What’s Aged the Worst?
That a $65 million studio film this uncommercial got made at all; its complete shutout from the 2007 Oscar nominations
In the discussion (5)
Approx. transcript time · 00:32:11Read transcript
- Asked whether the emotionally unsatisfying ending has aged worst, the answer is that the ending is gutsy: it leaves you feeling Arthur Lee Allen is the Zodiac, which drew criticism in 2007 because that is not the commonly held belief, but the film deserves credit for saying who James Vanderbilt and Fincher think it was; the making of the film was Fincher, Vanderbilt and others investigating the crime from Graysmith's text, with Graysmith involved and doing press runs with Gyllenhaal, and Fincher, who grew up in Marin County, has called the Zodiac the ultimate boogeyman of his childhood.
- On whether it is a personal film: Fincher is said to have a perverted sense of the personal, so anything sick and any compulsion to solve things is personal to him; his anecdote about the school threat, a police escort for his bus home and his father knowing yet not picking the children up is reflected later in the film's line to a father who works from home.
- Fincher's rumored next project, World War Z II, is seen as the kind of thing artists of his stature now do to remain artists of his stature, though he started with Alien 3 and has always interacted with the mainstream; it is nice to have this oddball film in the middle of his catalog, about the frustrations of an obsessive creative mind, the madness of chasing something you care about and the inability to predict success, with a cartoonist who ends up at a gun range as an analogy for wanting to make movies and working in Hollywood.
- The two things that aged worst have nothing to do with quality: that this film, a $65 million movie supposedly made as an Oscar movie, got made at all, and that it was not nominated for a single Oscar in a historic year full of downer films, when No Country won Best Picture.
- Recording around Thanksgiving while Ridley Scott is reshooting a swath of All the Money in the World to replace a major performance five weeks before release, a thought experiment puts Scott in the editing room on Zodiac for the 2006 Oscar push: he would have cut it around one of the three main characters and made the date, where Fincher's obsessiveness is why it came out in 2007 and not 2006.