David Fincher is finally taking a breather, at least this week’s edition. It’s a Sunday in early February, his one day off from directing Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which has been shooting in New Orleans since November, and isn’t due to wrap for another eight months. But the breather is spent doing interviews for his newest release, “Zodiac.” “I’m working really hard watching TV for a living, so I can make time on Sunday,” he tells his interviewer.

Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Panic Room,” “Alien3“) is only half-kidding. He is one of a handful of Hollywood directors who has fully embraced shooting movies in High Definition video, leading the pack of filmmakers abandoning film cameras and labs for the high tech world of HD cinematography. And he doesn’t even use videotape anymore, opting to send his images to hard drives. Why? “Because tape is stupid,” he growls.

“Zodiac,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Jr. and Mark Ruffalo, follows the investigation, by police and by an obsessed newspaper cartoonist, of the infamous “Zodiac killer,” who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late 60s and early 70s. It is a place and a time Fincher knows well, having grown up in the region during that period. Even so, when he read the script, he found there was more to the story than he remembered.

“I love movies where you come into them thinking that you know what’s going on, and then you find out you don’t,” he tells Geek. “I remember, at age seven, seeing that [attorney] Melvin Belli was going to be on the ‘A.M. Show,’” to speak directly to the alleged killer live on the air by phone, a scene depicted in the film. “But I didn’t know the politics behind the Zodiac investigations, and I wasn’t aware of the interjurisdictional issues and conflicts. I read the script, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is just insane that this took place, that it actually happened this way.”

Though he never went to film school, Fincher grew up watching such films as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Taxi Driver,” “The Godfather” and “Star Wars.” “I loved all those movies of the 70s. It was an amazing time. When Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters’ came out, it was event. It was the days before the hype. You felt like you were discovering something, as opposed to having something rammed down your throat.”

Fincher began studying what he saw on screen, particularly – a rare event in those days – a documentary about the making of “Butch Cassidy.” “I always thought they made movies in real time. It never occurred to me that it took months.”

After graduating high school in 1980, he went to work for Marin County animator John Korty, before moving over to a job at – every geek’s dream – Industrial Light + Magic. Fincher found himself working on the “Chickenwalkers” miniatures unit as an assistant cameraman on “Return of the Jedi,” alongside such masters as Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett. “It was pretty cool, although it was really sort of the beginning of the end of all the photochemical visual effects. But I learned a lot, that’s for sure.”

His experience at ILM would come in handy, even decades later. “We were the on-set experts. We had to be able to answer questions about, ‘Can you do this? or ‘Can you do that?’ or ‘What can’t you do?’ So coming from that world, you’re always kind of curious about what the next gizmo is that’s going to make our lives more interesting and more productive.”

He made the jump into shooting music videos in the mid-80s, for such artists as Madonna (“Express Yourself,” “Vogue”) and The Rolling Stones (“Love Is Strong”), among others, co-founding leading video and commercial production houses, Propaganda Films, in 1987 and, 12 years later, Anonymous Content. “I got into commercials to assuage my guilt about having to charge a real day rate to recording artists, because they would eventually have to pay for everything,” he laughs.

Alienated

Based on his video and commercial work, Fincher was eventually tapped to direct his first feature film, “Alien3” in 1992. It was a big jump from the commercial world, and somewhat of a shock. “Shooting movies and shooting commercials are such separate kinds of disciplines,” he says. “In commercials, you learn how to make your point quickly, because you only have 30 seconds to do it.” Moving to features was, as he puts it, “pretty brutal.”

“In the commercial world, you’re pretty much in charge of what you’re doing. Starting on a feature, though, was more like, ‘Shut up, kid! No one wants to hear from you.’ I think for any first-timer, if you’re spending real money, they really just want you to do what you’re told.” He learned a valuable lesson. “I learned it’s not about making friends, it’s about making movies.”

Fincher would go on to make crime thriller “Se7en” in 1995, with Morgan Freeman and his future “Benjamin Button” star Brad Pitt, actioner “The Game” in 1997 with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, 1999’s acclaimed “Fight Club,” again with Pitt, and his 2002 thriller, “Panic Room,” starring Jodie Foster.

It was Freeman, actually, who approached Fincher about bringing sci-fi scribe Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” to the screen, though, so far, that hasn’t happened. “We never got a script, and, at the time, the amount of CG work that he wanted to do would have cost way too much money,” Fincher explains. “But certainly, if we can solve the problems that we need to in ‘Benjamin Button,’ ‘Rama’ will be this much closer to being doable.”

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is about a man (Pitt) who ages in reverse – starts old, ends young/small. The changes to Pitt’s face and physique will be accomplished both by makeup and by motion capture and visual effects, the latter to be accomplished much later down the pike. Directing actors whose faces are not those which audiences will see is, to say the least, a challenge. “It’s the trickiest thing I’ve ever had to do, really. You have to do a lot of imagining to get performances that are believable out of synthetic faces.” Not to mention the strain on Fincher’s high-priced star. “If you see what he has to go through, he’s earning every penny.”

Fincher is using the same workflow he put in place for “Zodiac,” something actually developed a few years earlier for a Lexus commercial. The director had become enamored of the Thomson Viper Filmstream High Definition video camera – the same camera director Michael Mann used to such great effect on “Collateral” and “Miami Vice” to help keep the crime-ridden nightscapes alive in his film’s images. “We started using it on television commercials,” putting it to work on a Lexus spot.

The system not only shoots the footage with video cameras, but, in Fincher’s case, he records the images to hard drives instead of video tape, something done for the first time on a feature film on “Zodiac.” “I developed it really for purely selfish reasons,” he explains. “I like having feedback right away. I don’t like to have my dailies come the next day and find out the stuff’s out of focus. I really want to know now.” Strangely, he says, that idea doesn’t necessarily appeal to everybody. “A lot of people really like the mystery of, ‘I wonder if I got it? I’ll find out tomorrow.’”

Working in the digital realm simplifies the insertion of visual effects, as Fincher found out on his Lexus spot. “We didn’t want to do any of the car driving stuff. I like to do all that in post production,” he says, leading to the cars in the ad being built by a visual effects house instead of an automobile plant.

Jake Gyllenhaal in “Zodiac”

Fincher at Bay

These days, even in a dramatic thriller like “Zodiac,” CG visual effects have their place, often unbeknownst to the audience. The film, which takes place in late 60s/early 70s San Francisco, has an opening helicopter shot flying across the San Francisco Bay towards the city, showing traffic atop the busy Embarcadero Freeway – which was destroyed by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

Visual effects were also used to recreate one of the Zodiac killer’s famous crime scenes, at the intersection of San Francisco’s Washington and Cherry Streets where a cabbie was murdered. “They wouldn’t let us shoot there, so ended up having to do it all CG,” Fincher explains. Just the cab, and some curbs and sidewalk were built, at a soundstage in Downey, California, with the rest filled in by blue screens for insertion later of matte paintings based on photographs of the corner as it existed in 1969.

Fincher also uses CG visual effects to show the construction of the Transamerica pyramid, long a landmark of the city, built during the period covered by the film, and shown in various stages of construction. “It’s in the background of a lot of shots, so we just thought it would be a nice way to make our point that 11 months had passed” between killings.

Of course, not everything about recreating the 60s requires computers. Anyone who grew up around that time will appreciate catching Robert Downey, Jr. sitting at his typewriter, erasing a mistake with one of those obnoxious round typewriter erasers with the brush on the end (the type that used to rub a hole through your paper if you weren’t careful). And the city is loaded with Volkswagens. “Our little joke to ourselves was that, in the 70s, there was a Bug on every street. Either a white one, a gray one, or a yellow one – but there was always a Bug,” the director says.

Fincher hopes to see a wide release of “Zodiac” using Digital Cinema Projection (or “D-Cinema,” as it’s sometimes known). The film and theater industries are making the slow transition to the system, in which the studio provides a hard drive with the complete movie on it, which is played back on a digital projector, instead of playing – and wearing out – reels of film. “Digital projection is getting us closer and closer to being able to go, ‘Here’s what I intended,’ instead of ‘Here’s what turned out after passing this through a lab and squeezing a few more prints out of this third print run that went to Canada,” he notes.

For someone who loves film tech all over his movie sets, Fincher is a decidedly un-techy person at home. He admits to having gotten himself a Playstation 3 (in case you’re wondering, “Madden” is his game), but that’s pretty much it. “My life is pretty boring,” he says, except, of course, his work. “I’m okay with playing ‘Madden’ to keep my mind off work, as an outlet. But, frankly, work is interesting enough.”