Lights, Bogeyman, Action

NEW ORLEANS

A scene from “Zodiac.”

DAVID FINCHER, impolitic as ever, is ridiculing the notes hes been getting from the studio executives overseeing his latest film, Zodiac.

Its easy to get lost in all the details, he intones, reading their critique of one scene from his laptop. Are there any trims you could make here to cut down on the information and focus it even more on two main characters?

I love this, Mr. Fincher says, leaving no doubt as to his sarcasm. Its this weird shell game where they go, Can you focus it more on the people by making it be less of them? And of course what it really gets down to is that they want me to audition their cuts to them.

But he wont. Instead, he says, you just rope-a-dope.

That same uncompromising attitude extended to his relationship with the cast, led by Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal, who endured multiple takes of 70 shots and beyond. Mr. Downey affectionately called him a disciplinarian, while Mr. Gyllenhaal, saying that as a director he paints with people, added, Its tough to be a color.

At 44, Mr. Fincher remains Hollywoods reigning bad-boy auteur, and his impatience with meddling has become as famous as his tendency to test his actors patience, stamina and preparation. But not as famous as his films, the most celebrated among them Se7en, the 1995 thriller that grossed $350 million worldwide, and Fight Club, his over-the-top answer to young male anomie.

After five years of withdrawing from one project after another, Mr. Fincher will present Zodiac, about the serial killer who terrorized San Francisco in the late 70s, on March 2. Then, in 2008, comes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the screenwriter Eric Roths epic reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgeralds story about a man who ages in reverse. (Of more interest to some fans, Benjamin Button will reunite him with the star of Se7en and Fight Club, Brad Pitt, and amounts to a sharp turn for Mr. Fincher into romanticism.)

To trim Zodiac to just over two and a half hours, Mr. Fincher said he had to make painful cuts. Gone, for example, is a two-minute blackout over a montage of hit songs signaling the passage of time from Joni Mitchell to Donna Summer; in its place, artless but quick and cheap, are the words Four years later.

Mr. Fincher has always been outspoken, but if he takes this movie a little more personally, theres a reason: For him, the Zodiac murderer, who terrorized the Bay Area and was never caught, isnt just any old serial-killer story.

Raised in Marin County, Mr. Fincher was only 7 when the area was seized with fear in 1969. I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now, he recalled in December in an interview in New Orleans, where he was editing Zodiac while filming Benjamin Button. And my dad, who worked from home, and who was very dry, not one to soft-pedal things, turned slowly in his chair and said: Oh yeah. Theres a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, whos threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus.

I was, like, You could drive us to school, he recalled thinking.

It was that same sense that initially drew him to Se7en, he said: the fearsome power of the stranger among us. Thats what Zodiac was for a 7-year-old growing up in San Anselmo. He was the ultimate bogeyman.

People ask me, When are you going to make your Amarcord? Mr. Fincher added, with a little laugh at the comparison to Fellinis autobiographical tour-de-force. For now, he said, Itll have to be Zodiac.

Much has been made of Mr. Finchers dark eye, his gloomy palette and dim view of human nature, as seen not just in his hits but in his lesser films The Game and Panic Room. And hes had a reputation for cutting-edge special effects and innovative camerawork since, at 22, he directed his first commercial, for the American Cancer Society, featuring a fetus smoking a cigarette in utero, an ad that led to an early career as a top music-video director.

But the source of his dark-hued lens on life, Mr. Fincher suggested, might be as simple as that original bogeyman. It was a very interesting and weird time to grow up, and incredibly evocative, he said. I have a handful of friends who were from Marin County at the same time, the same age group, and theyre all very kind of sinister, dark, sardonic people. And I wonder if Zodiac had something to do with that.

Mr. Fincher was first approached about Zodiac by Brad Fischer, a producer at Phoenix Pictures, with a script by James Vanderbilt. It was based on two books by Robert Graysmith, a former San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who became obsessed with the Zodiac, and who built a case against one suspect, now dead. Mr. Fincher said he wanted Mr. Vanderbilt to overhaul the script, but wanted first to dig into the original police sources. So director, writer and producer spent months interviewing witnesses, investigators and the cases only two surviving victims, and poring over reams of documents.

I said I wont use anything in this book that we dont have a police report for, Mr. Fincher said. Theres an enormous amount of hearsay in any circumstantial case, and I wanted to look some of these people in the eye and see if I believed them. It was an extremely difficult thing to make a movie that posthumously convicts somebody.

Mr. Graysmith said Mr. Finchers team found evidence that investigators had missed. He outdid the police, Mr. Graysmith said. My hats off to them.

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