Director David Fincher would do well to bring crime writer James Ellroy along to all of his interviews, as he did just days before the opening of his film "Zodiac." Tall, beanpole thin, the 58-year-old author riffs like a jazz musician on violence, masculinity, the toll of obsession.
Ellroy is a charter member of the high-functioning, trying-to-be-happy walking wounded. When he was 10, his mother was killed and her body was dumped near a high school -- that's the defining prism of his life and his art in such books as "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential" and his autobiography, "My Dark Places." He's been haunted by the fact that her killer was never found.
Fincher has made a movie about a cadre of men haunted by the serial killer Zodiac and whose lives are punctured, contorted and shaped by that hunt. Zodiac was a killer who terrorized the San Francisco area in 1968 and 1969, mowing down lovers in secluded lovers' lanes and getting high off taunting the media and the police with bizarre cryptograms that he sent to the newspapers. He then disappeared -- and was never caught -- although the film details the investigation by two cops, Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi (Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo, respectively); a boozing, self-destructive journalist, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.); and a shy cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who comes closest to solving the deaths.
For all of his interest in crime and the wounds it leaves, the 44-year-old Fincher, who also made "Se7en," and "Panic Room," insists he's not the haunted type. Though gray flecks his hair, he appears the buoyant young techie. He speaks with his hands -- as if they could magically render the scenes unspooling in his head and keep their roiling emotions at a safe distance.
He grew up in the San Francisco area during Zodiac's reign, when the killer threatened to mow down schoolchildren as they got off their yellow school buses -- and Fincher's own father, a journalist, nonetheless made him take the bus.
Zodiac was Fincher's original boogeyman -- a figure who mesmerized a city, much the way a film director mesmerizes an audience. "You are 7 years old and you know people have been bound and stabbed at Lake Berryessa. You go, 'I've been at picnics at Lake Berryessa.' Do second-graders talk about murder? Oh, yeah. Especially when you were in Marin County, which was, is such an idyllic place."
Unsolved mysteries
