Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Museum conversation with David Fincher turned into a sharp look back at Zodiac and a brief but revealing update on Netflix’s Quentin Tarantino-written Cliff Booth film.
Rodrigo Perez
April 20, 2026
The Playlist
Very few crime movies get more revered with age. David Fincher’s 2007 thriller Zodiac, written by James Vanderbilt and following the way the Zodiac killer case pulls inspectors, reporters, and cartoonist Robert Graysmith into a years-long spiral of obsession, did. With Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. anchoring that descent, the film opened as a chilly, meticulous procedural and has kept growing in stature over the years, less because it offered closure than because it turned uncertainty, fixation, and spiritual erosion into the point. So it made perfect sense that Bong Joon Ho would be the filmmaker hosting a 4K screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a post-film conversation with Fincher recently as part of the museum’s A Weekend With Bong Joon Ho series.
Bong Joon Ho made that admiration plain right away. After recalling how immaculate Fincher’s office was—even down to the colored pencils arranged by shade—he got to the question underneath that story: whether Fincher’s obsessiveness really matched its reputation. Fincher did not deny it. If anything, he leaned into it, saying, “No, I mean… Look, I feel like you should do everything in your power to be as clear in what you’re trying to communicate as you can possibly be.”
The Fincher Analyst 