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Zodiac

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

David Fincher on "Zodiac" Director's cut

 

Q. The original version of the script is different?

(Fincher) The original version of the script was different. Jamie’s first draft, that I read, that I was sent, was structured differently--it wasn’t as long. It was more of a movie--. it wasn’t quite—as one critic said—it was like being locked up in a filing cabinet. There wasn’t so much data…

One of the memories that I have of leaving the Bay Area when my parents moved to southern Oregon in ’76: And I remember traveling in the car filled with boxes. I remember looking out the back and actually asking myself whatever happened to Zodiac, ‘cause it was such a big deal for so long. It was almost two years the guy was in the paper every day and all of a sudden it just disappeared and I remember thinking, “What happened with that?”

And when I got the script I kind of thought I didn’t want to make a movie about it. I didn’t want to make a movie that exploited it. I wanted to make the movie about it that kind of turned over every rock and looked under it … in terms of what it meant to the politics—you know, the Chronicle was kind of in a neck-and-neck tie with the Examiner and really catapulted into the forefront because Zodiac chose to communicate through the Chronicle.

So a lot of the landscape of San Francisco changed because of Zodiac. In our discussion with the paper about how we were going to portray, we made no bones of the fact that a lot of the investigation was really waylaid by the Chronicle’s involvement and the things that they chose to print. You would never in a serial-killer investigation today print the guy’s handwriting on the front page of the paper: You would hold that back, typeset it, you would just not allow people to have access to what this guy’s handwriting looked like.

You know, there was a lot of stuff we went through, we had two books to cull from: “We want this to be the movie, we want this,” and this it was just a year and a half trying to figure out how to get it all in—to do it all.

Q. Did you ever at a certain point try to structure the movie around one person rather than three or four?

(Fincher) Yeah, I just didn’t want to do that. The original draft was much more Graysmith from the beginning, much more him peering over people’s shoulders and a little less of Toschi. I think Avery is pretty happy that he wants to write the book and it kinds of sends him on his way. It was a little more of a straight line, there weren’t as many digressions. The scene in the basement was in there. But there was this summation at the end, it was much more modeled after either JFK or Psycho—there was an eight-page summation at the end where Graysmith turned over all his files to the Department of Justice. I just felt like a placebo to the notion that somebody is going to carry the torch. I really wanted to see Toschi and Graysmith run through it one more time… and just have them both go, you know it, you both know it.” One or two things that Graysmith can tell him that‘s different than what he thinks he knows… We restructured around that.

Q. With a little sense of lingering doubt?

(Fincher) There is doubt … The guy was never convicted, and there are many many many--a lot of holes in this, it’s a very circumstantial case. A very interesting, troubled, complicated guy who just as it turned out had no alibi and a lot of circumstantial evidence including some really damaging hearsay from Don Cheney. And as anybody in law enforcement will tell you, 90% of all homicide cases that are solved are solved because somebody tattles to somebody else: “Yeah he was drunk and he told me,” and they go and arrest the guy—that’s normally how it works out. the fact this is hearsay is not that revolutionary in jurisprudence, the fact they couldn’t make anything stick.. And again, you know, I don’t know if there was the term serial killer in 1970s. There was no behavioral sciences, no Quantico, no Mosaic. It was very, very incredibly early times. The fact that Melvil Belli went on TV had a conversation, tried to talk him down, you know that’s a San Francisco thing, but they were naive about what serial killers were all about—psychosexual sadists and that kind of compulsive behavior.

Q. Can you talk a little bit about the way you worked with the actors. What was the general direction you wanted to go in?

(Fincher) I don’t know that I was going for a style. I was pretty specific about Avery, what he— … I knew my dad was a journalist; he worked for Life magazine, I knew a lot of those guys. I had to get Robert to understand that kind of intellectual showoff that Paul Avery needed to be for the movie. It seemed to me, he’s auditioning jokes for whoever in the room would appreciate them. Graysmith was easier and harder because Robert was available to us and we could sit down to talk with him, he could say “this was going through my head.” But to get at the guy when he was 22 or 23 when the whole thing started and get that to make some kind of sense… It was more about like making what Jake had to do believable for Jake, to make it work for him, and Ruffallo went off to meet with Dave Toschi a couple of days and came back as Dave Toschi. It’s hard to appreciate, ‘cause what’s he doing in this movie seems odd, but that’s who this guy is. He really nailed it. We were so nervous when they screened this in San Francisco… but everybody was very happy with Dave Toschi. He’s very sweet—I mean he did have an ego a little bit out of check and he did want people to write stories and his hubris, his need for that kind of attention was his downfall, and we wanted to get into that a little bit. Ruffolo just managed to catch this guy. No bullshit, Tony Edwards did a truly thankless job—a role not a lot of people even wanted to to take--he came in and was so radiates decency at every moment.

Q. Why did you want to shoot this film in digital, with the Viper?

(Fincher) I’ve been making television commercials, shooting digital, for some years mostly to test out whether it could work—the workflow was kind of robust enough for the wear and tear of a 120-day shoot. But I also kind of liked—there are things Harris Savides, who shot the movie, hated about the look of Viper, the look of the digital CCD chip , but I sort of thought it was appropriate—it looked like realty television in a weird way, but it was better than that. Some of it was hybrid between 30 grams a second and that kind of plastic, waxy quality it gives faces in film, and so I thought it was appropriate.

I like the work flow, love watching on a 23 inch monitor, high def--you can see when people’s eyes go out of focus, you can right away focus on his ear and not on his eye—you can immediately do that. I like the immediacy of it. I like that for the first time in the history of motion pictures… everyone can look at exactly what you’re going to get— there’s no mystery, and I think that’s a great thing.

Q. It’s also very helpful when you’re doing all the effects you did for the movie too?

(Fincher) Yeah, yeah. it’s a great thing. We cut on Final Cut, and we can on any given day go “that job is locked,” put it on the drive. … Two hours later it can be send back to Quick Time and we can begin the process of honing in on what the effect is going to be. Very fast to me.,,

Q. I have a question about uncovering new evidence during the course of the movie.

(Fincher) We asked a lot of questions. It wasn’t so much uncovering new evidence as getting five or six key people in the room to talk who had maybe never met or never had seen certain police reports. It was not so much—again, just more lingering conjecture.

Q. Did you get a lot of communication from the Zodiac obsessives?

(Fincher) No. (Laughter).

Q. A question about the additional seven minutes in
the film.

(Fincher) When we got a version of the movie we were happy with, we did one more screening. I was in New Orleans, I was shooting, and all the executives from Warner Brothers and Paramount flew out, and they rented a screening room, and we hijacked people from malls and brought them in and gave them the power of life and death.

There isn’t that much—there’s a sequence in it where Tony kind of runs down for Mark and McDermott a case for the Santa Rosa district attorney and they’re talking to a speaker.

And then there’s the 45 seconds, which was originally two minutes of black, where you just have the sound montage that takes you from 1972 to 1977. I always loved this idea of where Toschi and Graysmith finally meet and fade out, and then you go “four years later.” But I kind of wanted to kind of feel those four years. Part of the problem making this movie was to try to have it take its toll on the audience. You wanted to feel like you’d been subjected to—that you’ve done your homework and you’ve been in the room and heard the stuff and followed up on it—I wanted to get that feeling. When we screened it for this audience in New Orleans, it was fairly evident that those sequences in particular—and there were other sequences that a lot of people wanted to cut, but those were the ones I felt we could stomach. And so we cut those… It doesn’t change it that much. I just felt for the DVD we could call it the director’s cut, so we might as well at least could put it back to the final screening that we did that we lopped the ears off.

Q. Talk to us a little more about the precise approach to the visuals, and/or working with Harris Savides.

(Fincher) Well, working with Harris is to work with one of the five most talented guys. I’ve worked with some really—he’s probably the most talented cameraman working today and I don’t think he liked this whole digital thing. But, you know, we talked a lot at the beginning about how simple we wanted to make stuff and how much we wanted to present this in as unvarnished and unpolished a way—so it became a lot about practical solutions, what you would expect to see in the situation, and what would actually be there. If you know his work—it’s about the choices at the beginning, the blinders we put on, more than the available toys. He’s one of these guys who wants to know what are the limitations. If we had any disagreements, it’s that he felt we shot too much coverage, we’d shot too many angles, and we could tell the story simpler—“man, I shot five and a half pages and I have three setups, I can’t deal with these….”

We tried to be as primitive as we could; we didn’t want to loop the camera unless we had to—we didn’t want any cranes, unless for a specific POV, like a kid’s POV looking down at Paul Stine, because you got to get an audience to listen to what everyone is saying, and they have to know that is front and center the most important thing that’s going on—what are people saying? Do you believe them or don’t you?. So we had to remove every possible distraction.

Ren Klyce, who was the sound designer for 20 years—originally we didn’t want any score, we thought score would be emotional icing and it would some way detract from the data, and I had the idea we could do the entire thing with source music cues—and we found a lot of interesting period music, but ultimately it seemed thematically we needed to get the idea—we felt we needed a Zodiac theme, and we felt we needed a handoff: some kind of fanatic instrumental handoff from Toschi to Armstrong to Avery to—it needed to have something to underline that. There’s only 30 minute of music in the whole movie; he recorded extremely quickly. But Ren said “What about David Shire” and I loved the conversation … and we just called him. … I was still kind of reticent, and he came out, and sat at the piano and played some themes and said, “It would be stupid to say no to this.”

Q. So what the hardest part for David in making the transition from music videos and commercials to feature films?

(Fincher) I think it’s a manifold answer to that question. It’s completely different disciplines—there are just ways that when you’ve made three or four movies and have to stage hundreds of days of shooting, you just think about things in a different way. Certain things you have in your back pocket. Like in my first movie I didn’t really think of “where am I in this room and what has the audience seen, what do they know already, what do they need to know, what do I need to hide from them and what do I need to underline?” And actors treat you like a fucking idiot because you are. I think it’s difficult to make the transition in that it’s difficult to get anybody to give you the money tomake movies, and it’s hard to get actors to trust you and ultimately it’s about stories and they’re told through actors and so I think the hardest thing in the transition is understanding that they give you the great gift of what they can do, but they also saddle you with an enormous responsibility because they don’t know what they’re doing—you have to tell them. One of the easiest ways to get an actor to stop fucking around is to stop giving him direction. You just go, “let’s do another one—one more.” Three takes of that and they’re fucking lost…They’re like “what’s wrong? what’s wrong?” “Let’s just do another one.” (Laughter.) You want them to pay attention and that’s what you do. I’ve been in situations where you’re giving very specific, “I need this, I need this” and they’re like ,,, and finally … well “what do you want?” So you drop in the shoulder … turn and say this line like this.” They’re more apt to do it.

Q. Did David feel any apprehensiveness in making a film about the Zodiac--the fact that the Zodiac asked for a film about himself?

(Fincher) I wasn’t making a film about the Zodiac, I was making a film about a guy—about a reign of terror. I was making a film about a whole time and place—five specific incidents.

Q. Also a film about the desire—

(Fincher) Yes, what is justice, the need for justice? What is it? What does it look like? When you see the guy get the lethal injection, and they close the curtain. Is that enough? What if they never get that far? What if you never get to arraignment. I did everything I could.

Q. Why did you drop on "Mission Impossible 3"?

(Fincher) I made a little rule for myself that you never start a movie with a three at the end of every line of script, and it served me well. It was very simple. Robert Towne and I worked for about nine, ten months on a story that we really liked and we brought it to Bruce Wagner and they really liked it and they wanted to put stunt men on and send out location scouts and I was like—we had 45 pages, the other 80 we had high hopes for. And in all fairness, the movie business is—a lot of it has to do with actor availability… and whether or not we can convince a studio that now is the time to strike. The pact that Cruise made with me was, he said, “I don’t need to do this—there’s no reason for me to do this until the script’s great.” I said “great, that’s what I want to hear.” And we had Robert Towne, who’s fantastic, and we had 45 pages that were date and a looming start date…

Q. Arthur Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”?

(Fincher) Yeah, it’s a great book and it’s a really interesting story. The corpse of it has been picked clean by “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” and “Alien” … “Hammer of God” or “Deep Impact”—there are so many movies that have stolen bits of it. Our take on it was, we wanted to do “Into Thin Air”—we wanted to make a science—science-fiction, heavy science film—I wanted to make a movie where kids would walk out of the theater and want to buy a telescope instead of an action figure. So the whole notion was to make something that was “How much oxygen do you have?” The whole thing where they throw a flare and it just tumbles 10 km in darkness and it hardly illuminates because the inside of the Rama is so big. … The movie would have to be 98% CD. So the question was expense, how do you do the weightlessness, how do you
do water simulations, and the fabric, and make that stuff real. It’s one of that movies that would probably cost $250 million to do right now and $80 million three years from now—that’s where the technology is headed--it will be easier to make that movie the longer they wait.

Q. You talk about the logos at the beginning being period logos.

(Fincher) When you work on something for too long, you can polish your turd (laughter). Yeah, you start to think to yourself… but you know it’s an odd thing when you start asking these vertically integrated media conglomerates, “Can we deface your logo?” … It was weird, it took weeks to get permission to do that stuff. Then we had to change them because the Time Warner shield used to say something else—Seven Arts or something like that—‘cause all these companies were owned by different... They all agreed in principle—they liked this idea—and it just took six weeks to get everybody to sign off on it. And then… Warner Brothers said there’s only one frame that was good so we took that and jiggled it to make it look like it was reprojected and put shit on it… (laughter).