prepared when he comes to the set, so his storyboards and pre-visualizations are not as rigidly guiding him, and he seems to be making them up on the fly instead of a year before shooting. the stuff he used to prepare before shooting, he's know preparing AS they shoot --- he's still hella meticulous and rigid about what he wants.

i think it's great that he's so visually driven. i'm sure there's some autistic kid out there who thinks fincher is the only person in the world who speaks his palette. whatever that means. i'm just unsure of what to make about this supposedly refined approach which just seems completely ULTRA fincher. i hope in a good way.

benjamin button isn't set in the dark is it?
under the paving stones.

polkablues

Quote from: MacGuffin on February 18, 2007, 01:08:08 PM
"Benjamin Button," which is still shooting in New Orleans, will take 150 days

Let me be the first to say Holy Fucking Shit.
My house, my rules, my coffee

Ghostboy

This movie is great! Man! It's a complete procedural, from top to bottom, but it's completely enthralling. I can't wait to see the longer version on DVD.

MacGuffin

INTERVIEW: MARK RUFFALO (ZODIAC)
Source: CHUD

David Fincher's Zodiac is a masterpiece, a truly great movie that is setting 2007 off on as strong a footing as any film in memory. Part of the movie's greatness comes from two amazing performances – Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery and Mark Ruffalo as detective Dave Toschi.

Toschi is a larger than life character – he was part of the basis for Steve McQueen's Bullitt, down to the unique holster he always wore. And in the first Dirty Harry, Toschi's famous Zodiac case was reborn as the Scorpio case – and solved in a way that Toschi could not.

I had a chance to talk to Ruffalo at a roundtable here in New York City today. He was candid and unassuming, really coming across like the kind of actor who cares more about acting than being famous.

Zodiac opens this Friday. You must see it.

Ruffalo: One interviewer today said to me, 'How does it feel that your first job, You Can Count On Me' is still your best work?' I agreed with him. [laughs]

Q: You've played a couple of police officers. How do you make this one different?

Ruffalo: 90% of it was being with Dave Toschi. Another 5%, maybe more, was the investigative work I was doing to be a cop, to know about the case. The character I think you would define by the choices he makes in a moment of stress. Dave Toschi, his character, I think is pretty strong. But the character is Dave Toschi, that [gets into his Toschi voice from the film] quiet way of talking, that sincere, measured way of talking... that's Dave Toschi. The idiosyncratic things, the animal crackers, the way he dressed, all of that is original Dave Toschi.. DT!

Q: Dave had been the basis for Bullitt, and he saw his case taken and made into Dirty Harry. When you came to him, was he like, 'You Hollywood bastards!' or was he pretty friendly?

Ruffalo: He was a little reticent. His wife didn't want him to have anything to do with this movie. [The case] cost them an enormous amount as a family, and Dave who he was as a person, and his career. When I showed up our conversation started something like, [Toschi voice] 'Umm, thank you for coming... Why do you want to talk to me? You're the big Hollywood movie star.' I was like, oh shit, here we go. He wasn't mean about it, but there was a certain amount of distrust. I said to him, 'I'm here to honor you. I'm here to get it right. I know this is a big part of your life and I wouldn't dare to try and portray you without being able to hear it from your mouth.' I could never have come up with the Dave Toschi I had in this movie without him. Never in a million years could I have gotten the kind of idiosyncratic behavior that that guy has.

Q: Some of your strongest scenes in the movie are with Jake Gyllenhaal. What's he like to work with?

Ruffalo: He was good. I've known Jake for a long time, and it was good to work with him. It was fun to see him really kind of stretch his wings with somebody like Dave Fincher. They were tough scenes, and they took a lot of building, but I'm happy the way they ended up. It's a good performance, and I think it's one of his best. As much as he talks about being put through the wringers, it paid off for him.

Q: Was that your experience with Fincher as well? Jake talked to the New York Times about how difficult the process was for him, and Fincher is known for being very exacting. Was your experience similar to his?

Ruffalo: I can only respect an artist like Fincher. I can only respect somebody who puts that kind of demands on himself and the people around him. I can only respect a man who doesn't think good enough is good enough. So I didn't see it the way some people saw it – to me that's 'Waah waah waah.' I mean, to me, we get paid a lot of money and there are people who work a lot frickin' harder – most everyone on the set. If you had to do a few extra takes... To hear that makes me cringe. Please god, don't think we're all like this.

Q: Did you find yourself getting more and more fascinated with the case as you researched it for the film?

Ruffalo: I'm not a big Zodiac [guy]. I didn't know it well, I'm not a true crime guy. But working on it, as I started to enter the world of Dave Toschi and the investigation, I did become a little obsessed with it. There was constant conjecture on who did it, and this piece of information... people were coming in all the time with their own theories. You sit around with a group of actors, the last thing you have to worry about is people talking and sharing their ideas. There was a constant debate going on that made it really interesting. That drew us in.

Q: Do you think it's Arthur Lee Allen?

Ruffalo: He's the best suspect there ever was, but I take the side of Dave Toschi, which is there's a due process of law, and where's the beef. That one piece of evidence that really sticks it to that guy never materialized. This movie is as much about due process of law as it is about anything. You see in the world where we are today when due process of law is thrown out and we go by gut feelings and trumped up evidence. The one thing these guys can be accused of is following the letter of the law too closely.

Q: There's so much to the movie beyond your character. What was your thought when you finally saw the whole thing?

Ruffalo: Wow. I saw a rough cut in Dave Fincher's office – it didn't have any music, it wasn't sweetened – and I was really blown away. What I saw, what Fincher was actually going for, is so different from anything else he's ever made. I thought this is something to be really proud of. I didn't know how the rest of the world would react to it, and usually my tastes run counter to the popular culture, so I didn't know how it would be seen, but I just thought, 'Damn, this is a daring piece of film work by a major director for a major studio.' Who's doing that, really?

What's amazing is that you know they don't catch the guy in the end, but you go along for the journey anyway!

Q: This movie is almost like journalism in how it delivers facts and information. For many actors having to give that kind of exposition is a nightmare – how did you keep from crossing the line of making all that information boring?

Ruffalo: There's that stuff, and then there's the desire to catch the guy, which keeps the scene interesting. Then there's what's going on inside them personally – some people are falling apart, some people are eating themselves up. It's everything that's under the words, how richly you can build that life under the words. The simple things like the procedural and the jargon, what's built under the surface of those is what makes it work.

Q: As an actor how do you approach that?

Ruffalo: It's all character work. Your desire has to be so great – what it costs you, what it's costing that character – if that's working inside you and your motor is going as an actor, the audience sees that and they're interested. It happens in a way they're not quite aware of, and what it is is that they're seeing themselves in the movie in a weird way.

Q: You're often seen a serious actor, but you do very light movies like 13 Going on 30 or Just Like Heaven in between these very serious parts.

Ruffalo: I come from the theater, where you can do whatever the hell you want; they expect it from you. You're not stuck as a romantic or comedic or tragedian... you can do what you want. I always thought the best way of acting is one foot in the grave and one on the banana peel. I feel that the best drama has some humor in it and the best humor has some humor in it.

I did a bunch of dark movies, and my nieces could never see anything I had done. I was like, it would be fun to do a romantic comedy. I really admire Marcello Mastroianni, he had such a great career. He was dramatic and he was funny – he did everything. I was like, you know what, I'm just going to do whatever I feel like doing. I'm not going to follow any mold and I'm not going to do what anybody tells me. I'm going to do a movie my nieces can watch – and also a movie I think has a really positive message for young girls. That movie says something, and I'm into that game. I like movies that say something. Even Just Like Heaven is saying something about life, about the way you live your life and love – the power of love. Some of the stuff might seem flip, but to me it has an important meaning. It's another way to reach people and give part of the human experience to them.

Q: Speaking of messages, does this film say something about our lives post-9/11, with the boogeyman out there and this formless fear people experience?

Ruffalo: It doesn't surprise me that this movie is happening at this moment and that it's getting the attention of people and people are relating to it. It might not be so up front as that – this is film theory, this is deep stuff – but as an artist I like to think that is true. You see it all over the culture, we're dealing with dark material right now and paranoia. It's everywhere – even this year's fashions are dark and heavy and gothic and medieval. There's something in the subconscious.

Q: Your next film is going to be with the excellent Rian Johnson on The Brothers Bloom. Can you talk about your character and what you'll be doing?

Ruffalo: Stephen Bloom. I play the older brother of the Brothers Bloom con man couple. They've been confidence men since they were young boys. The younger brother, who's been the sort of the flawed romantic hero of all these elaborate cons is sick of it. He wants to live an unwritten life, so we set up this huge con where, in the end, he'll be able to walk away from being a con man and find true love. It's out there, man. It's very literary. It starts with magical realism and gets heavy at the end. There's a lot of embedded symbolism, but it's a great con man movie, too. A lot of it's based on The Sting. It's a cross between The Sting and The Last Waltz. [laughs]

Q: Was it the script that drew you in or had you seen Brick?

Ruffalo: I got the script and he starts it in rhyming quartets. I was like, what am I reading? It's out there. I have to say it's out there, but this kid has raised 30 million dollars to make a con man movie with real panache and style, and I have to say I think that guy has enormous panache and style and is one of our really interesting filmmakers, so I'm up for that game. Plus it's a part I've never done – it's a lot of language, the character is very flamboyant. It's going to be shot in Eastern Europe and have a lot of anachronistic qualities. It's going to be fun, and I'm excited.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin



2 men, 1 obsession: the quest for justice
Source: Los Angeles Times

Director David Fincher would do well to bring crime writer James Ellroy along to all of his interviews, as he did just days before the opening of his film "Zodiac." Tall, beanpole thin, the 58-year-old author riffs like a jazz musician on violence, masculinity, the toll of obsession.

Ellroy is a charter member of the high-functioning, trying-to-be-happy walking wounded. When he was 10, his mother was killed and her body was dumped near a high school — that's the defining prism of his life and his art in such books as "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential" and his autobiography, "My Dark Places." He's been haunted by the fact that her killer was never found.

Fincher has made a movie about a cadre of men haunted by the serial killer Zodiac and whose lives are punctured, contorted and shaped by that hunt. Zodiac was a killer who terrorized the San Francisco area in 1968 and 1969, mowing down lovers in secluded lovers' lanes and getting high off taunting the media and the police with bizarre cryptograms that he sent to the newspapers. He then disappeared — and was never caught — although the film details the investigation by two cops, Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi (Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo, respectively); a boozing, self-destructive journalist, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.); and a shy cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who comes closest to solving the deaths.

For all of his interest in crime and the wounds it leaves, the 44-year-old Fincher, who also made "Se7en," and "Panic Room," insists he's not the haunted type. Though gray flecks his hair, he appears the buoyant young techie. He speaks with his hands — as if they could magically render the scenes unspooling in his head and keep their roiling emotions at a safe distance.

He grew up in the San Francisco area during Zodiac's reign, when the killer threatened to mow down schoolchildren as they got off their yellow school buses — and Fincher's own father, a journalist, nonetheless made him take the bus.

Zodiac was Fincher's original boogeyman — a figure who mesmerized a city, much the way a film director mesmerizes an audience. "You are 7 years old and you know people have been bound and stabbed at Lake Berryessa. You go, 'I've been at picnics at Lake Berryessa.' Do second-graders talk about murder? Oh, yeah. Especially when you were in Marin County, which was, is such an idyllic place."

Unsolved mysteries

Other serial killers were caught, but not Zodiac — which as a kid Fincher resented. "When you finally saw David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam"), you got to erase it, because you were, 'Look at you. You are a schlub.' What is the line the Good Witch says in 'Wizard of Oz'? 'Oh, rubbish, you have no power here. Leave before somebody drops a house on you.' "

Fincher remembers when his family left the Bay Area when he was 8. As he watched the hills recede from the back of his family's Audi, he said, he thought about the Zodiac killer and wondered: Are they going to catch that guy?

"It didn't keep me up at nights, but it was one of those things on Halloween when you are 8 or 9 years old and you curb your egging of houses and toilet-papering and go home at 11 because the Zodiac is out there," he says.

"Artists always harken back to that, which aroused the moral and erotic imagination," says Ellroy. "With me it's my mother in conjunction with 'The Black Dahlia.' Sex, justice, morality, the details of police work and forensic detection, lives in enormous duress — that's what gets us inchoate. Years later we become dramatists. We want to get back. We want to know how we got to where we are today. We want to honor the gift that we were given imaginatively."

Fincher and Ellroy know each other slightly, because at one point Fincher was going to direct the screen adaptation of Ellroy's "Dahlia" book. He wanted to make a five-hour, $80-million miniseries with movie stars — and when that fell through, he turned to Zodiac, which dealt with similar themes. They met up recently at Fincher's Modernist Hollywood office — Ellroy came along primarily because he is such a fan of Fincher's movie, which lands in theaters Friday. The conversation turns and returns to what binds the two — a mutual interest in obsession and the destruction it leaves behind. Still, given the nature of their temperaments, the author offers a distinctly more visceral take and the director a more analytical one.

For Ellroy, who has grown to hate the helter-skelter pace of so many testosterone movies, the film vividly re-creates what he experienced when he teamed with retired Sheriff's Deputy Bill Stoner to reinvestigate his mother's death. "It was read files, talk, engage in interviews that went nowhere. The entire year fueled by what is the great dramatic tension of this motion picture; which was two hours and 38 minutes long; it is almost entirely conversation, discussion, rediscussion, reassertion, and it's a wholly tense, kinetic filmgoing experience. I've never seen a film that so gloriously and intelligently captures their lives and what homicide work is."

"When you talk about obsession, you have to talk about the toll," says Fincher. "Toll is not something you can explain. It's something you have to feel. Can you make a movie — will you ever set out to make a movie where people's necks hurt? I will, I like that."

The film delineates clearly between the two cops — who at the end of the day knew they were doing a job and could go home to their lives — and the civilians: the journalist and the cartoonist whose lives slowly deconstruct as they willfully throw themselves into the pursuit of a killer, which Graysmith believes he's found, although he can never bring the suspect to justice.

"This movie is a whole metaphor for men and how we all go assertively into the world and how we countermand our own personal chaos by trying to impose order on external events," says Ellroy.

His assessment at first sounds a little high-brow to Fincher, who goes on to explain, "I was interested in this whole notion of justice. At what point do you achieve justice? A therapist friend of mine had a great quote: 'You don't have to kill all the rattlesnakes in the world, but you have to know where they are and avoid them.' At the end, Graysmith has identified the rattlesnake and knows where he lives. He's able to go, 'I can't take you to court. I can't get a grand jury convened, but I know it's you.'

"When you look at obsessive characters — my father was a little bit like that — there is going to be something that fuels that. I look back on my 20s and go, 'Thank God there was no PlayStation, because I would never be what I am today.' I would have lost years off my life because it is dangerously fascinating to me."

Indeed, as Ellroy points out, obsessives just need to find an arena to exercise their personality. "A guy like that — and I am obsessive on two marked fronts — I'll find it. Wherever I am, whether I'm in Moosefart, Mont., ... or Los Angeles, Calif. This is Avery and Graysmith — they were looking to take a fall, and they found it."

They're not trying to simply self-destruct, says Fincher. "You're talking of people who are looking for something to feed this part of the makeup. They have to get to the bottom even if it means swimming to it. Got to get to the bottom of the case. Get to the bottom of the bottle. You get to the bottom. That's what they did."

Ellroy knows this impulse and uses it in his work. "I lie in the dark, night after night after night, brooding. And I am either thinking about the work that I do or about women.... That's it! It's a little about 58 years and I am as bad as I was when I was 23. I suspect it's going to keep me alive for a very long time. It turns on me, but I indulge emotion, and I give back generally to the work, to the narrative point."

Two men, different lives

As the crime masters swap notes, it's clear that Ellroy not only talks the talk but was forced to walk the walk, although his devastating firsthand experience with violence provides the well of his art. That doesn't seem to be true for Fincher. One is, in a sense, a method actor; the other opts for the British school — simply using one's imagination.

The director shrugs. "I'm a kibitzer. It's just what interests you." He sighs, suddenly frustrated, slightly defensive. "I'm tired of this moniker of being dark, dark, dark." He says he's not personally, and "for the fact of the matter, I don't even think my work is."

But he goes on: "I'm not interested in making a movie where somebody goes out of their way to kiss their wife to show you that they are a good person," he says, mockingly. "I am not here to placate."

When Fincher leaves the room briefly, this reporter asks Ellroy if he believes that one needs firsthand knowledge to truly understand and re-create the horror of crime.

He holds no one to this standard. Slouching down in his seat, his longs arms outstretched and his head resting on the table, Ellroy sighs like a wise master. "The imagination is unfathomable and endless."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

samsong

#110
really liked this, with slight reservations, but i'm gonna blame them on the conditions of the theater i saw it in (really fucking hot, sound was really low) -- i'm sure if it were ideal, i wouldn't have gotten antsy the way i did.  or it could be the movie, whatever.  this compares favorably to Vengeance Is Mine, patient in its intensity and descent into areas of moral gray that few films even aspire for.  you never really get a true sense of who any of the characters are but in the case of this film, being a "procedural" (whatever the fuck that means), i suppose it's appropriate.  good start to the year so far, as far as the anticipation:satisfaction ratio is concerned.

Ghostboy

Quote from: samsong on March 02, 2007, 12:07:14 AM
sound was really low

It was the same in the theater I saw it at. I was looking forward to the sound design (half-mono, depending on the period, as mentioned a few pages back), and I'm pertty sure it was the theater's fault that it didn't sound too great. This will probably be another film that will be best served by geeky home theater systems, where the sounds is perfect and the original running time is intact (although there'll probably be a bare-bones DVD released first with the theatrical cut).

MacGuffin

Director David Fincher: Beyond The Zodiac
Man behind 'Se7en'/ 'Fight Club' talks about new film, Eliot Ness, singing totalitarians.
Source: MTV

No one would be likely to confuse the movies of David Fincher with those of any other director. And yet the man behind such vividly distinctive pictures as "Se7en" (1995), "Fight Club" (1999) and "Panic Room" (2002) has surpassed himself on a couple of levels with "Zodiac," his hypnotic and densely-layered new film about the famous serial killer of the late 1960s. We spoke to Fincher last week by phone from New Orleans, where he was wrapping up a new movie called "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which is based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Among other things, we talked about such possible future projects as "Torso," based on the Brian Michael Bendis comic about the latter-day involvement of gang-buster Eliot Ness with a Midwestern miscreant known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer. However, for a man who was a Marin Country grade-school kid when the Zodiac murders were underway, his new movie was still the most personally meaningful.

Kurt Loder: When you started working on "Zodiac," were you hoping to actually crack the case after all these years?

David Fincher: No. I don't think there's any hope of that. I don't think it's in the cards. It's one of those things that will go on for years and years, and there will forever be differing theories.

Loder: One of the most interesting things about the movie is that even though the bad guy is never caught, or even conclusively identified, there's a strong narrative satisfaction at the end — we think we know who did it.

Fincher: Well I'm glad you thought that. You may be in the minority. [laughs] There are some people that are a little miffed at the inconclusive nature of it.

Loder: Well, Leigh Allen very strongly seems to be the guy, and that's enough for me.

Fincher: I think a reasonably intelligent cop gets a feeling about some things, you know? And in the Zodiac case, these were all smart guys, and this was what their gut was telling them, that it was Leigh Allen. Also, that was the story we bought in the two Robert Graysmith books that the movie is based on. So we didn't feel the urge to have to tell everything. All the ancillary aspects of the case, we didn't have to get into that.

Loder: Charles Fleischer's character, Bob Vaughn, is kind of ancillary, but I'm glad you left him in.

Fincher: We wondered about that — do we include Bob Vaughn? Because he's such a red herring. Is he necessary? No, but ...

Loder: It's a really scary scene.

Fincher: Well, yeah, it was fun. And I felt that like it kind of talked about the red-herring nature of an investigation that goes on this long.

Loder: Why do you think serial killers have such cultural resonance? The Zodiac; Jack the Ripper; the "Son of Sam" killer, David Berkowitz — each of them killed a relatively small number of people in a relatively brief period of time. And yet ...

Fincher: Well, I think it's the nature of the letters they wrote to the press — the nature of people who taunt others with their ability to hunt freely amongst the citizenry. I don't think if Zodiac hadn't written his letters that we'd be making a movie about him, or talking about him now.

Loder: Where did Robert Downey get his character from? Paul Avery, the reporter he plays, is dead.

Fincher: [laughs] Well, I don't know. When Downey says, "I know what to do with this," you get out of his way.

Loder: You really managed to nail the period the story takes place in — the late '60s and early '70s — without trotting out the usual clichés.

Fincher: That was an important thing to us. I didn't want the movie to look like pastiche. I wanted it to look genuine. I knew San Francisco in those years. I loved that era and that period, and I wanted to do right by it.

Loder: The soundtrack is really smart, too.

Fincher: Yeah, that was the thing. I mean, we originally had this Big Brother & the Holding Company song for the opening. And then somebody played the Three Dog Night song ["Easy To Be Hard"] for me, and I was just like, wow! Because that was it — that was the summer of '69. It's weird how music can be that way. You want it to be all things to all people, but then you find the thing that works for you, and you can't deny how personal it makes that moment.

Loder: What's the feedback on the movie been so far? Has anybody said, "I don't get it"?

Fincher: Well, yeah. But we've had really, really great responses. I mean, look, as with almost everything I've ever done, there are people who really like it, and there are people who think it's cold and manipulative. I have no idea what the consensus is. I've given up trying to understand.

Loder: The movie is like a master class in editing, the way it navigates so much complex material.

Fincher: Editing it was a nightmare. I mean, how do you cut a scene in half that was originally a six-page scene, that had all this richness of detail? But you finally go, "You know what? I don't have time for that right here. I'm wearing the audience out."

Loder: The movie doesn't feel long, though. Is it going to be longer on the DVD?

Fincher: I believe so. It's really a question of ... I mean, right now these DVD windows are so short that we're already talking about the DVD, you know? We were talkin' about the DVD two weeks ago, and I was like, "You gotta be kidding." I mean, can we worry about getting the movie in theatres before we worry about prepping it for the disc?

Loder: Were there any scenes that were particularly heartbreaking for you to cut out?

Fincher: Yeah. There's a scene that I want to put back — although I agreed at the time that it didn't play. It was a great scene before the cops get the search warrant to search Leigh's trailer. Anthony Edwards, who I think is phenomenal, and Mark Ruffalo, who I couldn't be a bigger fan of, and Dermot Mulroney, who's just delicious in this part, go into Dermot's office and just talk to a speakerphone for about five pages. I just loved it. I loved the "Charlie's Angels" thing with the speakerphone. One of the guys would talk, and then we'd actually cut to the speakerphone. It was so much fun. I'll probably put that back, just because I love the idea of police work just being three people in a room talking to a speakerphone.

Loder: I think a lot of people might be expecting a picture from you to be a little more gory than this one is.

Fincher: Well, you know, my movies aren't that gory. I mean, I think "Panic Room" is probably the most violent movie I've ever made. Not in terms of what it talked about, but in terms of what you actually see. I sort of pride myself on not having to ... I mean, I like audiences to feel discomfort, but I don't go out of my way to offend people. This was never intended to be "Se7en." That was a different time and a different place, and it was 15 years ago.

Loder: I know you were concerned with accuracy in this picture, but was there any material you had to adjust a bit just for dramatic reasons?

Fincher: Yeah — the moment where Avery gets the shirt. This little piece of bloodstained shirt came to the "Chronicle," but it didn't really come to Avery. It actually came in another letter the day before. But we needed Avery to open that Halloween card, and for the audience to be able to go, "Uh oh — that's the Zodiac." So we fudged that, yeah.

Loder: One of the creepiest scenes in the movie is when the cops go to search Leigh's trailer, which is filled with guns and fetish magazines — and squirrels. Were there photos of that in the original case files?

Fincher: Leigh's trailer? Yeah. I mean, we don't have photos of the inside, but we have the police reports that talk about the contents of everything that was found in the trailer. He had squirrels and chipmunks as pets, and he performed little operations on them. He was ... how does he characterize himself? "I'm a nasty, nasty man"? It's also interesting that police reports in those days were so much more polite. They reference that he had pornography, but they won't tell you what kind of pornography.

Loder: What conclusion did you come to in the end — was Leigh Allen really the Zodiac?

Fincher: There are things that I think are compelling, certain handwriting characteristics. I know that he was cleared on the handwriting, but we had handwriting experts look at the morphemes, and a lot of other things they didn't really look at back then, and there are definite similarities. But I don't know that we'll ever know.

Loder: You're well-known by now for shooting a lot of takes — something that probably doesn't endear you to some of your actors. What is it that you're looking for when you get up to, say, Take 65? What's eluding you?

Fincher: The most takes we did on this picture was on day one, doing a walk-and-talk scene. Walk-and-talk scenes are really hard. If somebody's delivering five pages of dialogue walking down a hallway, it's got to be just right. We re-shot a couple of scenes because we didn't feel like the information was landing. Because that's all this movie is, it's character and information, and when that stuff isn't working, you have to go back to the drawing board, and find another way in. I understand that some actors can find this frustrating; they like encouragement, and it's not encouraging to say, "Let's do another one." But it's not like I didn't have a reason or didn't have a direction. There was a direction we were going in.

Loder: There's an enormous amount of information in this film — were you worried about whether viewers would be able to take it all in?

Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. No one wants to make something that's boring. No one wants to open in 3000 cinemas and bore people. That's bad. But I love forensic-investigation shows. I love Court TV. And I thought there was a big audience out there for that. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seemed to me that people like getting involved in those kinds of puzzles.

Loder: You obviously have an affinity for the serial-killer genre. I'd imagine you don't want to make a career of it, but you are considering making a film version of "Torso," aren't you?

Fincher: I'm interested in that. I'm not interested in the serial killer thing, I'm interested in Eliot Ness. I'm interested in the de-mythologizing of Eliot Ness. Because, you know, "The Untouchables" was only two or three years of the Eliot Ness story. There's a whole other, much more sinister downside to it. And so that's of interest to me. We want to make it the "Citizen Kane" of cop movies. I also want to make a CG animated movie. And I've been talking about doing a remake of a movie I really liked in the '70s, "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud." Ever see that? And there's a World War II movie that Robert Towne is writing that I really love. All kinds of stuff.

Loder: How did you become involved with "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"?

Fincher: I read a script many, many years ago. It's a really beautiful story, but I didn't feel that it was makeable in that incarnation. I told Brad [Pitt] about it years ago, and then it was being offered to him, but they didn't have a director, so they brought it to me, then I worked on it for about four years, and now it's finally at a place where the studio wanted to throw the kind of money that it would take to execute it. So here we are in New Orleans, making it.

Loder: Is there any kind of movie that you've always wanted to do that you haven't done yet? Is there a musical in your future?

Fincher: I'd love to do a musical! I really would. I wanted to do "Evita"! I really did. I thought it was a nasty musical — I liked that about it. It's sort of perverse.

Loder: Singing totalitarians.

Fincher: Exactly. The thing I loved about it is, they understood the corollary between sex and politics, you know? They're almost the same thing.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

The Red Vine

This was one of my most anticipated movies this year. It doesn't disappoint.

It was somewhat like I thought it would be but yet totally different. As Ghostboy said, it's entirely procedural. It does have a long running time and sometimes you can feel it. But you're loaded with so much information throughout that it's hard to be bored. It's truly a rollercoaster ride.

Amazing movie.
"No, really. Just do it. You have some kind of weird reasons that are okay.">

MacGuffin

Interview: David Fincher of "Zodiac"
Source: The Oregonian

"What do you think? What are our chances? Do you think anyone will go to a movie that lasts this long and requires this much of its audience?"

Usually it's the journalist who asks the questions during an interview. But these queries come from David Fincher, director of "Seven," "Fight Club," "Panic Room" and, now, "Zodiac." It's a fine new film about the crimes of and hunt for the infamous Bay Area serial killer of the 1970s who called himself by that astrological name in taunting letters to the press and police.

Like other Fincher films, "Zodiac" is full of violence and drama and movie stars (Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo) and exquisite craft. But, also like other Fincher films, it's long and dark and complex and demanding. Although it's likely to satisfy anyone who enjoys Fincher's other films or such dense entertainments as "The Departed" and "The Usual Suspects," an estimated $85 million of studio money is at stake. No wonder Fincher is seeking a little affirmation.

Now in his mid-40s, Fincher spent his childhood in the Bay Area -- where he witnessed the Zodiac era in real time and had George Lucas as a neighbor -- and his high school years in Ashland. He spoke to The Oregonian recently from his Los Angeles office.

"Zodiac" is a story about real people who were brutally murdered or wounded and who are either still around or still have families alive. Do you feel an obligation to the survivors and relatives?

Yes. You know, we could've made this movie without ever having interviewed anybody, and we didn't want to do that. We wanted to get the real story, and we wanted them to know that we didn't just want to depict their anonymous suffering as "Victim No. 4." We wanted to know what really happened and the fallout from it. I feel a responsibility to that. When you're portraying people's real lives, you owe them the responsibility and dignity of telling them what you're gonna do and then sticking to that. My reputation aside, I really don't set out to offend anybody. And especially not people who've suffered.

The film is built around this trio of people trying to solve the crime (reporter Paul Avery, detective David Toschi and cartoonist and independent investigator Robert Graysmith). Do you feel particularly close to any one of them in personality or attitude?

I feel about the same for all of them. They're sort of all pieces of who I am. Avery, the pro, says things like, 'This guy killed only five people; more people die every year in the East Bay commute.' He's the tortured realist; he'd love to get involved and get broken up about stuff, but he doesn't. And then Toschi, who thinks you have to let things go. Graysmith is the compulsive part of my personality.

Internet sites that follow film production have suggested that this film might have been out sooner, maybe in time for Oscar consideration. Was there a lot of delay in finishing?

Well, making movies is hard. It takes a long time. And we reshot a lot of stuff, and some of it's better and some of it's not. We had to play around with it and do some test screenings, with the intent of assuaging everyone's fears. And we didn't. So then you go through that whole rigmarole of, "Let's all see what the movie actually is." And we did that for six months, and it got to the shape that it has now. We reached a concession point. I wasn't gonna make it any shorter, and they weren't going to let me make it any longer. So it's where it should be.

What sort of things did you lose that you wish you had saved?

There was some stuff in the original cut that I would have loved to have seen in the final cut, but they just wouldn't sit still for it. There was an entire scene where the cops run down some district attorney with their case against Arthur Leigh Allen (a suspect). And I just love it because it's so "Charlie's Angels": just three guys talking into a speakerphone. But the audience was, "You're kidding, right? Five minutes of guys talking into a speakerphone?" Well, the audience spoke, and the audience said no.

You took great pains to achieve a period look for the film, it seems to me. What portion of your attention do you reckon you put into things like decor and props and wardrobe?

Probably far too much! I hope it's the right amount. It starts early on. We would always try to find anything that was real. Reality is good enough for me, and that's what we did. "What would the outside of this character's house look like?" Well, we got some pictures and we knew. Between the truth and something that was beautiful, we opted to go with the truth.

Our other mantra was, "Let's make sure that we don't do pastiche." It's one thing to do an homage, but I didn't want to make a movie about sideburns. I wanted it to be a movie about people, and I wanted it to be about the '70s in San Francisco that I knew growing up. So when in doubt, I would reference old photos and go, like, "Yeah, that's about how many Volkswagen Bugs you'd see on the street, so that's what we'll do."

When you did that visual research, did you find that the period differed from your impressions from your childhood?

It was pretty much as I remembered it. The one thing that changed was my understanding of the Zodiac case, which was based on a 7-year-old's memory. As a kid, I always thought Zodiac's body count was much higher and that there was this huge manhunt to find this guy. It turns out it was two guys with these rotary phones and Bic pens. Even when they were telling us on television that they were going through computer files comparing fingerprints, the reality was that the technology didn't exist in any truly useful format until later. The '70s was a little bit of a technological backwater. They didn't have fax machines. And we wanted to talk about that -- not to harp on it but to remind people that those times were more primitive.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Pubrick

Quote from: MacGuffin on March 03, 2007, 12:40:49 AM
But the audience was, "You're kidding, right? Five minutes of guys talking into a speakerphone?" Well, the audience spoke, and the audience said no.

the audience needs to shut the hell up.
under the paving stones.

tpfkabi

i enjoyed this very much.

then again, i can sit and watch several episodes of shows like Cold Case Files, etc on tv.

Downey impressed me. the name is always floating around in reference to his troubles, but i guess i really haven't seen many films with him in them.

did anyone else leave the theater kinda checking out other people and cars suspiciously?

I am Torgo. I take care of the place while the Master is away.

john

Fuckin' astonishing.

Fincher can go either way with his completely computer generated shots. I dug Panic Room, but some of those shots left me cold and indifferent.

Then here... it was like all the love George Lucas claims to have for digital effects actually put into effect. Fincher's love for making the movie was contagious. I loved watching this movie.

You know what I didn't love though? The four young, black girls that sat behind me.

I mean, God Bless 'em for seeing Zodiac...but I didn't need to hear:

in relation to one of the victims pleas: "That dude is a faggot"

in relation to Robert Greysmith's car: "Fuckin' small ass car. Whaaaat?"

in relation to another victim: "Fuck him up."

in relation to Paul Avery: "smokin' a blunt like a pimp."

in relation to the location: "This shit is in San Francisco?" Keep in mind, the Golden Gate Bridge is featured prominently on the poster and, oh yeah, we're seeing this film in a theater....in San Francisco.

in relation to the ending: "They don't even gonna catch that motherfucker?" followed by, "That is a hella stupid ending."

I shit you not. I imagine this belongs in the "worst theatrical experiences" conversation. Sorry. It's more of a tangent because, see, regardless of their comments....that movie was fucking phenominal in every way.
Maybe every day is Saturday morning.

tpfkabi

Quote from: john on March 03, 2007, 01:28:19 AM
Fincher can go either way with his completely computer generated shots. I dug Panic Room, but some of those shots left me cold and indifferent.

yeah, those shot took me out of Fight Club and Panic Room.

i liked the long shot at the beginning through the car door - all the fireworks, people in the background.
I am Torgo. I take care of the place while the Master is away.

matt35mm

Ah delicious.

Hopefully this film can be taken as a good sign for things to come this year, especially since it was better than the Best Picture nominees from last year.