James Vanderbilt wrote the screenplay for 2007’s Zodiac on spec — meaning he wasn’t commissioned to write it. So he began cutting it down before he sent it out to studios.
“I was just like, This script is too fucking long. No one is going to read it. And I think the original script they sent out was 150 pages. It’s the thing you shouldn’t do, is write a 150-page script,” Vanderbilt tells MovieMaker about the film, released 15 years ago today.
Even when David Fincher agreed to direct the project, Vanderbilt was still concerned about its length. But much to his surprise, scenes were often added in development, not removed.
“In the spec, I had written the whole sequence with Brian Cox, and the morning show where Zodiac calls in, and then I cut it before sending the script out,” Vanderbilt says.
“And then one day Fincher was like, ‘You know, Zodiac might have called this morning show?’
“I was like, ‘Oh, I wrote it.'”
Fincher, who had spent months doing research on Zodiac, was impressed.
“You did?” he replied.
So Vanderbilt sent him the previously-cut 15 minute sequence.
“And he goes, ‘Well, this has got to go back in,'” Vanderbilt says. “And so it just kind of kept growing.”
Eventually Fincher sat Vanderbilt down and told him to “stop worrying about the length. I’m going to just make everyone talk very fast,” Vanderbilt says.
True to his word, “if you watch the movie, it is very bip, bip, bip, bip — everyone is talking very fast,” he adds.
One of the more harrowing scenes in Zodiac, from writer James Vanderbilt and director David Fincher. Photos courtesy of Paramount
The Passage of Time
Vanderbilt had read Zodiac, San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith’s non-fiction account of the Zodiac killings, when he was a teenager. He became “enthralled by the idea of the case.”
“The thing that hooked me was the fact he was a cartoonist. I felt like Wait, what? This is the guy who’s gonna put it all together? I loved that unlikely hero element,” he says.
But Zodiac is not simply a time capsule of an era where a serial killer stalks the Bay Area, taunting its local newspapers, citizens and police. It is “a movie about the passage of time,” Vanderbilt says.
From the start of his screenwriting process on spec, Vanderbilt says he “was very conscious that this is going to be a story that takes place over almost 25 years.”
Once Fincher boarded the project, the two had endless conversations about the passage of time.
The pair considered slug lines and “finally landed on: we’re going to overload you with slug lines. We’re going to give you every date as it hits,” Vanderbilt says.
And Fincher and Vanderbilt also discovered “pretty early on from Inspector Dave Toschi (played by Mark Ruffalo), that they really would go to the intersection of Washington and Cherry every anniversary and sit there,” Vanderbilt says of one of the Zodiac Killer’s infamous crime scenes.
That story became a perfect recurring moment to thread throughout the film, marking the years as they passed.
Mark Ruffalo is Inspector Dave Toschi in Zodiac, from director David Fincher and writer James Vanderbilt
The Four-Year Time Jump
Another key element in the screenplay structure was a four-year time jump that occurs 94 minutes into the 157 minute runtime of the director’s cut of Zodiac.
“We talked a lot about the four-year time jump that happens in the movie. We wanted that to be a weird gut punch where you’re like, Wait, we just did all of this stuff. We lost this suspect. Now we’re moving four years ahead?
“Initially, David did this over-black sound montage, which is beautiful, but was like a million dollars worth of music,” Vanderbilt says.
The studio didn’t want to spend that much money on music rights for a sequence over black. Executives — perhaps rightfully — felt audiences might believe the theater’s projector had broken down.
Fincher shocked the studio with his back-up demand.
“David was like, ‘OK, fine. I need the visual effects budget to build the Transamerica building in fast-forward on screen,’” Vanderbilt recalls.
“They’re like, ‘What?’
“Well, look. It’s one or the other,” Fincher coolly responded.
The music-set montage over black eventually found its way to audiences in the director’s cut.
Either option “was always in service of us wanting you to feel the accruement of the years and how long this is taking,” Vanderbilt says.
“It was this idea that the years begin to really weigh down on people. So we talked a ton about it and did everything we could to kind of try and make that happen,” he adds.
Also read: Zodiac Killer Revealed by His Love of Comic Books, Author Says
Pitching Zodiac
Vanderbilt had made a movie with producer Mike Medavoy before, and recalls his initial pitch to him on Zodiac.
“I gave Mike the three minute version of it. I just said, ‘It’s Zodiac. It’s this, this, this.’“
Medavoy’s reaction was understandable.
“He looked at me and he goes, ‘Well, they never caught him,'” Vanderbilt remembers.
“I was like, ‘Yeah.'”
“And he goes, ‘Well, how do you end the movie?'”
So Vanderbilt pitched Medavoy the perfect ending of the film — the one that plays in the film right before Officer George Bawart (James Le Gros) tracks down Mike Mageau (Jimmi Simpson) in Ontario, Canada.
“Graysmith walks into the store and looks at him (Arthur Leigh Allen) and knows it’s him and walks out. And it’s the fact that he needed to know, and he needed to believe that he had finally figured it out. And you’d be happy he was out of this obsession.”
“I was like, ‘That’s the end of the movie,‘” Vanderbilt says.
OK, Medavoy responded, satisfied, and Zodiac was greenlit.
Main image (above): Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery and Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith in Zodiac, from director David Fincher.
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