Zodiac is fascinating from the first minute to the last. And there are 158 of them (review)
David Fincher’s thriller will return this evening on Chérie 25. Not to be missed.
Zodiacof David Fincherwill return this evening on Chérie 25. Guillermo del Toro recommends it… And First Also. Upon discovering it in May 2007, the editorial staff was fascinated by this “very large Fincher”served by the trio Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo And Robert Downey Jr.
Zodiacit is a particularly meticulous film, on which the actors sometimes had struggling to get along with the filmmakernotably Jake, who plays his young investigator, and who had to reshoot multiple takes to satisfy his director.
Mathieu Carratier thus related in First Mark Ruffalo’s words about Zodiac’s tense shots: “The first day of filming, I had a scene with Jake that took sixty-eight takes. When David came to see us, I hoped it was to fire me.”
“There’s a part of David that likes to see people suffer and then tell them that this job isn’t easy, Gyllenhaal said at the time. The filming turned out to be tedious.”
After seeing the result, however, Jake reconsidered his position:
“It took me a while to admit it, but I learned a lot from this experience. It’s like working with a great coach: you hate him throughout training, but when you win the match, you understand better what he did to you, and you stay scarred for life. It’s the complications that make the relationship unique.”
Here is the review of Zodiacoriginally published in First in 2007:
December 20, 1968. A couple is shot dead in cold blood in the San Francisco area. This double murder as well as thirty-five others will be claimed by a serial killer calling himself the Zodiac. He terrorized America for almost five years without ever being arrested.
Detectives David Toschi (Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Edwards), reporter Paul Avery (Downey, Jr.) and cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) dedicated their lives to tracking him down, which Fincher’s film recreates in great detail. .
You read correctly: David Fincher, the director of Se7ensets out in pursuit of one of the most enigmatic serial killers to have plagued the United States. A real marketing fantasy swept away from the first images by the director. No oozing walls, twilight atmosphere, or Nine Inch Nails playing theme music: Zodiac is an adult investigation film, of mind-blowing sobriety, about the obsession of four men seeking to unmask an assassin they will never catch. Suicidal? On the contrary: fascinating from the first to the last minute. And there are 158 of them.
We left the director of Fight Club drowned in the exercise of efficient but somewhat vain style (Panic Roomin 2002). Five years later, he returns, transformed into a subtle and fascinating storyteller, with a colossal work evoking the best of a certain Hollywood cinema of the 70s (The President’s Men).
Those who summed up Fincher as a smart guy hiding behind his technical virtuosity are going to get a slap in the face. The others too. Zodiac is the first major American film of 2007.
Video: Discover all the invisible secrets of David Fincher’s cinema