10 Years On: ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’

Commentary, filmmaking, and hearing about the process.

I’ve heard David Fincher’s movies more times than I’ve seen them.

Over the past several years, between three separate iPod Classics and multiple crashed hard drives, I’ve accumulated a series of mp3 files from the DVD/Blu-Ray editions of his work, specifically the director’s commentary. It ranges from Se7en to Gone Girl, including interviews for corresponding press junkets and his most recent work on TV projects like Mindhunter. Some files are chopped up into 15-minute segments. Others are presented at their full 2+hour length. This is all thanks to the work of intrepid fans and other anonymous angels online who do the same for other filmmakers’ work.

These are some of the most reliable pieces of audio I own, never tiring, never boring, comforting in the way I imagine a familiar audiobook must be. If a track from one of Fincher’s films comes on shuffle, invariably, I back up to the beginning of the movie and finish it through.

Which means I know Fincher’s voice and his mannerisms well. Or at least, the ones he presents. They’ve seeped into my own vocabulary. He says “notion” a lot. He “takes umbrage” with certain ignorant or “facile” criticisms. He often laughs at how ridiculous the enterprise of making movies is. He pauses before delivering the last phrase of a scathing line, always in the same soft voice, like here in the commentary for Gone Girl: “So, everybody bitches and moans about how many takes…People I’ve never even met complain about how many takes I shoot. The take of Neil Patrick Harris parking that Jaguar dead center in the middle of that frame, that was take two. That was take two, it’s in the movie. We walked away after take two. So, please…go fuck yourselves.”

I return to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button most often, specifically for these kinds of off-the-cuff moments. Ironically, it’s the entry in his filmography that I’ve seen the least. It may be because Benjamin Button is a movie whose poignant sadness is often forgotten, especially by those who remember it simply as that one where Brad Pitt ages backwards. It may be because I haven’t had time to sit down with the film in its entirety, which runs close to 3 hours, in a long while, and taking it with me in my ears is easier. Who knows. These are nominally boring types of ephemera. Anyone who’s been in my car more than once has likely had to put with listening to David Fincher at some point.

So, in honor of the 10th anniversary of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I slapped together some of my favorite moments from the director’s commentary, with the requisite context in case you haven’t seen the movie (which you definitely should). There may be better ways to do justice to the things that resonate with you. This is mine.

“It took for fucking ever”

Benjamin Button begins with a cascade of actual buttons falling into the shape of the Paramount and Warner Bros. production logos, the sound of a tuning orchestra playing in the background. “The button logos was an attempt of mine to kind of make the presentation credit feel like it was…not two companies presenting a movie, but a sort of conjoined effort of two companies to bring this movie to fruition.”

It’s the unlikely result of over 25 years of production purgatory. For the longest time, the film rights to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, upon which the movie is based, belonged to Universal Studios. In fact, 10-time Universal collaborator Steven Spielberg was going to make the movie in the early 90s, with Tom Cruise in the lead role, though we likely wouldn’t have gotten Jurassic Park had that been the case.

The rights hobbled around Hollywood a while longer after the project fell through, until they were sold to Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, who brought it over to Paramount. By 2004, when Fincher signed on to direct the film, directors from Ron Howard to Spike Jonze had been attached, along with screenwriters Charlie Kaufman and Jim Taylor.

Fincher’s version of Benjamin Button is a far cry from the original source material. Largely concerned with the more mundane aspects of a person who ages backwards, Fitzgerald’s story follows Benjamin through Yale, the Spanish-American War, a football career at Harvard, and eventually death as a child. He is born with the ability to speak, his father passes the Button Hardware family business on to him, he goes to college, falls in love, goes to war, goes back to college, and ends up abandoned by his family.

In the film, adapted by Eric Roth into a more sweeping, romantic kind of story, Benjamin’s condition pushes him out into the world and into several unexpected, more dramatic situations.

“The sea of faces”

How the cast for Benjamin Button was “cobbled together” is endearing and often hilarious to hear about. As is Fincher’s obvious admiration for the people he worked with.

Jason Flemyng, who plays Benjamin’s estranged father, met Fincher at Brad Pitt’s “Santa Barbara surf shack”. “He had gone swimming out at seven o’clock in the morning in water that I think is only suitable for great whites”. This on a day where great white sharks were indeed reported to be migrating up the California coast.

Taraji P. Henson, as Benjamin’s adopted mother Queenie, was cast after some persistent jostling from Laray Mayfield, the casting director. “Laray came in with a DVD of Hustle & Flow and showed me Taraji and I had literally no idea how it applied. I was kind of like, ‘This woman right here? This is the woman?’…She came in on a Saturday and in five minutes we were like ‘Well, that’s done.’”

Mahershala Ali, as Tizzy Weathers. “Mahershala I saw on an advertisement for a television show that he was doing. And I pointed it out to Cean [Chaffin, producer and Fincher’s wife] and said, ‘That’s what I think Tizzy should be like.’ And Laray had a picture of Ali and I said, ‘Well, yeah let’s bring this guy in…’ Again, five minutes later, it was like ‘That’s the guy.’” Ali, whose career has since risen in prominence, was later cast in Fincher’s Netflix adaptation of House of Cards.

Lance E. Nichols, as the New Orleans preacher from early in Benjamin’s childhood. “There’s a funny story. We shot this scene [of Benjamin learning to walk] in November of 2006. And by summer of 2007, we were shooting Benjamin going to visit Daisy in the hospital in Paris, but we were shooting on Wilshire Boulevard in an old theater…And Lance Nichols comes walking in the lobby and looking around. I looked over and thought ‘What’s the Preacher doing in Paris?’ And he had this big smile on his face and he came up to me and said, ‘You’re still shooting this movie?’ [laughs] ‘I’ve done five other movies between seeing you in City Park and now finding you on Wilshire Boulevard.’ It was great to see him and it was…ah, humiliating.”

Tilda Swinton, as the mysterious Elizabeth Abbott. “I’m going to tell this story because I think it talks about what real collaboration is, which is when somebody challenges you to make you better. I had originally an idea for who would play Elizabeth Abbott, and it was not Tilda Swinton. And only because Tilda Swinton didn’t occur to me…I kept saying to Brad, ‘This is the woman I think we should get’ and he kept saying, ‘I don’t know’ for weeks. And finally, he said, ‘You know, I think there’s better.’ So I said, ‘Okay, that’s fine. If there is somebody better, it should be obvious. And you should be able to figure out who this better person is in five minutes or less. So I’ll be in my office. In five minutes, I’m going to call and hire this other actress’…Three and a half minutes later, phone rings, I pick it up, and he says ‘Tilda Swinton’ [laughs]. And I said, ‘Okay, that’s better.’”

Ted Manson, as an elderly man named Mr. Daws who’s been struck by lightning seven times. “This is Ted’s last movie. He passed on about a month or two before he ever saw the movie but he was [chuckles] wonderful to work with because he was so sweet and so polite. He flew out, for when we did the read-through of the script, five months before we started shooting. He flew himself out to LA and every time Ted would start in with his, ‘Did I ever tell you…?’ people would just fall out of their chairs laughing, because he had this amazingly great, squeaky voice that was, you know, obviously aided and abetted by a lifetime of Marlboro Reds.”

Jared Harris, as Captain Mike. “I love the idea that Jared has this character who’s talking about the exact opposite situation that he had in his life where he evidently wanted to do the same thing that his father did.” Jared’s father was famous Irish stage and film actor Richard Harris, best known to some for roles in Camelot, Unforgiven, and the first two Harry Potter films as Albus Dumbledore.

Finally, the various Extras throughout the film, most of which are septa- and octogenarians in the old folks’ home where Benjamin grows up. “Extras, normally from the standpoint of the production team, do not engender a lot of sympathy. In fact, a lot of times, they are sort of considered to be the most problematic of departments. And it gave me a whole new kind of take on how difficult and confusing the process of making movies is…You know, we literally could not have made this movie without the faces that Louisiana afforded us. Almost everybody was kind of memorable in their own specific way.”

“Fincher’s sadism”

I won’t go on about the one thing everyone seems to harp about when it comes to David Fincher’s method of filmmaking (his proclivity for doing many takes). It’s better to hear him, and other actors he’s worked with, talk about it. I will say this: it’s not as salacious a deal as most critics seem to think. Though, it is occasionally very funny.

In the scene where Benjamin learns to walk, there’s a prat fall. “So Peter Badalamenti, who plays Benjamin’s body in this scene, he’s a stunt man. He’s been a stunt player before. And I asked him to fall on his face. We made this sort of rubber mat that was painted like the wood and so he could fall face first, which is not comfortable, but…it’s not unheard of. And he kept falling and catching himself and I said, ‘Peter, you gotta fall.’ And he was like [laughs] ‘Why don’t you get up here and show me what you want?’ So I went up in front, because I was pretty pissed off, and just fell face first into the floor and got up and said, ‘Just like that’. And he said, ‘Well, yeah but you only have to do it once.’”

Cut to: the commentary from 1999’s Fight Club. Fincher, Brad Pitt, and Edward Norton are watching the third-act scene where Tyler Durden beats the shit out of Norton’s character in a parking garage rigged with explosives. A stunt double for Norton was used in a section where Tyler throws him down a long flight of stairs.

Brad Pitt: “He [the stunt man] goes down, those stairs are hard. Everyone’s clapping and then we hear ‘Once again!’”

Edward Norton: “And he did it eight times!”

David Fincher: “No, twelve. I was-”

EN: “Twelve?!”

BP: “And this is when we were truly aware of Fincher’s sadism.”

DF: “Well, but I gotta say-”

BP: “And what take did you use?”

DF: “[snickers] We used take number one.”

As time has gone on, Fincher’s commentary has skewed toward the introspective. This includes increasingly frequent glimpses into his manner when it comes to directing, often apologetic in the face of production mistakes like technical issues.

“This is a perfect example of exactly how important it is to have great actors. We had shot 15 takes of Taraji washing his [Benjamin’s] hands and being upset with him and they were all great. It turned out that the camera had a back-focus problem and I could only shoot two more because she was kind of wasted. You know, it was two in the morning or something. So she did two more and they were just as good as the first fifteen. You kind of go, ‘Phew!’ But it’s so embarrassing to come up to an actor and say, ‘It’s really great what you did those last fifteen takes, but it’s all out of focus. I need you to do it one more time.’”

Sometimes, he admits his repeated takes can be a little taxing.

“When we were shooting young Mr. Daws being struck by lightning, he [the actor] kept asking ‘So what happens?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I mean, 500,000 volts of electricity just rip through your body.’ And he goes, ‘Well, do I fall over on my side?’ I said, ‘You know, you just fly up in the air.’ By the end of the day…he was done being struck by lightning.”

But I don’t think he’s very uncomfortable about it. In a BFI Southbank Q+A, Fincher was asked about the high number of takes he’s supposedly infamous for.

“This is bullshit. Look, you’re spending $150m, unbelievable amounts of money, to ship period vehicles from Illinois down to Louisiana and get them working. There are teams of people making these cars work, all this stuff. So you get there and you’re going to shoot three takes and then go home? Why? This is the whole reason we’re here — we’re here to do what’s in front of the camera. And I find that actors — some people resent it and go, ‘My best stuff was when I had a lot of energy after my mochaccino and now my energy’s gone,’ but a lot of actors work it out in their heads, they figure it out and have an idea of what they’re going to do. I can see that and I like to move past that, to where they’ve forgotten why they came, or who they are. And it is about choreography, where the eye of the audience finds that person and that person is revealed and they come forward and say their line. All those things in concert. So, you spend all that money to get there, so you might as well make sure you got it.”

“The old city and the new city”

Benjamin Button was one of the first productions to shoot in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. A subtle, yet integral facet of the film is the looming presence of the storm as it draws closer and closer to the narrators. There are multiple temporal framing devices in the story, from the clockmaking Mr. Gateau sequence at the very beginning to the bridging of Benjamin’s early, warm Jazz Age years with the coldness of a modern world in his later ones, devoid of the possibility for his existence at all. But the primary perspective comes from the sickbed of Cate Blanchett’s Daisy and her daughter Caroline, played by Julia Ormond.

“Some people don’t like the idea that this hurricane takes place during Katrina, and it’s not intended to be an inordinately important beat. It’s just talking about change, the old city and the new city, and a time before a very defining and chaotic moment in city history.”

Cate Blanchett’s narration through all of this, told from her death bed in a New Orleans hospital hours before Katrina hits, moves the massive scope of the film towards a conclusion that seems inevitable. Much of this movie is a love letter to New Orleans, to the tapestry of lives that overlap through time, generations, and disruptive upheaval.

“It was very difficult to put a cast together in New Orleans after Katrina because there were so few working actors left. Most of them had to find work in Texas and in Georgia.”

It’s also a testament to some of the odd production requests the city had to endure during shooting.

“Whenever we would shoot a scene in an exterior day, in this period, we had to get rid of the street, so we would bring in loads and loads of dirt, lay them down so that the roads looked like they were dirt, and then cars would drive by. You’d have dust all over the place. It was pretty fantastic. And great thanks to city of New Orleans for letting us do it. Certainly, a lot of the daiquiri vendors in the area were not so happy. Apparently, dust and daiquiris don’t go together.”

“Lop his head off”

The major point of concern for the filmmakers on Benjamin Button was the various stages of aging Benjamin goes through, with the aid of what was then cutting-edge digital technology.

“We were trying so hard to figure out different ways to integrate him [Benjamin] into the scene so it didn’t have to be a performance. It could be a much more physical thing than hanging it all on a closeup of his face.”

Seven different actors and performers supplied the body for Benjamin throughout the film. All had Brad Pitt’s face digitally superimposed upon theirs. This is a technique of continuity David Fincher would later apply for the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network and various stunt scenes featuring Rooney Mara’s double in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

“In these three shots, you’re gonna see Benjamin’s head replaced as he’s walking out of frame, walks into a doorway. Benjamin’s head replaced as he’s petting the dog…And again, do you need to do those effects shots? But that’s what makes him, to me, feel real. He’s a real person in these scenes because you throw him away. He’s there and he’s doing what Benjamin would do, but it’s not like it’s always framed and supported as a big money shot.”

That big money, factoring in a budget of nearly $170M, was a gamble for the studio. “We had very strict over-budget penalties on this movie.” Perhaps, by current standards, wherever they may be at the time of reading, the transformative technology presented here isn’t as realistic. It’s convincing though. Convincing for the fable told throughout the film, and the ephemeral roles time plays in it.

“This is the kind of effects work that I love the most, is where we see Benjamin smiling, not doing much of anything else. And you know [chuckles], it’s a $20,000 effects shot to just have him as part of the sea of faces. I love that stuff.”

“The curtain call”

Where do you come out after a movie like Benjamin Button? Upon release, some critics were surprised at how saccharine the film seemed, especially when compared to Fincher’s past work.

I love this assessment from Kimberley Jones of the Austin Chronicle: “Fincher’s selling us cheekboned movie stars frolicking in bedsheets and calling it a great love. I didn’t buy it for a second.” I love it, even if I I don’t buy it. The film seems to be more about death and the relationship we all have with time than romance or an epic love. The concept of a person who ages in reverse throws some of the most mundane, seemingly unremarkable moments of life into a relief that creates an uncomfortable awareness of where one is then and there, in what condition, under what circumstances. And when it comes to the film’s central relationship between Benjamin and Daisy, it’s ultimately a story about two adults who are intentional in every part of their commitment to one another, right through to the bitter end.

“I’ve always maintained — and there are people who feel differently — that the movie is not about how two people are made for each other. It’s about two people who loved each other and made a commitment to one another and then lived up to that…that commitment to one another from the first time they meet on the lawn and he’s eighty and she’s seven. Never mind tension that these are two people who are made for one another. It’s someone who should spark an interest in another person and continue to sort of parallel one another throughout life.”

In 2009, Fincher gave an interview for Film Comment. Among the topics at hand was the notion of what would come next:

I’m very curious about what people are going to make of it?

“As am I. But this is the part where you just want to hibernate and wake up eight months later. How did it all turn out? Am I persona non grata?”