“To me this movie does to genre filmmaking what...

“To me this movie does to genre filmmaking what L’Avventura did to narrative cinema in the 1960s, in the sense that in L’Avventura, all of a sudden, the central character disappears, and you’re just left with abstract issues of what was really going on in life around that character.

Here you have the notion that everything is in place for a classic narrative — a serial killer, the cops, a smart guy from everyday life, the ciphers. Everything should fall in place and there should be a resolution, and here you’re only left with question mark after question mark, which ultimately is what real life is about, and it’s very rarely acknowledged by cinema.

What amazed me at the time and still does is the connection with Seven, because it’s like the anti-Seven. It’s this incredible exercise in dialectics. In American cinema, I don’t see an equivalent.”

— Filmmaker Olivier Assayas on David Fincher’s Zodiac