David Fincher has lots of ideas — Zodiac
Next month David Fincher’s new film Mank is released on Netflix. The period drama about the creation of Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane was written by Fincher’s late father Jack, and marks the director’s return to film-making.
Fincher has enjoyed a six-year hiatus following the release of Gone Girl in 2014.
The 58-year-old made his film-making debut in 1992 with Alien3 however due to consistent meddling from executives he disavowed the finished product.
Since then he has made 9 feature length films, each one released with a director’s commentary.
Listening to Fincher’s commentaries one thing is clear — he loves his films bristling with ideas. With almost every scene, even with some specific shots, he is trying to present an idea. And he loves to talk about it.
Five years after the release of Panic Room, Fincher returned to the director’s chair with the widely-acclaimed epic Zodiac. His first film based on a true story, Zodiac is about the desperate, failed attempt to catch the Zodiac serial killer who terrorised the San Francisco area in the late 1960s and 1970s.
It stars Jake Gyllenhaal as cartoonist/Zodiac obsessive Robert Graysmith, Mark Ruffalo as Detective Dave Toschi and Robert Downey Jr as journalist Paul Avery.
Here are David Fincher’s ideas in Zodiac (spoilers ahead, obviously):
Use of period Warner Bros and Paramount logos
“There was some speculation about our use of the period Warner Brothers and Paramount logos about whether or not we were trying to make the movie seem like it was made in the 1970s and although — I think it was born out of the desperation to have just some idea, any idea, we just hit upon this notion of using the period logos to, kind of set the analogue scene for how the drama would unfold.”
San Francisco a ‘cosmopolitan city’ in opening shot
“I love the idea of seeing this cosmopolitan city, or the city that San Francisco was when I was a kid, it was a very jewell-like cosmopolitan oasis and that’s sort of what I wanted to get across in that opening shot.”
First Zodiac letter enters Chronicle office
“I liked the idea of doing something that was very, very simple in terms of its travel and cause and effect.
“Really all we really wanted to do was bring this one specific letter into this world. For me the Chronicle is a key kind of hub in the movie because it’s where all the information is disseminated and it’s certainly where a couple of our leads come into contact with the idea of the Zodiac.”
Paul Avery and Robert Graysmith ‘meet’
“Avery probably never had this kind of interaction with Graysmith until much later but we liked, in terms of telling the story, we liked the idea of Avery sort of seeing a spark and Robert making the trek across the newsroom to the art department to fill him in on the… and liked the idea of him introducing himself even though Robert’s a bit chagrined by it because he’s already been introduced to him before.”
Bryan Hartnell corrects Cecelia’s description of his studies as they’re held up by Zodiac
“It felt to me like they were nervous but it showed that they weren’t… it made them seem like friends or, less like they were romantically involved, they didn’t know each other that well. I love the idea of this little digression in the middle of it.”
The Zodiac letters ‘are the key’
“The letters are the key, the letters for me were the thing that — again it was the idea of this ongoing correspondence with somebody who is in process and you got to see how he… not only the manipulation of the press, the manipulation of the public, but just his evolution, the evolution of his thinking and how he thought about himself.”
The fixed shot of Paul Stine’s cab before his murder
“The cab shot is one of those moments that people seem to really remember in the movie. The idea here was to have this sense both of detachment, God’s POV looking down on something he has no control over and also this way of… you’re both locked onto what’s happening and powerless to change it.”
‘Warring publisher and editor’
“John Terry (playing Charles Thieriot) and John Getz (Templeton Peck) were the sort of warring publisher and editor.
“We had this sort of idea that — it was hard to dramatically show the hierarchical structure of the Chronicle — so I liked the idea that you had two guys who basically come to the same conclusions but get there by very different ways.”
‘The beginnings of Graysmith’s obsession with the Zodiac’
“This is a nice scene, I like how this is laid out. This is Jamie Vanderbilt’s (writer) notion of… how to kind of kick start the second… the beginnings of Graysmith’s obsession. I like the idea that there was this moment in time where the new letter had come and everybody had stopped what they were doing and they’d all piled into room to be part of whatever was to come.”
Detective Toschi takes a phone call at home
“This was a scene that we put back in the movie just before we were to lock picture and it had been taken out, it had been out for months. But I really felt we needed to get an idea of Toschi at home, I felt like we had him as a cop — also this scene sets up the whole ‘basement for future use’ notion — but that wasn’t as important as seeing the guy at his dining room table poring over stuff he’s already seen 100 times.”
Painting Melvin Belli as a ‘blowhard’
“We may have gone a little too far in painting Melvin as a blowhard but I liked the idea — there was a story that Bill Armstrong told us — it actually took place in his town home, his penthouse that was actually up the hill from the Transamerica building that would, of course, been across the street from his offices, but there was a story that Armstrong told us that he received this call on Thanksgiving or around christmas at some point and they’d rushed over because Melvin Belli was sure that there was a sniper on the building across the street.
“Some people had seen a man and they thought he had a rifle and so Bill and Toschi rushed over and there was a dinner party going on and they were led in and they had a little conference momentarily with Melvin and then they were sort of paraded through this party and introduced to people and Armstrong said he began to be aware of the fact that they were sort of, they’d become de facto dinner guests in Belli’s wanting to show how responsive the police were to his discomfort.
“So I liked that notion of these guys being summoned to this place and we fudged it a little bit so it now happens with the letter.”
The detectives return to the scene of the murder
“This is a wonderful scene, I love the idea of Toschi and Armstrong going back to the scene of the Stine murder.”
Paul Avery is sent a bit of bloody shirt
“In reality the bloody shirt arrived in another letter that was sent to the Chronicle but we needed to kickstart this idea that, we needed to make it positive for the audience and absolutely equivocal that he had been communicated with by the Zodiac, again a little bit of dramatic licence.”
Avery meets an informant
“I love this scene, this was originally designed to be a much bigger deal. And we follow Downey, there’s a big kind of non-scare moment where he meets an informant and we shot it a couple of different times.
“It just didn’t have its place in the movie and had to… I mean the movie was long as it was, extremely long as it was, and it didn’t seem like, seemed like a moment where we could lose a bit of… but I like the idea that he goes to, I ultimately like the way that it’s structured, that he goes down there, we see him, there’s some.. and then something kind of oddly not right about where he’s going to meet this guy.
“In actuality he went to a house, it was completely dark and met some guy there but it was too much like the informant in Chinatown so we didn’t do that.”
‘Lunatics’ coming forward with wild Zodiac claims
“I thought this was very funny, the notion of having all these kinds of people who are so suspect and then leading into the Don Cheney/Sandy Panserella meeting in Torrance, I liked the idea of couching it as literally having to meet with every lunatic who has come out of the woodwork to offer their theories and so it all sort of culminates this guy telling me this incredibly hard to believe story that it’s all been laid out for him by Leigh Allen.”
Toschi and Armstrong scene worked perfectly
“This is one of those great moments where you have this idea for a scene and you know you’re gonna need coverage, and the guys gotta eat and you go ‘oh man this is gonna be a nightmare’ and you come in and you shoot the master and the master’s so good and the timing of it works so well and you just go ‘well, that goes in the movie, that’s fine, we’ll move on, we don’t need close ups of anyone, that’ll be okay’.”
Time-lapse sequence of the construction of the Transamerica Pyramid
“In any case the notion was one of, it wasn’t meant to be ‘let’s have a directorial flourish here’, we tell the story of a passage of time and originally there was a whole audio montage on top of it… in the end it was too difficult for test audiences to follow and they just needed a reprieve and we ended up cutting the dialogue out of it, we ended up just playing Marvin Gaye music and you can’t really go wrong with that.”
The police having to lay out the information for themselves
“I love the idea of watching how the police have to lay it out for themselves, they have to lay it out in a convincing manner, there’s the moment here where he talks about the weapons and they shoot a little glance between each other and they’ll list them, they don’t really really have that stuff at their fingertips, it’s the kind of process that police officers go through as they compile their case and they… as they build their belief structures and they have to prove it to themselves and to one another over and over before they’re given an opportunity to get a warrant to serve.”
Charlie’s Angels reference
“Any time you can cut to the speakerphone as the… as the ‘Charlie’s voice’. I just love the idea of these guys laying it out for ‘Charlie’, it seemed like such a 70s idea.”
Audio montage to move story 4 years forward
“I wanted to have a mass-culture reference in moving us forward 4 years and so the idea was to do this montage purely of audio, of different songs and to finally take the movie from mono to stereo, since six-track stereo only really came on the scene with Star Wars.”
Graysmith tries to rekindle Avery’s interest in the Zodiac
“I love the idea of him, again, the conceit of the scene is he’s going to try to rekindle the interest in Zodiac of the person he considers to be the foremost expert on it and his hero and he sees Avery and Avery is fairly ruined and… we shot this scene and it really didn’t work.
“There are many many ideas as to why it didn’t work but fundamentally I think that we were just… it seemed very simple to me, I loved the notion of, kind of, opening Graysmith’s eyes to the fact that the world just wasn’t working the way that he thought, that even the people that he thought stood for justice and just-ness (weren’t on his page).
Graysmith not discouraged by Avery
“I liked the fact that Graysmith, that we see his resolute nature of his decision when he goes home to the person he trusts the most in his life and she says ‘where you been?’ and he says ‘at the library’ we really get the idea that he’s not been discouraged by Avery’s snide comments.”
Graysmith speaks to Melvin Belli’s staff
“I love the idea of the woman who’s dusting and the woman who’s polishing silver in the background , he’s getting all the information that he actually needs from people who are totally unaware they’re being interviewed and are really, trying to attend to his… they’re embarrassed by the fact Melvin Belli is so late. I thought that that’s a nice construction.”
Robert Graysmith has no sense of direction
“I loved the notion that it’s never occurred to Robert that the… we had a couple of things that we did in this. I’ve not experienced the sense of Robert as having no sense of direction but I liked the idea of a character who’s not really sure how far away Sacremento is, when I mean in actuality if he went to speak to Mel Nicolai then he would have had to have driven to Sacremento and be coming back from Sacremento.
“So the fact he’s now going to go see Sherwood Morrill (handwriting expert) and it’s in Sacremento doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense but in any case, I like the idea of a hero who is kind of ‘huh where is that exactly?’”
Graysmith is too polite
“I love this, I love the idea of him feeling, because he’s so polite, feeling compelled to follow someone who may or may not be a serial killer into his own basement. And I liked that as a character moment that he doesn’t feel he can just turn and run at this very moment.”
Graysmith runs up to police department in the middle of the night
“I love the idea of running up to a police department in the middle of the night saying ‘I need to go through your records’ and I think there’s great compassion here in Elias’s (Elias Koteas) face, the way that he wants… he wants to see this guy to be done with this thing.”
Sopping wet paper slammed on door
“I love the idea that he shows up, he had this piece of paper that was sopping wet from the time Jake’s been outside and I said just pick it up and just slap it on the door and it worked well.”
Graysmith desperate for Toschi to agree with him
“I liked the idea that amongst the two of them this was where they ended up, they ended up back at this place where it was slightly more illuminated from another point of view, but it was the same circumstantial case, it was the same, it was going to be the same frustrating end.
“But it’s nicely drawn in the way of Jake’s presentation of it that he finally feels like, if you’ll just tell me, as the person I look up to, that you concur, I can move on. And Ruffalo says ‘I concur and write your book, put it out there’.”
Total number of ideas: 28
Film length: 157 minutes
Ratio of minutes to ideas: 5.6
Next up: The Social Network
