Oak trees were helicoptered in for the Lake Berryessa murder scene; all the gore was added with CGI because repeated takes made fake blood impractical; the film was shot digitally apart from the opening sequence; James Ellroy called the three lead performances inadequate yet the film great; Downey left jars of urine on set to protest the long hours
When the crew arrived to shoot the lake murder scene in Napa the oak trees were no longer there, so Fincher had oak trees flown in by helicopter and temporarily planted with water to keep them alive for the shot; the hosts joke about the trees flying commercial to Santa Rosa next to Groot.
Fincher used CGI for everything gory because with so many takes fake blood would have meant wiping down the set each time, so for the taxicab murder he could shoot a hundred takes of Mark Ruffalo unlocking a door and add the blood splatter later; the opening sequence was shot on film and the rest digitally, edited on an Avid rig, and much of the tangible period feel the hosts admire is actually post-production.
James Elroy (as transcribed), whose Black Dahlia Fincher was going to direct before Brian De Palma did, is quoted finding it most interesting that Gyllenhaal, Downey and Ruffalo are miserable in the film, three inadequate and unconvincing performances he does not believe a word of, and that it is still a great movie; the hosts observe he is in harmony with Andy Greenwald.
An earlier research aside on Fincher's methods: Downey reportedly left jars of urine around the set to protest the long hours and decided to give Fincher what he wanted because he understands gulags; Gyllenhaal is quoted on takes running from five to ninety plus reshoots that left him asking where the risk was; Fincher's reply was that he is not interested in earnestness, the thing he hates most in acting, and that about fifteen takes gets actors out of it.
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.
The film's TV-like procedural breadth and its comfort with an ambiguous ending; Jake Gyllenhaal's transition into a serious actor beginning here; the obsessive period details and insert shots
For a film that feels timeless, the television quality and procedural feel is named first: it belongs with the 2007 films such as Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood that are unnaturally comfortable with ambiguity, There Will Be Blood ending on 'I'm finished' with nothing finished, Michael Clayton with a Graduate-style slow dissipation of triumph in a vehicle, No Country for Old Men likewise, and this one ending basically on a coin toss, leaving the audience with the characters' own lack of satisfaction despite the coda; that handling of expectation has aged incredibly well.
Sociocultural reasons are offered for that mood: the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, international quagmire, uncertainty about what it means to be an American and the second term of a complicated presidency, so the art of such times runs to downers, ambiguity and unhappy endings, and it is not unusual that a writer like Cormac McCarthy became a national figure then. — Sean Fennessey
The Gyllenhaal thread continues: apart from Prince of Persia a couple of years later, basically every film he has taken since Zodiac is complicated and masochistic in some way, perhaps learned from being put through the Fincher machine; this is also the film where the myth of Fincher's endless takes is born, reportedly needing 80 tries at a scene of Paul and Graysmith talking in a bar.
Fincher is read as an expert at psychological warfare who needed every character wrung out, Graysmith in particular drained of all interest except his goal, and so made the actor do the same thing over and over; Graysmith has a teacher figure throughout, Avery or Toshi (as transcribed), whose affirmation he seeks, and they always tell him it doesn't matter or that he didn't get it.
One host does not like the Gyllenhaal performance much and finds it not exceptional in an otherwise exceptional film, too earnest and a much bigger swing than the subtle gradations of Ruffalo and Downey, with an Eagle Scout at one point and a maniac at another and an unconvincing transition; another calls the performance the wild card, like Groff in Mindhunter, and reads Fincher breaking a performer of habits as the character is broken of his previous existence as the kind of meta-level game Fincher would want to play.
Graysmith's arc is not a typical descent into madness: he is not a family man who loses everything, his son is the only person he can communicate with, and the Zodiac rather than Chloe Sevigny's character is the love of his life; the relationship is handled with care at first, since she finds the cartoonist at a gun range an interesting quirk but has boundaries, yet hers is the one character a host is not fond of, and it is called a Fincher problem, the woman as reality nagging the hero without ever stopping the story, like Rooney Mara in Social Network pointing things out and then getting out of the way so Facebook can start.
The details, specifically the insert shots, are another pick: a Vimeo compilation collects them, the magnifying glasses, frayed authentic 70s stationery with a different handwriting style on every page, Ampex tape recorders and local TV equipment, much of it added digitally when the real thing was unavailable; the obsessive detail is a big reason to rewatch, noticing a watch or a hat each time.
Called the most anticlimactic final question of a podcast ever: an amazing actor giving an amazing performance in a role that should not work in movies, basically stupid and larded with existential questions, and the hosts get caught up every rewatch; Heath Ledger is then named as the conversation turns to what his career would have been.
He gave only two or three iconic performances across maybe 12 or 13 movies, good in all of them: Dark Knight, Brokeback Mountain, 10 Things I Hate About You, very good in only ten minutes of I'm Not There and in the not very important Lords of Dogtown, serious fare like Monsters Ball and The Four Feathers, and movie-star attempts like The Patriot; Brokeback and Dark Knight read as the start of what would have been an incredible run.
