Zodiac’s Cinematographer Thought It Was Boring Too
I never got around to posting a written review of David Fincher’s Zodiac, but if you listened to the Film Junk podcast then you know that I thought it was a bit too slow and got bogged down in details (at the same time, there were undoubtedly some unfair expectations placed on the movie since it was coming from the director of Seven). Zodiac was quite well-reviewed critically, but it never seemed to find its audience. In a recent interview with American Cinematographer, DP Harris Savides revealed that he also thought the movie was a bit dull, although it was clearly a conscious decision by Fincher.
“I was concerned about the amount of non-cinematic information that had to be conveyed onscreen. There was so much exposition, just people talking on the phone or having conversations. It was difficult to imagine how it could be done in a visual way. I told David we had to figure out ways to make these scenes interesting and cinematic, but our solution was the opposite: to simply have faith in the material and present it truthfully.” There’s a lot of technical detail in the interview, where he talks about the dilemma of using HD video to maintain the “Dragnet-style” that Fincher wanted. “The audience has to listen, and that’s a conundrum: you’re trying to be visually interesting without obscuring the information the audience needs to absorb. There’s even a sort of visual banality that’s appropriate to the story; what the investigators are doing is tough, banal work, not what you generally see in the movies. Nevertheless, after day 30, I was asking myself if we were on the right path! I was worried our approach could result in a boring movie…” said Savides. So, was he right? Or did you enjoy the realism of the film?
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Personally, Zodiac wasn’t quite what I was expecting. If someone asks me who my favorite director is, my answer tends to be David Fincher, and as such I was looking forward to something a bit more like his previous films. However, aside from maybe two or three shots throughout the entirety of Zodiac, I found myself more tied up in the story than the director/direction. Fincher seemed to play down his own style so that people would focus more on what’s going on than how dazzling the visuals were. While it wasn’t what I thought I was going to get, I won’t say that was a bad thing because I still quite enjoyed the movie. Out of Fincher’s other films, Zodiac could be most compared to Seven based on the subject matter, and I honestly think that it’s a good thing that Fincher didn’t make both films the same way. Each of the movies he’s made thus far in his career has been a different genre from one another, so now that he’s finally done a second film in the vein of a crime/mystery, I think that making the film with a different, more realistic feeling was a better choice than just trying to make another Seven. Especially since Zodiac is based on real events (and he seemingly went to great lengths to depict them as close to reality as possible). As for if it was boring? I don’t think so. It was slower than his other films, but in my opinion that’s just the pace he chose for it as opposed to not doing his job properly and making it slow. I mean, the movie takes place over several years and is essentially about people searching for something and repeatedly coming up with loose ends. I think that Zodiac was done properly for what it is, and it’s probably the second most enjoyable theater-going experience that I’ve had this year after Grind House.
Posted by Rian on April 12th, 2007Leave a Reply