A filmmaker best known for dark, intense thrillers,
Fight Club's David Fincher tackles the brutal, true tale of an uncaught serial killer in Zodiac, a stylish, character-led story set a few decades back in San Francisco. A brooding, serious-minded actor, Jake Gyllenhaal fit perfectly into Fincher's extreme world view. With an impressive string of credits already to his name, films as diverse as
October Sky (1999),
Donnie Darko (2001),
Brokeback Mountain (2005) and
Jarhead (2005), Gyllenhaal was clearly ready to take the Fincher challenge. And it really was a challenge. Playing real-life cartoonist turned amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith, Gyllenhaal delivers a memorable obsessive, hooked on the idea of nabbing the elusive, mocking murderer.
"At first I didn't know anything about this story," says Gyllenhaal candidly. "I didn't know about Zodiac. I didn't know about Robert Graysmith. But I did know about David Fincher. I'd met him a few times about other things and then he sent me the first draft of the Zodiac screenplay, which was very different to the later drafts he produced. The first draft is very much a cop thriller and I thought it was fascinating. The murders terrified me. I remember flipping through the pages and thinking, 'This is real, this actually happened.' Just thinking of David doing the movie. I was totally in."
Later drafts of the screenplay, increasingly emphasising characterisation, only served to get Gyllenhaal more excited about his role. "At the start of the story," he explains, "Robert Graysmith exists on the periphery of the case. He's a cartoonist, an intern, at the San Francisco Chronicle. He happens to be in the room when the paper is sent a cipher and a letter from the Zodiac Killer asking them to print the cipher. He's turning in copies of different cartoons. But little do they know he's obsessed with puzzles and deciphering things. He becomes really interested in the case and then, years later, when the case isn't solved, he takes it upon himself, under the guise of writing a book about it, to try and solve the case on his own.
"What's most interesting about this story is that when something like this happens there's mass hysteria. And then it's given to the experts. And sometimes the experts don't have the same heart that a regular kind of guy like Robert Graysmith would have. They also have so much red tape to go through, all the jurisdictions. Robert, a regular person off the street, doesn't have to get a warrant for this, or permission for that. He can just go out of pure heart and pure obsession. That's fascinating because we rely less and less on ourselves, you know. We rely on the opinions of experts, but so often they're tinged with personal, political and work related things. Someone like Robert, doing the work on his own, the true hard facts come much more clearly. To me, that's an empowering thing."
Deliberate and well-prepared, Gyllenhaal spent a fair bit of time getting to know the real Graysmith, inside and out. "Robert Graysmith is an interesting bird, I would say. When I first met him I had told him that I was going to put him on tape because I wanted to study his mannerisms and just physically, I wanted to see how he behaved. I was actually really nervous. I wondered what kind of personality a guy has to have in order to obsess about a serial killer. I thought, 'I'm going to meet this guy and it's going to be like this weird, dark exchange. What world am I going to have to go to with him in order to get some truth out of him?' And he walks into the room and he's this sweet, innocent, unassuming and constantly complimentary man.
"It's like in acting school, when they tell you to always play the opposite. That's who Graysmith is. He's everything you'd never expect from a guy obsessed with a case like this. He definitely has a darker side though. If he wants to get a piece of information out of you and you haven't answered the first time because it's a little too close or a little too personal, he'll insert it in this odd, syncopated way, so that you answer it and don't even know you're answering it. He's very smart, and at the same time, kind of cunning, when he wants to get information. But, as a human being, he's a gentle guy. It's really interesting."
"I watched Jake interpret my character on several occasions," notes Graysmith. "He was not doing an impersonation of me but an interpretation of me. I thought he caught my enthusiasm and excitability, my Southern upbringing, polite deference and eccentricities perfectly. And we already had the same colour of hair."
Well known for his striking visual style, David Fincher adapted his original, more visceral vision of Zodiac to beef up the characters and give actors Gyllenhaal,
Robert Downey Jr and
Mark Ruffalo more to work with. "He gave us a space in which we could work," says Jake. "he knows what he wants though. He's very clear about it and in a lot of ways that discipline's sort of like working on Shakespeare. You have to stay within the iambic pentameter. You have to stay within the rules, but within those rules are amazing discoveries."
With an enormous number of lines to deliver, and the lion's share of screen time, shooting Zodiac proved to be an arduous process for Gyllenhaal. "It was a 110-day shoot where I was talking most of the time about finding a serial killer. It was grueling in terms of the mindset I had to be in. And particularly with David, there's a sense in his movies that there's an interesting numbness in them. I think that comes from him. There's something in him and I think his process brings that out, too. The takes he does and the way he does it forces you into this sort of state, and within that state is a David Fincher movie. It's interesting for the people involved because there are some who revel in it and some who are disturbed by it. And we worked on it for six months. Yet the audience gets to experience it in two and half hours. I don't know if I would ever want to go back into the Zodiac world," concludes Gyllenhaal, "but it was quite a world to be in."