December 23, 2008

• Fincher and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

  “I was born under unusual circumstances.”

  Those opening words, spoken in voice-over narration by Brad Pitt, who plays the title character in David Fincher’s much anticipated—and already much heralded—new film, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” make a perfectly understated introduction to the stoical Button, but also to the epic movie in which Fincher has framed him.
  
  Among the unusual circumstances surrounding the making of the film is that film figured so little in it. Although nearly every major Hollywood movie of this size and budget is still made on film, “Button,” except for some high-speed and underwater sequences, was shot digitally on high-definition Thomson Viper cameras directly to hard drive, without ever touching tape, then captured into Final Cut Pro for editing.
  
  Shooting this way allowed Fincher to bring film-like resolution to the screen without surrendering the speed and flexibility he could only achieve by building his movie entirely from data. And because Fincher had used the same workflow to create his critically acclaimed previous film “Zodiac,” he was confident that it could be ratcheted up to meet the even greater narrative, technical, and logistical challenges of “Button.”

  If David Fincher believes he can pull it off I would always believe him…I used Fincher three times when he was a TV commercial director for Levi’s and Coca-Cola. The last spot was during the same time he discovered the script for Se7en. I knew I was probably using him the last time for TV.

  Early critical reaction to the film suggests he was certainly right. “Button,” which opens Christmas Day, has been nominated for five Golden Globe awards; shortlisted by nearly every credible Oscar handicapper; and touted by at least one critic—who was moved to call it early—as “one of the best films of the decade.”
  
  Long In Development

  Since it was first published by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the story of a man who is born in his 80s and ages in reverse, has alternately teased Hollywood and scared it away. Not low on the list of discouragements was the technical challenge of showing a character convincingly morph from a newborn nonagenarian to a senescent infant over the span of nearly a century. But in the 1980s, the idea of making “Button” was again making the rounds in Hollywood.

  It was about then that a young special effects assistant named David Fincher first saw a “Button” script floating around George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, where he worked. He saw another promising “Button” script in the early 90s, as he was building his reputation as a groundbreaking director of music videos (Madonna, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith) and as a budding film director, but he passed to pursue the edgy features (“Se7en”; “The Game”; “Fight Club”) that would win him significant fan attention and critical acclaim. But when in 2003 he saw a third iteration of the script, this time by Oscar winning screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”), Fincher was smitten.

  “I’d never read the short story,” says Fincher. “I’d read a great script around 1992, but I didn’t think it was makeable. Then twelve years later it was rewritten by Eric Roth, a guy I have a lot of respect for. It was a beautiful, beautiful story, and I thought, ‘This would make an amazing movie.’”

  As It Is Rewritten

  Roth’s script, which he revised again before production, takes nothing more from the original Fitzgerald story than the central conceit. Besides moving the story from Baltimore to New Orleans, he introduced a framing device in which a young woman, Caroline (Julia Ormond), reads aloud from Benjamin’s diary to her elderly mother Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who is dying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina approaches.

  The diary details the story of Benjamin, born in New Orleans in 1918 on the last day of World War I as his mother dies in delivery. Abandoned by his wealthy father on the steps of a New Orleans retirement home, he is taken in and raised by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), the caretaker. As a bespectacled 70-year-old child he first meets Daisy Miller, age 5; as a 60-year-old teenager he signs on to a tugboat to see the world; in his 50-year-old equivalency he travels to Russia and an affair with a diplomat’s wife (Tilda Swinton); in his “forties” he reunites with Daisy (Cate Blanchett), now 20, in New York. And in what Fincher calls the “sweet spot,” where their ages have aligned, they fall in love and marry, even as time works to pull them out of alignment again.

  Fincher’s account of what drew him to the script suggests that there is enough darkness mixed with light in the film to satisfy even fans drawn to the director’s signature noir. “The greatest love stories are always measured against the specter of death,” he says. “I liked how love and death were actually inexorably intertwined in this.”

  On Location

  On location in New Orleans, and then later in Montreal, Fincher—famously efficient on set—and DP Claudio Miranda shot in 4:4:4 RGB DPX format with Viper digital cameras and a minimal camera crew of “no more than five people.”

  “Shooting is no fun because it’s just heartbreaking compromise,” says Fincher. But shooting in high-def digital helped keep the compromises in check. “The thing I love about HD is that I can see what things are really going to look like. I want to be able to look at the monitor and confidently say, ‘OK, we’re done with that.’ I don’t want to think I like what I see and then be disappointed by tomorrow’s dailies.”

  Each day’s shooting was meticulously planned and rehearsed, and the mandate was to keep everything as naturalistic and realistic as possible to ground the essential truths of the story.

  Fincher’s Japanese Coke TVC
  

  Post-production supervisor Peter Mavromates explains how digital acquisition complemented Fincher’s shooting style:

  “People talk a lot about the number of takes, but what actually defines David’s style is how many different camera angles he uses. If there were a quotient that measured angles per scene, David’s would be very high compared to other filmmakers. So it’s very liberating for him to be able to shoot those angles and not have to sweat the whole lab cost thing.”

  • 3:37 pm
  • 4 Comments