robert graysmith Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Zodiac, about four men who became obsessed with finding the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco for two decades, opens this weekend. The film is based on the books Zodiac and Zodiac Unleashed, by Robert Graysmith. Graysmith was in town recently to talk about the film, and sat down with Cinematical for a chat.

(WARNING: There are minor spoilers in this interview. If you don't know anything about the Zodiac case, and you don't want to before you see the film, then please stop reading now.)

Cinematical: Let's talk about what it's like to see your book made into a film.

Robert Graysmith: The first draft of Zodiac was 1,200 pages long, and my editor would say, well that's a wasted page, and there would be an "X". Unfortunately, I took it literally – if there was an "X" on the page, I wouldn't use it, even it was good. Now that the movie's coming out, people ask me if there's going to be a reissue of the book with the movie; the book's never been out of print, it never stopped selling.

Cinematical: How was it working with David Fincher?

RG: Fincher – he was one of those kids in San Francisco during Zodiac, when Zodiac was threatening to blow up school buses. So he has a great love for that area. And he wanted to lovingly recreate San Francisco. I think in a lot of ways that David Fincher was so transformed by the school bus threats. I don't know if you read this recent article with him where he talked about feeling betrayed by his father for putting him on a school bus, where he could be blown up, when his dad freelanced and could have driven him. So this has been a long time percolating.

I used to sit there and watch him (Fincher) and think he should have been an artist, a painter. I got to sit there and watch sometimes, and he'd do like 35, 36 takes – that's very common for him. He doesn't move the camera, which I love, so all the actors are walking through the scene, and he's watching, watching. There's just something about it, he's not even sure what it is himself. But I got to where I could spot it, I'd say, yup, it's 14. And then he's say, okay, 14's a keeper. But then he'd shoot another 19 after that. He's a perfectionist, he's looking at the light, at the dust in the air, everything.

Much more after the jump ...

On July 31, 1969, a letter arrived at the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle with the handwritten admonition: "Please rush to editor!" The contents of that letter would terrorize the residents of the San Francisco Bay area,and would forever change the lives of four men: flamboyant and ambitious Detective Dave Toschi, his partner, the quieter William Armstrong, star crime reporter Paul Avery, and, perhaps most unlikely of all, quiet, unassuming political cartoonist Robert Graysmith. Inside the envelope was the first letter from the serial killer who came to be known and feared as the Zodiac killer. In addition to the handwritten letter ("This is the Zodiac speaking ... "), the envelope contained one-third of a cipher. The other two parts had been sent to two other papers. In that letter, Zodiac took credit for two recent murderous attacks on young couples, which had left two women and one man dead.

The cipher befuddled every major law enforcement agency, but it was solved, oddly enough, by a history teacher and his wife (three other ciphers sent by Zodiac have never been deciphered). And it was the quiet cartoonist, Graysmith, who put together one of the first important clues to the killers MO: the cipher referenced a 1932 film called The Most Dangerous Game, about a man on a remote island who hunted people as prey. Zodiac, a killer so wily and clever (and perhaps just a little bit lucky) that he managed to elude police for over two decades, taunted the cops with their failure to find and stop him. His threats to blow up school buses or to shoot out the tires of buses and then "pick off the little kiddies as they come bouncing off the bus" paralyzed the city, forcing police car and plane escorts for the city's schoolchildren.