Trailer
Plot summary
An unknown man attacks Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau at a lovers' lane in Vallejo, California, on July 4, 1969, and Mike survives. A month later, encrypted letters reach the San Francisco Chronicle from a writer who calls himself Zodiac, who says he will kill twelve people if the paper does not print his coded message. Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist there, guesses that the cipher holds no name; the editors and crime reporter Paul Avery keep him at a distance until Avery finds his reading of the letters useful. More attacks follow in Napa County and San Francisco, and inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong take on the case with police in Vallejo.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Zodiac (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Gary Oldman was originally set to play attorney Melvin Belli in Zodiac, but as Robert Graysmith said, Oldman went to a lot of trouble with appliances and 'just didn't have the girth' for the part; Brian Cox was cast instead.
- For the murder of Cecelia Shepard at Lake Berryessa, blood seepage and clothing stains were added in post-production. Fincher avoided practical blood because cleaning the costumes after every take was too time-consuming, so the murder scenes used CGI blood.
- For the scene in which cab driver Paul Stine is killed at Washington and Cherry Streets, residents did not want the murder recreated in their neighborhood, so Fincher shot the sequence on a bluescreen stage and CGI recreated the San Francisco intersection.
- David Fincher shot 56 takes of Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhaal on the first day of production in San Francisco, and the 56th take is the one in the movie. He said an actor who lets the role come to them cannot resent how long he is willing to wait.
- Composer David Shire used 12 tones, one for each sign of the Zodiac and never repeated, and gave the characters their own instruments: trumpet for Inspector Toschi, solo piano for Robert Graysmith and dissonant strings for the Zodiac killer.
- Mark Ruffalo was not interested in Zodiac at first, but David Fincher met him and told him he was rewriting the screenplay; Ruffalo took the part of Inspector Dave Toschi, saying he loved where Fincher was going with it.
- For its Academy Awards campaign, Paramount sent the director's cut DVD of Zodiac, rather than the version released in theaters, to the Producers Guild, the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild, the first time the studio had done this.
