David Fincher discusses Zodiac’s rising star

It’s not just the look of the film that’s very ’70s, but also the tone of the storytelling — the same kind of bleakness and lack of resolution that one associates with movies by directors like Alan J. Pakula, Sidney Lumet, Bob Rafelson and others who flourished in Hollywood in that era.

That was the decade that inspired and informed me, without a doubt. Those are the movies I come back to time and time again. I mean, I think it’s safe to say that without All the President’s Men, I wouldn’t have had the same confidence in making a newspaper story. When you talk about Pakula, you’re also talking about Klute, which is nearly perfect too. Those are the kinds of movies that I grew up loving, and I’ve never been that concerned with telling the audience that everything’s okay. There’s enough of that. You can find that on every street corner.

Man with a movie camera

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• David Fincher
• Robert Graysmith
• Alan J. Pakula
• Paul Thomas Anderson
• Movie Dramas

But what you can’t find on every street corner — at least nowadays — is a studio willing to give you the backing to make a movie like that.

We didn’t make Zodiac in spite of Paramount or Warner Bros. [the film’s co-producer and international distributor]. We made it because they recognized the material, loved the material, loved what we wanted to do with it, and they ponied up a lot of money to make this movie.

Yet the film is seen as a commercial disappointment. Does that make it that much harder to do something like this again?

I don’t know, because . . . look, in the end the movie business is unlike many other businesses in that, yeah, it is about the bottom line, but it’s also about a form of immortality. The players in this business don’t view this as being just about making money and getting a table at the Golden Globes. For everyone who truly cares, I think, there’s a desire to be culturally important on some level. It’s not like anybody involved with Zodiac went in saying, “Don’t you get it? There’s going to be 180,000 close-ups of different parts of this file. People are going to flock to it!” Everybody knew what the issues were going to be, and in spite of that, they wanted to make the movie. The goal here was to make an interesting movie, and I do think that movies are . . . five years from now is more important than five months from now, in my humble opinion. I’ll trade the opening weekend for a movie that can stand scrutiny five or ten years down the road.