- TGN's Newsletter
- Posts
- “Right Is Right”: RDJ Remembers Angering His Zodiac Castmates By Agreeing With David Fincher -TGN
“Right Is Right”: RDJ Remembers Angering His Zodiac Castmates By Agreeing With David Fincher -TGN
Resume
Robert Downey Jr. recalls a funny story from the set of Zodiac, where he angered his co-stars by agreeing with director David Fincher.
Downey explains that working with Fincher requires stamina and a commitment to perfection, even if it means doing 40 or 50 takes.
Fincher’s demanding approach can be challenging for actors, but it pays off in the end when delivering exceptional films like Zodiac.
Robert Downey Jr. remembers a funny story from the set of Zodiac where he angered his co-stars by agreeing to go with director David Fincher. Released in 2007, Zodiac saw Fincher fully in true crime mode, telling the story of the infamous Zodiac killer and the obsessive men who hunted him for decades – only to have the killer’s identity drained. One of the big stars that the Zodiac cast was Downey, who starred San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, a tenacious Zodiac hunter who eventually gave up on his quest to solve the mystery amidst his own personal struggles.
Zodiac director Fincher is, of course, known for his own obsessively demanding standards, a fact Downey knows all too well after working with the meticulous filmmaker. Speak against Vanity Fair in an interview prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Downey explained exactly how meticulous Fincher can be with a funny anecdote about a time when the director didn’t get what he wanted, and enlisted Downey to prove his point to an increasingly unhappy cast. Check out what Downey had to say in the space below (around 10:14 of the clip):
By working with David Fincher, you learn that you are more sustainable than you thought. A scene can transition into where it just feels very perfunctory and you’re almost in auto mode. But it doesn’t matter because of the craft of getting things done, like there was a scene where he was trying to get it done in one take and we must have done 40 or 50 takes and people were kind of annoyed. He said, “Downey, come here. Have we got it yet?” And I watched the footage and at the end I said, “Do you want to use this in one?” He says, “Yes.” I go “No.” He says, “Downey’s right, we haven’t got it yet. Remove all 40 of those recordings and we’ll start again after lunch.” And everyone looked at me like, “What the hell is going on…” But you know, good is good.
Fincher admitted to being tough on the set of Zodiac
Downey’s humorous tale of tense conditions on the set of Zodiac are in line with other accounts of actors at odds with Fincher while filming the true crime drama. Downey’s co-star Jake Gyllenhaal had a particularly hard time dealing with Fincher’s demanding approach, a situation Fincher himself dealt with in a 2020 New York Times interview. Though he expressed some sympathy for Gyllenhaal’s career situation at the time of Zodiac‘s shooting, Fincher explained why he thinks actors should show up at work and be ready no matter what’s going on off-set:
I don’t want to make excuses for my behavior. There are definitely times when I can be confrontational when I see someone slacking. People go through tough times all the time. I do. So I try to feel sorry for it. But. Are. Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. One day. And we may not get a chance to come back and do it again. I tell actors all the time, I don’t get around your hangover, I don’t get around your dog dying, I don’t get around the fact that you just fired your agent or your agent just fired you. Once you get here, all I care about is “Did we tell the story?”
Fincher playing mind games with his actors, as he seemed to do in the case of Downey’s story, is just another example of the director using every tool in his toolbox to tell the story he’s trying to tell. Of Zodiac, Fincher’s approach paid off and a true classic was delivered. Downey, for his part, understands why Fincher does it the way he does, and seems to agree that sometimes to get the scene right, you have to be willing to throw away 40 takes and come back after lunch to do it all over again – even if it angers everyone in the cast.
Source: Vanity Fair