Zodiac, a Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. joint production, is a 2007 film directed by David Fincher based on Robert Graysmith's two non-fiction books about the Zodiac Killer (Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked). It stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr., among others.

A notorious serial killer known only as "the Zodiac" haunted San Francisco during the late 1960s. Leaving several victims in his wake and taunting police with his ciphers and letters written to the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers, the Zodiac was never caught. This film tells the story of the notorious killings, standing to this day as one of San Francisco's most infamous unsolved crimes and of the men whose lives and careers were built and destroyed around the hunt for the killer.

Tagline: There's more than one way to lose your life to a killer.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, a San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist and, later, the author of two books about the Zodiac, Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked. Graysmith becomes at first fascinated and then obsessed with the Zodiac case as it unfolds. Robert Downey Jr. plays journalist Paul Avery who, as the paper's top crime beat reporter, covers the story for the Chronicle. Mark Ruffalo plays Dave Toschi, the San Francisco detective who led the investigation, and Anthony Edwards plays his partner Bill Armstrong. Brian Cox stars as Melvin Belli, the well-known celebrity defense lawyer who was contacted by the Zodiac.

The newspaper and police men eventually zero in on one suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen whom the film agrees with being the most likely person to be Zodiac. The film offers much circumstantial evidence which could support that conclusion, while offering possible reasons to doubt the evidence (fingerprints, handwriting, DNA) which legally exonerated Allen.

James Vanderbilt and producer Bradley J. Fischer optioned the rights to Robert Graysmith’s books when they became available after languishing at another studio for nearly a decade. David Fincher was their first choice to direct based on his work on Se7en. Originally, he was going to direct an adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, The Black Dahlia and envisioned a five-hour, $80 million mini-series with movie stars. The studio backing it didn’t agree, he was off the project and moved on to Zodiac. Fincher was drawn to this story because he was raised in Marin County during the Zodiac Killer's reign of terror. "I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now. And my dad, who worked from home, and who was very dry, not one to soft-pedal things, turned slowly in his chair and said: ‘Oh yeah. There’s a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who’s threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus.’" For Fincher as a young boy, the killer "was the ultimate bogeyman."

Fischer realized that “the case had taken on its own mythic proportions over the years, and it was our job to undo all that. To draw a clean line between fact and fiction.” Fincher told Graysmith that he wanted the screenplay re-written but with additional research done from the original police reports. To this end, Fincher, Fischer and Vanderbilt spent months interviewing witnesses, investigators, the only two surviving victims, and others materially involved in the investigation. Fincher said, “Even when we did our own interviews, we would talk to two people. One would confirm some aspects of it and another would deny it. Plus, so much time had passed, memories are affected and the different telling of the stories would change perception. So when there was any doubt we always went police reports.” During the course of their research, Fincher and Fischer hired Gerald McMenamin, an internationally known forensic linguistics expert and professor linguistics at California State University, to analyze the Zodiac’s letters. Unlike document examiners in the 1970s, he focused on the language of the Zodiac and how he formed his sentences in terms of word structure and spelling. Fincher said in an interview, "There’s an enormous amount of hearsay in any circumstantial case, and I wanted to look some of these people in the eye and see if I believed them. It was an extremely difficult thing to make a movie that posthumously convicts somebody."

Fincher and Fischer approached Sony Pictures Entertainment to finance the film and then approached other studios with Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures agreeing to share the costs.

When Dave Toschi met Fincher, Fischer and Vanderbilt, the director told him that he wasn’t going to make another Dirty Harry. Toschi was impressed with their knowledge of the case and afterwards, he “realized that I had learned so much from them.” In addition, the Zodiac’s two surviving victims, Mike Mageau and Bryan Hartnell were consultants on the film.

Alan J. Pakula’s film, All the President's Men was the template for Zodiac as Fincher felt that it was “certainly much more high-minded journalism. But, it is the story of a reporter determined to get the story at any cost and one who was new to being an investigative reporter. It was all about his obsession to know the truth.” And like in that film, he “wasn’t interested in spending time to tell the back story of any of these characters. I just wanted to know what they did in regards to the case.”

Vanderbilt was drawn to the notion that Graysmith went from cartoonist to crime-stopper. He pitched the story as, “what if Garry Trudeau woke up one morning and tried to solve the Son of Sam.” As he worked on the script, he became friends with Graysmith and consulted him often.

Both Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo were attracted to this project based on their enthusiasm for the script and how their respective characters were portrayed. To prepare for his role, Gyllenhaal met Graysmith and videotaped him in order to study his mannerisms and behavior. Initially, Ruffalo wasn’t interested in the project but Fincher wanted him to play Toschi. He met with the actor and told him that he was rewriting the screenplay. “I loved what he was saying and loved where he was going with it,” the actor remembers. For research, he read every report on the case and read all the books on the subject. Ruffalo met Toschi and found out that he had “perfect recall of the details and what happened when, where, who was there, what he was wearing. He always knew what he was wearing. I think it is seared into who he is and it was a big deal for him.”

The filmmakers were able to get the cooperation of the Vallejo Police Department (one of the key investigators at the time) because they hoped that the movie would inspire someone to come forward with a crucial bit of information that might help solve the case.

Originally, Fincher envisioned the film’s soundtrack to be comprised of 40 cues of vintage music spanning the nearly four decades of the Zodiac story. However, the director felt that an original score was also needed “to take the emotional part of the film to another level,” remembers the film’s sound designer and longtime collaborator Ren Klyce. At first, it was decided that only ten minutes was needed and this gradually increased until he realized that there was no money for the score, just for the 40 musical cues. After using music from The Conversation and All the President’s Men for the film’s temp track, it was decided that they should get David Shire (composer of both of these films) to do it. Fincher was keen to work with Shire as All the President’s Men was one of his favorite films and one the primary cinematic influences on Zodiac. Shire composed 27 minutes of music performed by the San Francisco Orchestra and said, “There are 12 signs of the Zodiac and there is a way of using atonal and tonal music. So we used 12 tones, never repeating any of them but manipulating them.” He used specific instruments to represent the characters: “the trumpet was Toschi, the solo piano was Graysmith and the dissonant strings were the serial killer Zodiac.” Along with an early track from the band Santana, the film's soundtrack includes "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" by Marvin Gaye and "Hurdy Gurdy Man" by Donovan.

Fincher decided to use the digital Thomson Viper to shoot the film. Fincher had previously used the Thomson Viper Filmstream digital camera over the last three years on commercials for Nike, Hewlett Packard, Heineken and Lexus which allowed him to get used to and experiment with the equipment. Working with digital cameras allowed him to watch what he just shot in full resolution, experience less equipment failure than with film (eliminating things like film negative damage) and reduce costs in post-production because he was able to use inexpensive desktop software like Final Cut Pro to edit Zodiac.

This was the first time the camera has been used to shoot an entire Hollywood feature film. Michael Mann's Miami Vice, as well as his previous effort, Collateral (a co-production of Paramount and its current sister studio DreamWorks, and which also starred Mark Ruffalo), were also shot with the camera but mixed in other formats.

Once shot on the Viper camera, the files were converted to DVCPro HD 1080i and edited in Final Cut Pro. This was for editorial decisions only. Once the final cut was locked, the original uncompressed 1080p 4:4:4 RAW digital source footage was cut together. Zodiac is the first major Hollywood movie that was created without the use of either film or video tape. Other digital productions like Superman Returns or Apocalypto recorded to the HDCAM tape format.

Fincher had previously worked with director of photography Harris Savides on Se7en (he shot the opening credits) and The Game. The two men worked hard to capture the look and feel of the period as Fincher admitted, “I suppose there could have been more VW bugs but I think what we show is a pretty good representation of the time. It is not technically perfect. There are some flaws but some are intended.” The San Francisco Chronicle was built in the old post office in the Terminal Annex Building in downtown Los Angeles. A building on Sprint Street subbed for the Hall of Justice and the San Francisco Police Department.

Production began on September 12, 2005. They shot for five weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of the time in L.A. bringing the film in under budget, wrapping in February 2006. The film took 115 days to shoot.

Zodiac was supposed to be released in time for Academy Award consideration but Paramount felt that the film ran too long and asked him to make changes. Contractually, he had final cut and once he reached a length he felt was right, the director refused to make any further cuts, “but we also made promises to people that we were going to tell their story and they would not to be turned into plot devices.” To trim down the film to two hours and forty minutes, he had to cut a two minute blackout montage of “hit songs signaling the passage of time from Joni Mitchell to Donna Summer.” It was replaced with a title card that reads, “Four years later.” Another cut scene that test screening audiences didn’t like involved, “three guys talking into a speakerphone” to get a search warrant as the Toschi and Armstrong talk to a district attorney (Dermot Mulroney) about their case against suspect Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch). Fincher said, “I’ll probably put that back [on the DVD] just because I love the idea of police work just being three people in a room talking to a speakerphone.”

Not all of the cast was happy with Fincher’s exacting ways and perfectionism (some scenes required upwards of 70 takes) as Gyllenhaal was frustrated by the director’s methods: “You get a take, 5 takes, 10 takes. Some places, 90 takes. But there is a stopping point. There’s a point at which you go, ‘That’s what we have to work with.’ But we would reshoot things. So there came a point where I would say, well, what do I do? Where’s the risk?” Downey Jr. said, “I just decided, aside from several times I wanted to garrote him, that I was going to give him what he wanted. I think I’m a perfect person to work for him, because I understand gulags.”

Fincher responded, “When you go to your job, is it supposed to be fun, or are you supposed to get stuff done?” Ruffalo also backed up his director’s methods when he said, “The way I see it is, you enter into someone else’s world as an actor. You can put your expectations aside and have an experience that’s new and pushes and changes you, or hold onto what you think it should be and have a stubborn, immovable journey that’s filled with disappointment and anger.”

The MPAA gave this film a rating of R "for some strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images."

Reviews have highly been positive. As of March 20, 2007, it was given a rating of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes (dropping to 78% for their "Cream of the Crop" designation) and a 77 metascore at Metacritic.

Nathan Lee in his review for the Village Voice wrote, "Yet it's his very lack of pretense, coupled with a determination to get the facts down with maximum economy and objectivity, that gives Zodiac its hard, bright integrity. As a crime saga, newspaper drama, and period piece, it works just fine. As an allegory of life in the information age, it blew my mind." Todd McCarthy's review in Variety praised the film's "almost unerringly accurate evocation of the workaday San Francisco of 35-40 years ago. Forget the distorted emphasis on hippies and flower-power that many such films indulge in; this is the city as it was experienced by most people who lived and worked there."

David Ansen in his review for Newsweek magazine wrote, "Zodiac is meticulously crafted — Harris Savides's state-of-the-art digital cinematography has a richness indistinguishable from film — and it runs almost two hours and 40 minutes. Still, the movie holds you in its grip from start to finish. Fincher boldly (and some may think perversely) withholds the emotional and forensic payoff we're conditioned to expect from a big studio movie." Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer felt that "Mr. Fincher’s flair for casting is the major asset of his curiously attenuated return to the serial-killer genre. I keep saying “curiously” with regard to Mr. Fincher, because I can’t really figure out what he is up to in Zodiac — with its two-hour-and-37-minute running time for what struck me as a shaggy-dog narrative." Christy Lemire wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that "Jake Gyllenhaal is both the central figure and the weakest link...But he's never fleshed out sufficiently to make you believe that he'd sacrifice his safety and that of his family to find the truth. We are told repeatedly that the former Eagle Scout is just a genuinely good guy, but that's not enough."

Zodiac opened in 2,362 theaters and grossed $13,395,610 in its first weekend. As of March 19, 2007, it has grossed $28,923,000 domestically.