The notebooks themselves were created by designers Clive Piercy and John Sabel, who filled the pages with large blocks of text, broken only by the occasional macabre photograph or ambiguous artifact taped in place.
[The team] photographed books and shadows and mapped it all out with stills to get an idea of what it would look like when you see through the pages and you see the shadows behind the page and the backlight.
The typography itself was hand-etched into black-surface scratchboard and manipulated during the film transfer process to further smear and jitter it. This transfer was then cut up and reassembled during post production to add a final layer of temporal distress.
“[Fincher] knew that he wanted it to be drawn by hand, because it was from the mind of the killer, and I was taking that further, wanting it to be like the killer did the film opticals himself.”
Even though digital editing and compositing were already commonplace in Hollywood and especially in post-production, Cooper and his team opted to assemble the majority of the sequence by hand, giving it an analog warmth and randomness which may have otherwise been cheapened by digital effects.
"I had the standard movie geek childhood, because for as long as I can remember all I wanted to do was make movies."
— Paul Thomas Anderson
— Paul Thomas Anderson
He is a director with a reputation for darkness. Now comes the story of the Zodiac killer. Just who is David Fincher? And how did he get that way?
"‘Fight Club—which I have to say I think is the best film I’ve been involved in—part of the thing which is really terrifying and great about it is that it’s highly ambiguous, not in its morality, but in its message. It’s pretty unapologetically neutral in terms of its suggestions of what you’re supposed to take from it. I think a lot of popular films let you walk away without your having to think about them much more because they’ve delivered what they want you to know about them. When I watch David Fincher’s other films, Seven especially, I thought that it was almost like philosophy in the sense that it was structured like a dialectic. He had an idealist and a cynic, and he put them at heightened extremes of the modern world, and the film never resolved in the sense that he left it for you to decide: who did you feel was right? He just dumped a lot in your lap and I liked that and I felt like Fight Club was even more so. It was a dark, comic, sort of surrealist look at some of the dysfunctions of our generation and of young people who are feeling out of sync with the value system they are expected to engage in.’"
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.