We reassess the greatest films of all time, one film at a time

Zodiac

Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal as crime reporter Paul Avery and cartoonist Robert Graysmith.

WHEN IS A SERIAL-killer movie not a serial-killer movie? Perhaps when there’s no arrest, no shoot-out, perhaps when his identity isn’t what the filmmaker is most interested in at all. David Fincher had already made the best of the genre and this, no doubt, convinced Warner Bros. and Paramount to shell out for his sixth feature. But Zodiac is, as he told everyone at the time, a “newspaper movie”. It has more in common with All The President’s Men than it does with Seven. It’s about information, mythology and the danger of being a passenger in your own life.

“More people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed,” says reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), even if his dismissal of the outsized interest in the Zodiac Killer feels a little hollow given he’s dying from a dissolute lifestyle, partly driven by trying to escape fear. He’s talking to the political-cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), upon whose books, Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked, James Vanderbilt’s doorstop screenplay was based. But although the film is centred on Graysmith — in fact making his presence more explicitly felt than the books ever do — the filmmakers also conducted their own laborious research. Vanderbilt and producer Brad Fischer tracked down witnesses — using a private investigator for the particularly elusive Mike Mageau (played by Lee Norris and Jimmi Simpson at different ages), survivor of a Zodiac shooting — as well as key police figures, meeting with some alongside Fincher (as exhaustively detailed in Graysmith’s book Shooting Zodiac). These included the film’s third lead, Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), a San Francisco detective who had provided inspiration for more fantastical Hollywood depictions of law enforcement: Bullitt and Dirty Harry (whose Scorpio Killer was shamelessly modelled after the real-life murderer still very much at large when it opened in 1971).