Zodiac (Original Motion Picture Score)

Two soundtrack albums were released from the 2007 film Zodiac. The first album, Zodiac: Songs from the Motion Picture, was released by Lakeshore Records on February 27, 2007 and features various popular music pertaining to the time periods covered in the film. The second album, Zodiac: Original Motion Picture Score, was released by Varèse Sarabande on March 13, 2007 and features the music of David Shire. Originally the film's director, David Fincher, envisioned the film’s soundtrack to be composed of 40 cues of vintage music spanning the nearly three decades of the Zodiac story. However, the director felt that an original score was also needed "to take the emotional part of the film to another level," according to the film's sound designer and longtime collaborator Ren Klyce. At first, it was decided that only ten minutes was needed and this gradually increased until he realized that there was no money for the score, just for the 40 musical cues. After using music from The Conversation and All the President's Men for the film’s temp track, it was decided that they should get David Shire (composer of both of these films) to do it. Fincher was eager to work with Shire as All the President’s Men was one of his favorite films and one of the primary cinematic influences on Zodiac. Shire composed 27 minutes of music performed by the San Francisco Orchestra and said, “There are 12 signs of the Zodiac and there is a way of using atonal and tonal music. So we used 12 tones, never repeating any of them but manipulating them.” He used specific instruments to represent the characters: “the trumpet was Toschi, the solo piano was Graysmith and the dissonant strings were the serial killer Zodiac.”