20 Things You Didn't Know About Zodiac
7. Robert Downey Jr. & Jake Gyllenhaal Struggled With Fincher's Directorial Style
David Fincher is known for his perfectionist filmmaking style, one that didn't endear him to either Robert Downey Jr. or Jake Gyllenhaal during production.
Fincher's penchant for dozens of takes irritated Downey Jr. enough that he began to "rebel" by hiding jars full of urine around the set, though later fell in line. Downey 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."
Gyllenhaal similarly struggled with both the high number of required takes and particularly the digital nature of the shoot, allowing Fincher to delete unwanted takes willy-nilly:
"David knows what he wants, and he's very clear about what he wants, and he's very, very, very smart. But sometimes we'd do a lot of takes, and he'd turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there... 'Delete the last 10 takes.' And as an actor that's very hard to hear."
Ruffalo, however, proved the more diplomatic of the trio:
"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."