David Fincher's Amarcord

Wonderful passage in the NYT Sunday Arts & Leisure piece on David Fincher and his new film Zodiac by David M. Halbfinger:

Raised in Marin County, Mr. Fincher was only 7 when the area was seized with fear in 1969. “I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now,” he recalled in December in an interview in New Orleans, where he was editing “Zodiac” while filming “Benjamin Button.” “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.’ ”

“I was, like, ‘You could drive us to school,’ ” he recalled thinking.

It was that same sense that initially drew him to “Se7en,” he said: the fearsome power of the stranger among us. “That’s what Zodiac was for a 7-year-old growing up in San Anselmo. He was the ultimate bogeyman.”

“People ask me, ‘When are you going to make your ‘Amarcord?’ ” Mr. Fincher added, with a little laugh at the comparison to Fellini’s autobiographical tour-de-force. For now, he said, “It’ll have to be ‘Zodiac.’ ”