The Clint Eastwood movie that inspired David Fincher to make ‘Zodiac’
As a filmmaker famed for their meticulous attention to detail, David Fincher was hardly going to make a true-life serial killer thriller without doing an enormous amount of research, with Zodiac a mammoth undertaking before a single frame of footage had even been shot.
Writer James Vanderbilt had wanted to adapt Robert Graysmith’s book of the same name after first reading it at 15 years old, making him the perfect foil for Fincher, who grew up in the Bay Area around the time the murders were taking place, giving them both a personal investment in the story.
Together, they spent a year and a half researching the case and reading tens of thousands of documents, as well as speaking to surviving witnesses, police officers, and politicians who were involved in the case. As a result, Fincher let rip at Clint Eastwood’s classic Dirty Harry for capitalising on the Zodiac killings for the sake of populist entertainment.
Released only a couple of years after the spate of deaths captured nationwide attention, Don Siegel’s hard-boiled crime thriller hit cinemas in 1971 and would go on to become a massive success. The plot finds Eastwood’s Harry Callahan seeking to track down the Scorpio killer, with the narrative wearing its real-life inspirations on the sleeve for all to see.
Fincher was always going to strive for the utmost accuracy, but in the audio commentary that accompanied the home video release of the film, he made a point of calling out Dirty Harry. He said: “In my conversations with David Toschi and Robert Graysmith, they were a little amused by the way Hollywood had depicted the Zodiac; they were sort of tickled by it.”
Noting that he didn’t see Dirty Harry until he was “probably 12”, he sought it out “because Zodiac was such a kind of a personal thing”. Detailing further, he added: “This person had kind of crept into our personal unconscious, and fucked with us for so many years, that when I saw Zodiac as plot device in the movie I was a little bit appalled.”
Fincher mentioned that Toschi was also “a little sickened by how easily it was concluded in the movies,” with people turning it into a joke by telling him, “Clint Eastwood sure did a great job with your case.” Understandably, then, when the Seven and Fight Club director took on the project that would become Zodiac, he made sure to ground it as much as possible in nothing but fact.
As one of the finest crime thrillers of the 21st century, it would be fair to say that Fincher accomplished his goal of crafting an immersive and engrossing recreation of a killing spree that gripped America, while Dirty Harry continues to endure as one of Hollywood’s most iconic street-level crime stories.
