By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
[QUOTE] Writing Zodiac: You don't have to kill all the rattlesnakes
Zodiac scribe James Vanderbilt talks “dark” and “messiness” to Denis Faye at WGAW. “Fincher had this saying, like a therapist would say. “You don’t have to kill all the rattlesnakes to know where they all are.” And the idea behind it is that, for the guys in the movie, it’s more about them coming to the conclusions they came to in order to move on with their lives. We’ve all seen the movie a thousand times where Dirty Harry puts the bullet in the bad guy, and we get to go home feeling good about ourselves because it’s a safe world. That’s not reality, and I think what’s interesting is that Zodiac is more about what you have to do to move on from things in life. Things don’t get buttoned up into a pretty little package, and you don’t get to put them away.” Fincher “honestly is more collaborative than you’d think. David Fincher movies feel like David Fincher movies, but he’s a director who really likes writers. There are directors who don’t, who are sort of ego-driven and have to be the captain of the ship, but David, the way he comes at it is that if you’re the writer on the movie, he wants you to be the writer on the movie. That’s your job. You better come up with good stuff, and you’d better come up with good reasons for everything that happens in the script. If you do, great. It was sort of a wonderful experience. He’d say, “What if we try it this way?” and I’d say, “I think that’s a really bad idea because of this, this, and this.” He’d go,”Okay” and I’d go, “Really?”… [B]ut you have to pull your own weight with him… I honestly think part of being a writer is that you deal in dark shit so you don’t bring it out in your real life. I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky guy because I can deal with dark shit and get it out on the page and not have it follow me home.” [More at the link.]