Law and order
Mindhunter is the X-Files revival I've been waiting for. Of its many parallels to Zodiac the most apparent is its non-traditional structure. The unfamiliar rhythms lighten its subject matter and open them up to all manner of thematic and narrative exploration. It's funny and absorbing and you want to see what happens next. A lot of it is just people talking in rooms – not a coincidence, David Fincher says:
I don't care if the whole scene is five pages of two people in a car sipping coffee from paper cups as long as there's a fascinating power dynamic and I learn something about them. And I do not care if the car is doing somewhere between 25 and 35 miles per hour.Joe Penhall talks about writing and not writing the series here:
[Fincher] wanted me to hire English writers and I couldn't find English writers that I liked enough to do it or to get their head round it. He's one of those, he likes the English, he's an anglophile, he thought it was much better I was able to look them in the eye when we were working.
It ended up much better for me to get LA writers. The women that I wanted were all from LA and lived 2 miles from the office it turned out. They were very classy writers, they'd written Mad Men, had Emmy awards. They couldn't really be part of a writers' room and be bossed around and paid a pittance and made to rewrite these 25 times. I commissioned them, I paid them, I got them to do 2 rewrites and then after that I had to do it.