JAKE GYLLENHAAL TRACKS THE ZODIAC KILLER

In November 1969 one man terrorized the city of San Francisco by sending coded letters of his lover’s lane serial killings to the local San Francisco Chronicle which named him the Zodiac killer.

In the film Zodiac Jake Gyllenhaal plays a shy cartoonist Robert Graysmith on the Chronicle’s staff who becomes obsessed with catching the elusive killer. Jake says if only the police had modern day tracking systems like they do now Zodiac wouldn’t be a cold case file.

“He was in the power position in the end and they had so little to go on that yeah he started taunting them and teasing them. He would make them run over to one place and they’d run. The interesting thing about it then other people started to claim to be him so they had hundreds of different leads and they didn’t know where to go. They didn’t have any of the appropriate things like a cell phone or a fax machine that we all take for granted nowadays. That’s why I say as a joke this is a movie about the advent of the cell phone because I think if Dave Toschi, if Robert Graysmith, if Paul Avery, if these guys had a cell phone I think they probably could’ve caught the guy after the first cipher.”

Jake met the real Robert Graysmith who remained committed to the case well after detectives had given up. The film based on two books of his account also includes additional interviews from surviving victims done by Graysmith and director David Fincher along with original police reports. Zodiac opens Friday in theaters.