Zodiac (film)

2007 American film by David Fincher

For the young Fincher, he was drawn to the Zodiac story because he spent much of his childhood in San Anselmo in Marin County during the initial murders; he thought the killer "was the ultimate boogeyman". Fincher felt his job was to dispel the enduring mythic stature of the case by clearly defining what was fact and what was fiction. When Dave Toschi met Fincher, Fischer, and Vanderbilt, Fincher told him that he was not going to make another Dirty Harry (which is loosely based on the Zodiac case). Toschi was impressed with their knowledge of the case and realized that he had learned from them. The Zodiac's surviving victims, Mike Mageau and Bryan Hartnell, were consultants on the film. Alan J. Pakula's film All the President's Men was the template for Zodiac as Fincher felt that it was also "the story of a reporter determined to get the story at any cost and one who was new to being an investigative reporter. It was all about his obsession to know the truth." While researching the film, Fincher considered Jake Gyllenhaal to play Robert Graysmith. According to the director, "I really liked him in Donnie Darko and I thought, 'He's an interesting double sided coin. He can do that naive thing but he can also do possessed.'" In preparation for his role Gyllenhaal met Graysmith, and videotaped him to study his mannerisms and behavior. Initially, Mark Ruffalo was not interested in the project but Fincher wanted him to play David Toschi. He met with the actor and told him that he was rewriting the screenplay. "I loved what he was saying and loved where he was going with it", the actor remembers. For research, he read every report on the case and read all the books on the subject. Ruffalo met Toschi and found out that he had "perfect recall of the details and what happened when, where, who was there, what he was wearing. He always knew what he was wearing. I think it is seared into who he is and it was a big deal for him." Originally, Gary Oldman was to play Melvin Belli but "he went to a lot of trouble, they had appliances, but just physically it wasn't going to work, he just didn't have the girth", Graysmith said. Brian Cox was cast instead. Contrary to belief, Zodiac was not shot entirely digitally. Traditional high speed film cameras were used for slow motion murder sequences. Michael Mann's Miami Vice, as well as his previous effort, Collateral (a co production of Paramount and its current sister studio DreamWorks, and which also starred Mark Ruffalo), were also shot with the camera but mixed in other formats. Once shot on the Viper camera, the files were converted to DVCPro HD 1080i and edited in Final Cut Pro. This was for editorial decisions only. During the later stages of editing the original uncompressed 1080p 4:4:4 RAW digital source footage was assembled automatically to maintain an up to date digital "negative" of the film. Other digital productions like Superman Returns or Apocalypto recorded to the HDCAM tape format. Fincher had previously worked with director of photography Harris Savides on Seven (he shot the opening credits) and The Game. Savides loved the script but realized, "there was so much exposition, just people talking on the phone or having conversations. It was difficult to imagine how it could be done in a visual way." Fincher and Savides did not want to repeat the look of Seven. The director's approach to Zodiac was to create a look mundane enough that audiences would accept that what they were watching was the truth. The filmmakers also did not want to glamorize the killer or tell the story through his eyes. "That would have turned the story into a first person shooter video game. We didn't want to make the sort of movie that serial killers would want to own," Fincher said. CG was also used to recreate the San Francisco neighborhood at Washington and Cherry Streets where cab driver Paul Stine was killed. The area had changed significantly over the years and residents did not want the murder to be recreated in their neighborhood, so Fincher shot the sequence on a bluescreen stage. Production designer Donald Burt gave the visual effects team detailed drawings of the intersection as it was in 1969. Photographs of every possible angle of the area were shot with a high resolution digital camera, allowing the effects crew to build computer based geometric models of homes that were then textured with period facades. 3D vintage police motorcycles, squad cars, a firetruck and street lights were added to the final shot.

Originally, Fincher envisioned the film's soundtrack to be composed of 40 cues of vintage music spanning the nearly three decades of the Zodiac story. Fincher and music supervisor George Drakoulias searched for pop songs that reflected the era, including Three Dog Night's cover of "Easy to Be Hard". Fincher did not plan an original score for the film, but rather a tapestry of sound design, vintage songs of the period, sound bites and clips of KFRC and advertisements for "Mathews Top of the Hill Daly City" (a prominent local consumer electronics dealership of the time). He told the studio that he did not need a composer and would purchase various songs instead. They agreed, but as the film developed, sound designer Ren Klyce felt there were some scenes that could have used music. Klyce inserted music from one of his favorite soundtracks, David Shire's score for The Conversation. Fincher said that this scene would probably be put back on the DVD. To promote Zodiac, Paramount posted on light poles in major cities original sketches of the actual Zodiac killer with the words "In theaters March 2nd" at the bottom. The film was screened in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2007, with Fincher and Gyllenhaal participating in a press conference afterwards. The director's cut of Zodiac was given a rare screening at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City on November 19, 2007, with Fincher being interviewed by film critic Kent Jones afterwards.

The DVD for Zodiac was released on July 24, 2007, and is available widescreen or fullscreen, presented in anamorphic widescreen, and an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track. The initial DVD version of Zodiac contained only a few special features. According to producer David Prior, Fincher agreed to release it as Prior needed more time to prepare bonus material. In its first week, rentals for the DVD earned $6.7 million. The two disc director's cut DVD and HD DVD were released on January 8, 2008, with its UK release on Blu ray and DVD announced for September 29, 2008. Disc 1 contains, in addition to a longer cut of the film, audio commentaries by Fincher and Gyllenhaal, Downey, Fischer, Vanderbilt, and author James Ellroy. Disc 2 includes a trailer, a "Zodiac Deciphered" documentary, previsualization split screen comparisons for the Blue Rock Springs, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco murder sequences, and three video features: "Visual Effects of Zodiac", "This is the Zodiac Speaking", and a "His Name Was Arthur Leigh Allen". Other extras originally intended for the set, including TV spots and features on "Digital Workflow", "Linguistic Analysis", "Jeopardy Surface: Geographic Profiling" (Dr. Kim Rossmo's geographic profile of the Zodiac), and "The Psychology of Aggression: Behavioral Profiling" (Special Agent Sharon Pagaling Hagan's behavioral profile of the Zodiac) were omitted. However, the latter three features were made available on the film's website. For Academy Awards contention, Paramount distributed the director's cut DVD to the Producers Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, instead of the official release version; the first time that the studio had done this.

Opening in 2,362 theaters on March 2, 2007, the film grossed US$13.3 million in its opening weekend, placing second and posting a per theater average of $5,671. The film was outgrossed by fellow opener Wild Hogs and saw a decline of over 50% in its second weekend, losing out to the record breaking 300. It grossed $33 million in North America and $51 million in the rest of the world, bringing its current total to $84 million. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine, Fincher addressed the film's low gross at the North American box office: "Even with the box office being what it is, I still think there's an audience out there for this movie. Everyone has a different idea about marketing, but my philosophy is that if you market a movie to 16 year old boys and don't deliver Saw or Seven, they're going to be the most vociferous ones coming out of the screening saying 'This movie sucks.' And you're saying goodbye to the audience who would get it because they're going to look at the ads and say, 'I don't want to see some slasher movie.'" At Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale. Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman awarded the film an "A" grade, hailing the film as a "procedural thriller for the information age" that "spins your head in a new way, luring you into a vortex and then deeper still." Nathan Lee in his review for The Village Voice wrote that director Fincher's "very lack of pretense, coupled with a determination to get the facts down with maximum economy and objectivity, gives Zodiac its hard, bright integrity. As a crime saga, newspaper drama, and period piece, it works just fine. As an allegory of life in the information age, it blew my mind." Todd McCarthy's review in Variety magazine praised the film's "almost unerringly accurate evocation of the workaday San Francisco of 35–40 years ago. Forget the distorted emphasis on hippies and flower power that many such films indulge in: this is the city as it was experienced by most people who lived and worked there." David Ansen, in his review for Newsweek magazine, wrote, "Zodiac is meticulously crafted – Harris Savides's state of the art digital cinematography has a richness indistinguishable from film – and it runs almost two hours and 40 minutes. Still, the movie holds you in its grip from start to finish. Fincher boldly (and some may think perversely) withholds the emotional and forensic payoff we're conditioned to expect from a big studio movie." Roger Ebert gave the film a maximum of 4 stars, writing: "The film is a police procedural crossed with a newspaper movie but free of most of the cliches of either. Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful." Ebert also praised the ensemble cast and, as a longtime columnist for The Chicago Sun Times, asserted Zodiac was "intriguing in its accuracy" in showing the operation of a major newspaper. Time Out magazine wrote, "Zodiac isn't a puzzle film in quite that way, instead its subject is the compulsion to solve puzzles and its coup is the creeping recognition, quite contrary to the flow of crime cinema, of how fruitless that compulsion can be." Peter Bradshaw in his review for The Guardian commended the film for its "sheer cinematic virility", and gave it four stars out of five. In his review for Empire magazine, Kim Newman gave the film 4 out of 5 stars and wrote, "You'll need patience with the film's approach, which follows its main characters by poring over details, and be prepared to put up with a couple of rote family arguments and weary cop conversations, but this gripping character study becomes more agonisingly suspenseful as it gets closer to an answer that can't be confirmed." Graham Fuller in Sight & Sound magazine wrote, "the tone is pleasingly flat and mundane, evoking the demoralising grind of police work in a pre feminist, pre technological era. As such, Zodiac is considerably more adult than both Seven, which salivates over the macabre cat and mouse game it plays with the audience, and the macho brinkmanship of Fight Club." Some critics expressed disappointment with the film's long running time and lack of action scenes. "The film gets mired in the inevitable red tape of police investigations," wrote Bob Longino of The Atlanta Journal Constitution, who also felt the film "stumbles to a rather unfulfilling conclusion" and "seems to last as long as the Oscars." Andrew Sarris of The New York Observer felt that "Mr. Fincher's flair for casting is the major asset of his curiously attenuated return to the serial killer genre. I keep saying 'curiously' with regard to Mr. Fincher, because I can't really figure out what he is up to in Zodiac – with its two hour and 37 minute running time for what struck me as a shaggy dog narrative." Christy Lemire wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that "Jake Gyllenhaal is both the central figure and the weakest link But he's never fleshed out sufficiently to make you believe that he'd sacrifice his safety and that of his family to find the truth. We are told repeatedly that the former Eagle Scout is just a genuinely good guy but that's not enough." David Thompson of The Guardian felt that in relation to the rest of Fincher's career, Zodiac was "the worst yet, a terrible disappointment in which an ingenious and deserving all American serial killer nearly gets lost in the meandering treatment of cops and journalists obsessed with the case." In France, Le Monde newspaper praised Fincher for having "obtained a maturity that impresses by his mastery of form", while Libération described the film as "a thriller of elegance magnificently photographed by the great Harry Savides." However, Le Figaro wrote, "No audacity, no invention, nothing but a plot which intrigues without captivating, disturbs without terrifying, interests without exciting."

Only two 2007 films (No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood) appeared on more critics' top ten lists than Zodiac. Some of the notable top ten list appearances are:

In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest movies ever made, three critics and one director, Bong Joon ho, named Zodiac one of their 10 favorite films. In a 2016 critics' poll conducted by the BBC, Zodiac was ranked at 12th place in a list of the 21st century's greatest films.