Xixax Film Forum

David Fincher to Direct Benjamin Button
Source: Variety

Variety reports that David Fincher (Fight Club, Panic Room) is expect to direct Benjamin Button, written by Eric Roth and to be co-financed by Warner Bros. and Paramount.

Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the film centers on a man who, at age 50, begins aging backward and the complications that ensue when he falls in love with a woman of 30.

Paramount will handle domestic distribution and Warner will market the film in foreign territories.

Fincher is all wrong for this. I remember Spike Jonze was going to do this. I wish that would happen. Maybe Chris Cunningham, but I just want him to direct anything.

Well, it's a technological challenge, which Fincher loves, plus its potentially new stylistic territory for him, which is always exciting to consider. I'm more interested in what he does with this than any of the other projects he's been attached to lately.

I agree with Ghostboy on this one, and "interesting" is definitely the right word. Spike Jonze would do great, and that's almost a fact, but I wasn't too fond of Fincher's Panic Room, so seeing him do anything, especially radically different, is greatly anticipated.

Spike Jonze would do it too tongue-in-cheek. And as much as I like Cunningham, we need to remember something -- just because somebody is a great visualist, which he is, it doesn't mean he'll be a great storyteller, something he has yet to prove.

I'm just glad Fincher has finally committed to something. And Eric Roth is all over the place right now -- writing Spielberg's Munich film, "A Cold Case" for Romanek and Hanks, and now this.

i agree 100% with Stefen...this is a good project, but not for Fincher

Quote from: mutinycojust because somebody is a great visualist, which he is, it doesn't mean he'll be a great storyteller, something he has yet to prove.

I'm hoping he'll do that with this one.

DAVID FINCHER HAS 3 MONTHS TO PRESS PARAMOUNT'S "BUTTON"
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Hollywood Reporter reports that Warner Bros. Pictures has boarded Paramount Pictures' long-gestating adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Benjamin Button."

David Fincher has a three-month holding deal to direct the project. But several producers around town are holding their breath to see which project Fincher actually directs next.

The "Fight Club" helmer has been associated with a variety of projects, including Phoenix Pictures' film about the so-called Zodiac Killer, DreamWorks' "The Lookout" and the remake of "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud."

Eric Roth wrote the most recent draft of "Benjamin Button" with previous writers including Robin Swicord. The "Button" project has been in development for some time and has attracted the interest of several directors over the years, including Gary Ross, Spike Jonze, Ron Howard and Phil Alden Robinson.

As much as I like Fincher "The Lookout" seems better suited for him. Would maybe like to see Spike take on Button.

The premise is cool -- I want to read the short story.
Reminds me of something I saw a while back...what was it?....aye, lemme see....

A bit more detail here on the Benjamin Button project.


Fincher Talks "Benjamin Button" Status
Source: Empire Magazine

"What I am desperately trying to do is put this movie together that has been around for about 75 years at Paramount called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It's based on an F.Scott Fitzgerald short story that's been adapted by Eric Roth. It's a little 200-page script; a sprawling romance between a woman of 30 and a man who, at 50, begins ageing backwards.

It's dark, it's romantic, and it also deals with mortality in a pretty unflattering way. The guy is born in 1919 - with the film itself beginning in the Civil war, travelling around the world and carrying on all the way through to the year 2000. And we'd have to have the lead actor be recognisable from the ages of 18 to 85 years old" says Fincher.

Blanchett, Pitt on 'Case' for Fincher
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are in negotiations to star in the long-gestating adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which David Fincher is directing.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures are co-financing the project, with Paramount handling domestic rights and Warners taking international. Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall are producing.

The story centers on an elderly man who gets younger as time passes and encounters complications when, at age 50, he falls in love with a woman who is 30.

Eric Roth wrote the script. Past writers include Jim Taylor, Robin Swicord and Charlie Kaufman.
 
Pitt is working with Blanchett on a second Paramount project, "Babel," which Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is directing. He next stars in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." His other upcoming projects include "Chad Schmidt" for Columbia Pictures.

A newly minted Oscar winner, Blanchett ("The Aviator") recently signed on to star in "The Good German" with George Clooney and Tobey Maguire. Her recent credits include "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." Pitt and Blanchett are repped by CAA.

so is this before or after the serial killer thing?

i cant believe they're NOT going with the Kaufman script.  :shock:

also: this is a reunion cast for the original fountain, right?  has this been mentioned already?

Source: MTVNews

Men have been jealous of Brad Pitt's dashing good looks for years, so they likely won't be thrilled to hear he'll still have the body of a 21-year-old when he turns 50. But that shouldn't stop fans from wanting to see "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," his long-overdue reunion with "Fight Club" mastermind David Fincher that will also star Taraji P. Henson. "I am ready," the "Hustle & Flow" actress giggled while revealing that she had been cast in the age-defying drama. "I met [Pitt] already, and we really hit it off. It's going to be amazing." Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald tale, the flick will tell the story of a 30-year-old woman in love with a man who begins aging backward when he turns 50. "It takes place in 1919, so it's a period piece," Henson said of the film, which the notoriously dark Fincher will direct. "All of the characters age — it's sort of 'The Notebook' meets 'Forrest Gump.' Brad Pitt's character is born with this rare aging disease and he ages backwards, and my character adopts him. So I get to work opposite fine, sexy Brad Pitt — and I have to play his mother!" Laughing, she added: "I'm hoping somewhere in the script we can write in that he has an Oedipus complex." The film is scheduled to shoot this fall for a 2007 release. ...

Taraj P. Henson is an amazing actress, and is a far more exciting counterpart to Pitt than Blanchett (who's also great, but everyone knows that alread, so she's a bit more predictable). I'm so glad they're maintaining the period setting, too.

Two Fincher movies in 2007 - guess he's making up for lost time. Maybe PTA will follow suite.

Pitt is Benjamin Button; May Also Get into a State of Play

Well, there'll be no changing diapers for Brad Pitt in the near future. Right after he finishes shooting Ocean's Thirteen this summer, he's finally agreed (negotiations began more than a year ago) to star in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a David Fincher-directed project that will begin production this fall. Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, the film will tell the story of a man who, once he hits the big five-oh, begins aging backwards. Apart from the surely inevitable terror of turning 13 again, Button's life takes yet another troubling turn when he falls love with a woman of 30 (to be played by Cate Blanchett), who probably won't dig him anymore when he's a teen. Though the movie has reportedly been being tossed around in Hollywood for more than a decade, this is the first time it's actually neared production.

In addition, Variety reported this morning that Pitt has also expressed interested in starring in State of Play, a big-screen, Americanized version of a BBC miniseries. In the story, the central character is "a journalist and former campaign manager of a fast-rising politician who unravels a murder conspiracy involving his former boss." Pitt's involvement in this project so far is limited to his own interest; nothing has been signed, and there's no indication that negotiations have even begun.

Quote from: MacGuffin on July 27, 2006, 02:17:22 PM
a woman of 30 (to be played by Cate Blanchett)

:saywhat:

No offense to Cate, but even when she was thirty she didn't look thirty.

man why does everyone keep pairing these two up together?  original Fountain, Babel, this.  its crazy!

Swinton Set to Push Benjamin Button
Source: Production Weekly

Production Weekly reports that Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Constantine) is in talks to star opposite Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Jason Flemyng and Taraji P. Henson are also in negotiations to join the cast.

Written by Eric Roth from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the drama casts Pitt as a man who hits age 50 and begins aging backward. Complications ensue when he falls in love with a woman of 30, played by Blanchett.

Shooting starts November 6th in New Orleans and photography wraps in Los Angeles on February 7th.

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 24, 2006, 11:46:23 PM
a man who hits age 50 and begins aging backward. Complications ensue when he falls in love with a woman of 30.

you'd think complications would ensue when he begins aging backwards.

i'm about to read the short story online.

well it took you a couple years, but i'm glad you've come to this realization. 

Quote from: JG on September 25, 2006, 12:05:01 AM
well it took you a couple years, but i'm glad you've come to this realization. 

i haven't realized anything.

Quote from: MacGuffin on May 11, 2004, 01:40:56 AM
David Fincher to Direct Benjamin Button
Source: Variety

Variety reports that David Fincher (Fight Club, Panic Room) is expect to direct Benjamin Button, written by Eric Roth and to be co-financed by Warner Bros. and Paramount.

Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the film centers on a man who, at age 50, begins aging backward and the complications that ensue when he falls in love with a woman of 30.
Paramount will handle domestic distribution and Warner will market the film in foreign territories.

Quote from: Pubrick on September 24, 2006, 11:57:25 PM

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 24, 2006, 11:46:23 PM
a man who hits age 50 and begins aging backward. Complications ensue when he falls in love with a woman of 30.

you'd think complications would ensue when he begins aging backwards.

...or is it a conclusion? 

i almost had you

Quote from: JG on September 25, 2006, 12:11:38 AM

Quote from: MacGuffin on May 11, 2004, 01:40:56 AM
David Fincher to Direct Benjamin Button
Source: Variety

Variety reports that David Fincher (Fight Club, Panic Room) is expect to direct Benjamin Button, written by Eric Roth and to be co-financed by Warner Bros. and Paramount.

Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the film centers on a man who, at age 50, begins aging backward and the complications that ensue when he falls in love with a woman of 30.
Paramount will handle domestic distribution and Warner will market the film in foreign territories.

Quote from: Pubrick on September 24, 2006, 11:57:25 PM

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 24, 2006, 11:46:23 PM
a man who hits age 50 and begins aging backward. Complications ensue when he falls in love with a woman of 30.

you'd think complications would ensue when he begins aging backwards.

...or is it a conclusion? 

oh, i hadn't read the synopsis before. if i had quoted that original one from 2004 it could be considered a realisation. or if someone else had made the same observation back then.

Quote from: JG on September 25, 2006, 12:11:38 AM
i almost had you

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi5.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fy154%2Fpubrick%2Fvidcaps%2Fimg129.jpg&hash=69ef754534b65ef6ce9e41e6372e71784f278b16)
you'll never have me

Julia Ormond Joins Benjamin Button
Added to David Fincher's next pic
Source: Variety

Former Legends Of The Fall co-star Julia Ormond is back in Brad Pitt's arms. Actually, not so much – despite having joined the cast of David Fincher's Pitt-centric The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, it's unlikely the pair will even share a scene.

Ormond has been cast as Cate Blanchett's daughter, the woman to whom the aged Blanchett will tell the tale of her love affair with Button. You'll recall that the story finds Pitt's character aging backwards and falling in love with Blanchett.

Fincher plans to start work on the film next month, while Ormond will next be seen in David Lynch's Inland Empire. That's provided he can get some distribution for the three-hour film, of course.

whoever that is.

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Fear not, ladies, Brad Pitt hasn't gone off the deep end and shaved his head. He's merely wearing a bald cap for THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, the romantic dramedy he's currently filming under long-time director pal David Fincher. Based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name, in it, Pitt stars as a middle-aged man who falls in love with a thirty-year old woman (played by Cate Blanchett) and then finds himself aging backwards. Hilarity and hijinks? Oh, they ensue, baby!  The film is tentatively scheduled for a May 2008 release.

bumping this mofo up to ensure myself there is something news about the movie. the last post is from december so a trailer or some new pics is up soon.

Very Early Buzz on Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

One of the movies that was mentioned in our article about Why 2008 Will Be An Awesome Year was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The film is the latest from David Fincher, the director of Fight Club and Zodiac. Everyone knows (or should know) that Fincher is a phenomenal filmmaker, from the visuals and camerawork in his films to his storytelling and rich characters. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells the story of Benjamin Button, played by Brad Pitt, a man who starts aging backwards (from old to young) with bizarre consequences. You probably haven't heard of it yet, because it hasn't started its marketing, but an early reaction from a woman who was a costume designer on the film has practically started the buzz.

From Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere comes an e-mail from one of his long-timer readers. Although hardly anyone can be trusted these days, this does sound quite legit (and not too over-the-top). If it is the truth, then this certainly gets me excited for Benjamin Button, almost more than most movies this year.

"A friend of my wife's who is a costume designer was back in Pittsburgh visiting family over the holidays. During her visit we were discussing interesting projects she is or will be working on, and she said she's unequivocally excited about her latest film — The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

"Top to bottom she said the set and production was a dream, that both David Fincher and Brad Pitt were consummate professionals, and that the script was top-notch — the only script she can recall making her cry, she said. She added that the look and scope of design of the film while ambitious is also intricate and exacting."

"Furthermore, she mentioned that some of the sequences they saw that had been edited were absolutely stunning. Her description of the mood of those who worked on it is that of bated breath — a near universal belief that they have made an outstanding and moving film, one that transcends and one they wish not to jinx by too much loose talk."

"I take this with more than a passing interest as she has worked on Traffic, all of the Ocean's movies, Solaris and Miami Vice."

"My point is that she has been on top-notch productions and is not prone to be star struck or taken aback by every project she works on. However, in this case, she thinks this will be one of the highlights of her career."

The film is an adaptation from a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The script was written by Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth, of Forrest Gump, Munich, and The Good Shepherd. Fitzgerald noted that "This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end." The story was recently re-released this year in the form of a book in preparation for the film - you can find it on Amazon.com.

I couldn't imagine a better story for David Fincher to take on than one based around a saying like that. Just look at what he did with Fight Club! That email above has definitely shot my interest up from relatively mild to extreme and now I'm anxiously awaiting the next news on Benjamin Button, whether it's a just picture or the trailer.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is currently set to arrive in theaters on November 26th.

David Fincher 49 Minute Audio Interview!
Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

Given the longish length of Zodiac (the Director's Cut DVD runs 162 minutes) and the general theme of obsessiveness and meta-detail, it seemed fitting that this morning's phoner with director David Fincher should run longer than usual and go into a little more technical detail than normal. We talked for 49 minutes and the time just flew.

We began by discussing Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 11.28), which he hasn't test-screened or even come close to finishing. To go by yesterday's posting (which came second-hand from a below-the-liner who allegedly worked on it), this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story may be more emotionally affecting than the Fincher usual-usual, which has always been on the dark, visually audacious side.

I told Fincher my only problem thus far is with the name "Benjamin Button," which sounds like something out of Hans Christian Andersen. Fincher doubts if the title means anything to anyone these days, and doesn't hold the Fitzgerald association in terribly high regard. "He probably wrote the story for drinking money," he says.

We moved on to (a) digital photography and the revolutionary qualities that after-dusk images now possess; (b) a reported tendency on his part to ask certain actors (or at least Zodiac costar Jake Gyllenhaal) to perform numerous takes of a given scene until it's right; (c) the bizarre cuts that were made to Zodiac due to test-screening reactions (like the 45-second black-screen time-passage sequence), (d) the fact that Zodiac is currently listed as the 4th best film of '07 on the Movie City News critics' chart (even though this liking hasn't translated to any Best Picture awards), and so on.

The money quote comes right at the beginning when Fincher asks me, "Where do I send the check?" Again, the interview in all of its raging 49-minute glory.

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/images/column/11508/fincher.mp3

Quote from: modage on January 03, 2008, 02:42:36 PM
David Fincher 49 Minute Audio Interview!
Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

Given the longish length of Zodiac (the Director's Cut DVD runs 162 minutes) and the general theme of obsessiveness and meta-detail, it seemed fitting that this morning's phoner with director David Fincher should run longer than usual and go into a little more technical detail than normal. We talked for 49 minutes and the time just flew.

We began by discussing Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 11.28), which he hasn't test-screened or even come close to finishing. To go by yesterday's posting (which came second-hand from a below-the-liner who allegedly worked on it), this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story may be more emotionally affecting than the Fincher usual-usual, which has always been on the dark, visually audacious side.

I told Fincher my only problem thus far is with the name "Benjamin Button," which sounds like something out of Hans Christian Andersen. Fincher doubts if the title means anything to anyone these days, and doesn't hold the Fitzgerald association in terribly high regard. "He probably wrote the story for drinking money," he says.

We moved on to (a) digital photography and the revolutionary qualities that after-dusk images now possess; (b) a reported tendency on his part to ask certain actors (or at least Zodiac costar Jake Gyllenhaal) to perform numerous takes of a given scene until it's right; (c) the bizarre cuts that were made to Zodiac due to test-screening reactions (like the 45-second black-screen time-passage sequence), (d) the fact that Zodiac is currently listed as the 4th best film of '07 on the Movie City News critics' chart (even though this liking hasn't translated to any Best Picture awards), and so on.

The money quote comes right at the beginning when Fincher asks me, "Where do I send the check?" Again, the interview in all of its raging 49-minute glory.

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/images/column/11508/fincher.mp3

jesus, 45MB for 49mins. that IS a high quality interview.

the trailer (before indy (which i'd give a C+)) is freaking awesome. though it kinda tells you everything in order. i want to see it again right now, but maybe not being able to is a good thing... but i neeeed it..

edit-oop! official site (with nothing much) http://www.benjaminbutton.com/

Ah man - I'd almost go see Indy again just to see this trailer! And Alexandre Desplat is doing the score! Third best movie of the year!

yeah i didnt expect to see this.  it was awesome.  and so curious!

It's up on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbAPI8yZ83s)

sweet jesus. unreal!

I am sooo psyched to see this. The real highlight after seeing indy in theaters.

looks spectacular

now that that's gone here's the spanish flv file: http://www.joblo.com/video/media/flv/benjaminbutton.flv

and the best quality spanish link i can find:
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/benjamin%2Bbutton/video/x5ix5m_el-curioso-caso-de-benjamin-button_shortfilms

it'll probably show up on google video some time soon, though..

man, that shot of pitt flexing in the mirror.. put me down!

wow....this looks incredible

Visually, it looks amazing.

none of those links work for me?

El curioso caso de Benjamin Button:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nGvae6Cih0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nGvae6Cih0)

HOLY SHIT! first semi-official very small okay quality english trailer: http://www.joblo.com/video/media/flv/bennybutton.flv

hd apple seems imminent.

HD

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thecuriouscaseofbenjaminbutton/

It's up at Apple. This just looks amazing. It's made my list.

Brad Pitt is getting younger every day
Source: Los Angeles Times

It's a tantalizing hook for a film, isn't it? What if your hero was born an old man, only to grow younger every day, from wrinkles to wrinkles, so to speak--don't they say that all little babies look like Winston Churchill? That's the premise behind David Fincher's upcoming "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which stars Brad Pitt going from geezer-hood to infancy, and falling in love with Cate Blanchett along the way. The film is due in December and has already been touted for Oscarhood. Now that Paramount has put up its first trailer, I have no quarrel with any grand predictions.

The trailer promises us a moody, mysterious and bewitchingly bittersweet look at life, lived in an entirely unexpected way. It also offers the tantalizing possibility that Fincher, one of our era's greatest filmmakers, may have found a way (thanks to an Eric Roth script, adapted from a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story) to marry his often chilly obsession with serial killers and people in peril to a story with more emotional resonance.

If nothing else, the trailer--largely devised by Fincher, the ultimate hands-on filmmaker--reminds us that not every trailer has to play like a greatest-hits reel culled from the (fill in the blank: funniest, scariest or most exciting) scenes in a film, all so hideously pre-tested that no moment with any ambiguity or mystery could possibly survive. In terms of an opening, it's hard to top the trailer's first image:

As we pull in toward the face of a clock, the narrator (Pitt, with a New Orleans accent) says: "My name is Benjamin Button. I was born under unusual circumstances. While everyone else was aging, I was getting younger--all alone." As he finishes, the clock ticks--backward.

Propelled by French composer Camille Saint-Saens' melancholy "The Aquarium," Fincher shows us Button's life via a series of arresting images: A man rowing on a lonely lake. Pitt, studying himself in the mirror, wearing spectacles and boxer shorts, his head cocked to one side, as if bewildered by his strangely youthful appearance. A father, holding a little girl in his arms, a balloon slipping out of their hands. The trailer ends with the most bewitching image of all: A young toddler, walking with his lover, now aged, hobbling along with a cane.

Thanks to both the images and the music, the trailer does what a great trailer should--it leaves us wanting more, having tempted us with a tale that is both magical and steeped in an air of ineffable sorrow. It feels like just the kind of spooky fairy tale that Night Shyamalan could've made, if he were ever able to get out of his own head and embrace someone else's vision. But I'm eager to see the Fincher version. In the middle of summer, when you're surrounded by movies with dumb gags and cheap thrills, it's a pleasure to look forward to the work of someone who won't subject us to even an ounce of bathos or sentimentality.

Quote from: picolas on June 17, 2008, 06:06:40 PM
HD

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thecuriouscaseofbenjaminbutton/

Youth Withoutwho?

awww leave that movie be, y'all.

In case anyone wants to know, you can download the script at thepiratebay.org as a PDF. I haven't read it yet, but it's next in line after The Brothers Bloom.

David Fincher, Danny Boyle accomplish their missions
Both directors get the word out on their latest films.
By John Horn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Directors David Fincher and Danny Boyle came to the Telluride Film Festival with very different motivations for their fundamentally dissimilar films. But both will leave the festival having accomplished pretty much exactly what they needed to do.

Fincher, the director of "Fight Club," "The Game" and "Se7en," appeared at the 35th annual film festival to receive an opening-night career tribute award. In addition to his 167-minute director's cut of last year's "Zodiac," the filmmaker brought with him about 20 minutes of footage from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the decades-in-development reworking of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story about the reverse aging of a boy born as an old man.

The brief glimpses of Fincher's Christmas Day release established a couple of critical facts about "Benjamin Button."

First, the collection of scenes made clear that the director and screenwriter Eric Roth have used Fitzgerald's story as more foundation than blueprint; the many departures from the original story are apparent in the period movie's opening scenes, when Button is born as an infant with a senior's face, not as a fully grown old man from tip to toe. Second, Fincher was able to show that the technology used to insert "Benjamin Button" star Brad Pitt's face onto the torsos of the stand-ins who play the title character at widely different ages is both invisible and effective: Although the body may not be Pitt's, every small facial expression is.

Finally, audiences saw in several overtly emotional clips a side of Fincher that hasn't been clearly obvious in his early work: heart.

"It's probably the most romantic movie I've ever been offered," the director said during a rare Telluride downpour. "So, yes, it's the most romantic movie I've ever made."

Fincher also wants moviegoers to realize that he does not see Fitzgerald's story as an endorsement of the line attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw that "youth is wasted on the young," that it's a tragedy to have so little life experience when your body is willing, your attitude hopeful.

"A lot of people come away thinking that," the 46-year-old Fincher said. "But I see it the opposite way -- that youth is never wasted on the young."

A year ago, the award-season impetus for Daniel Day-Lewis began at Telluride, when in a similar tribute audiences saw early footage from the actor's Oscar-winning " There Will Be Blood." Fincher said there's no such intention behind screening the footage of "Benjamin Button."

"It's not about selling the movie -- it's a treat, an appetizer," he said. "It's not a positioning statement, it's not marketing. It's that in the last two years, we have been doing something like this, and, oh, that doesn't look like people trapped in their closet" -- a reference to his thriller "Panic Room," about a mother and daughter hiding from bad guys in a small room.

The British director Boyle landed in Telluride exhausted from racing to finish "Slumdog Millionaire" in London but also relieved that his film about an impoverished Indian teen was going to get the treatment it deserved.

"Slumdog Millionaire," which is populated with some nonprofessional actors and was filmed in Mumbai, stands among the very few movies acquired for American distribution in the last few years by Warner Independent Pictures, the specialized film unit of Warner Bros. But when Warner Bros. closed WIP earlier this year and had to accommodate several New Line movies into its fall schedule when New Line was folded, "Slumdog Millionaire's" prospects looked dim.

Warner Bros. contemplated several different options for the film, including a direct-to-video release or a sale to another distributor. As the studio sorted through the possibilities, invitations to both Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival stood unaccepted.

"When you hear that Warner Independent Pictures has closed down, you have to be concerned," said Boyle, the director of "28 Days Later," "Millions" and "Trainspotting," among other films. "I'm experienced enough now to know to keep calm, relax and don't panic. I knew it was a good film and that people would want to see it."

That proved to be the case. Fox Searchlight, which has distributed most of Boyle's movies, last week entered into a joint "Slumdog Millionaire" deal with Warner Bros. as the invites to Telluride and Toronto were welcomed. A last-minute addition to the Telluride schedule, "Slumdog Millionaire" had its first public screening Saturday night, and the response inside the sold-out theater could not have been much more enthusiastic. The film arrives in American theaters on Nov. 28.

"It's a very sophisticated audience here, and they don't mind subtitles. In fact, they even laughed at some of them," Boyle said the day after his film's first showing. "Festivals are the great originators of non-processed material. It's where the audience declares, 'This may not fit the strict definitions of what is a big film, but we like it.' It gives the film clout, and it's something the studios pay attention to."

"Slumlord Millionaire" concerns a fictional 18-year-old orphan who uses remembrances of his very difficult life to help answer questions in the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"

Given all that his film has been through, Boyle knows that he has been lucky. "The independent film world is clearly in a massive crisis," the director said. "We need some movies to work to get the faith back."

Confirmed: Paramount Feuds with David Fincher Over Benjamin Button
Source: Slash Film

Last week, I screened 20 minutes of clips of scenes from David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In our first impression article, I expressed my concern and disappointment over the footage shown, partly because I felt some of the short scenes dragged. Note: I haven't seen the entire film - I want to be clear on this..., I only screened 20 minutes of selected scenes. It was good but not great. I wasn't alone, FirstShowing and Jeff Wells also posted articles about the disappointing buzz the footage received at the festival.

In my blog posting, I told you about the rumors of Paramount's vicious fight with Fincher behind the scenes over the running time of the film. We also tried to connect the dots between the departure of Fincher's planned adaption of Heavy Metal and the rumored fight. Now The Playlist has found an interview with Kevin Eastman, creator of the Ninja Turtles and publisher of Heavy Metal, where he finally confirms the rumors:

"We developed it for Paramount in January... And it was time for them to make a decision [about going forward with the project] and they were at odds with Fincher over another project, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' [because] they wanted him to reduce the running time... and so they said, 'Until you step up to do what we want you to do with Benjamin, we're not going to greenlight any other of [your] movies.' And David said, 'Fine, fuck you, I'm going to set up [Heavy Metal] somewhere else,' so we jumped over to Sony and set it up there."

Yes, Fincher is a bad ass who won't take crap from anyone - including the studio who has supposedly spent over $150 million on a film aiming for award consideration. I've been told that this is his best and worst quality as a filmmaker.

But what if Paramount is right? I loved Fincher's Zodiac, but I think the theatrical cut could have benefited by losing 20-30 minutes on the back end. (Hey, there will always be a director's cut on DVD) It seems to me that Paramount might believe they are in the same situation with Button. It is worth noting that around the time of the Heavy Metal departure, the film was supposedly just under three hours long. An AICN reader saw a screening of that cut and admitted that "By an hour and a half/forty five, the audience was getting restless."

Anne Thompson's sources claim the film has since been cut to around two and a half hours, which probably meets with Fincher's studio obligations. But is that still too long? Another website reports that the latest cut is around two hours and fourty minutes. I havent seen the film, but the scenes Paramount and Fincher decided to screen at Telluride dragged in parts. I'm hoping the pacing issues will be resolved in the finished movie / in the context of the finished movie, because this film has the potential to be really magical.

trailer 2:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thecuriouscaseofbenjaminbutton/

i don't think i've seen an hd exclusive trailer before. the makeup effects seem kinda distracting but maybe it wears off after a bit... this trailer doesn't feel new. just a dialogue-filled version of the first one. still pretty damned excited.

God, this looks stunning. I remember years ago when Spike Jonze was supposed to make this with Cruise and I never understood how they could make it work without it being corny. Fincher has pulled it off, it seems.

A Curious Life, From Old Age to Cradle
By DAVE KEHR; New York Times

GROWING old is a subject American movies have largely avoided since the 1980s, when the commercial triumphs of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made it clear that there was money to be made in never-never land — that world of the adolescent imagination where no one ever matures and death exists only as a punch line. It surely means something that Leo McCarey's 1937 "Make Way for Tomorrow," the most deeply moving Hollywood film about old age, has never been released on DVD in the United States and has not been seen on television in many years.

A rehearsal for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," with from left, the film's screenwriter Eric Roth; Brad Pitt, who plays Benjamin; Cate Blanchett, who plays Daisy, Benjamin's great love; and the director David Fincher.
But suddenly and unaccountably, here is "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a big-budget studio film, set to open Christmas Day, whose central theme is human mortality, a theme the film explores using the same special effects technology, now extended into the digital realm, that American movies have used for so long to keep us trapped in perpetual childhood.

Directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, "Benjamin Button" tells the epic story of its title character, played by Brad Pitt. Benjamin, as he says in his voice-over narration, "was born under unusual circumstances" on Nov. 11, 1918, the last day of World War I. As the doctor attending him describes the strange little creature, "He has all the deterioration, the infirmities, not of a newborn, but of a man well in his 80s on the way to his grave."

But Benjamin doesn't die. Instead, abandoned by his wealthy father and taken in by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), an African-American attendant at a New Orleans home for the elderly, he begins to age in reverse. By 7, he looks like a little old man in a wheelchair, peering out at the world through thick glasses. Thanks to the film's deft use of computer-generated imagery — so deft and so sophisticated that, after a few minutes, it no longer seems remarkable — those eyes are recognizably those of Mr. Pitt, and they continue to be as Benjamin moves through all the stages of his life.

As a child in the body of a 70-year-old, Benjamin learns to play the piano and makes the acquaintance of the little girl, Daisy Fuller, who will be the love of his life; he seems to be in his 60s when, as a teenager, he goes to work for a tugboat captain (Jared Harris) and learns about drinking and sex; he's a young man in his 50s when he travels to Murmansk, Russia, and has his first great affair, with the world-weary wife (Tilda Swinton) of the British trade delegate; and he is a handsome 40-year-old when he meets Daisy again, now played by Cate Blanchett as an ambitious dancer in her 20s, all fired up by George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille. As he grows younger, she grows older: for a golden moment, they meet in the middle. But time, obstinately, does not stand still.

"Benjamin Button" is based on a 9,000-word short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in 1922, that had been a long-unrealized Hollywood project. When the producer Ray Stark owned the property in the 1980s, he commissioned a screenplay by Robin Swicord (she adapted the 1994 "Little Women") and took it to a number of directors, among them Mr. Spielberg and a young David Fincher, then working as a special-effects technician at Mr. Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic.

"I don't remember if Spielberg was involved, or about to be involved, or maybe he had already abandoned it at that point," said Mr. Fincher, 46. "It may have been a fact-finding mission to see if it were possible. I read it, and I thought it was beautiful, but ultimately I thought it was a love story with a capital L, and I was more interested in other things." Among those other things were, as it turned out, some of the most grimly intense films of the last decade: "Se7en" (1995), "Fight Club" (1999), "Panic Room" (2002) and "Zodiac" (2007).

"Benjamin Button" continued to make the rounds, but now as a screenplay essentially written from scratch by Eric Roth, an Oscar winner for the 1994 "Forrest Gump." More directors came and went — including Mr. Fincher's close friend Spike Jonze — before the project landed again on Mr. Fincher's desk, this time presented by the producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.

"Kathy and Frank wanted to know out of the gate if I thought it was technically feasible," Mr. Fincher said. "Was it possible to make somebody age, to make a character you could follow from the time he's four feet tall and 85 years old until the time he's 25 inches long and 6 months old and dying? And I said — not flippantly, but just because that's what I'd been taught in my early years of working at I.L.M. — I was, 'Oh, yeah, anything you can think of, you can do.' And we went on to talk about everything else that was important about this movie other than how we were going to accomplish it technically. There was one full hour and a half where we talked about first love and first kisses and first hangovers, and what it was going to be like to follow this person and how we were going to dramatize his plight in relation to all our plights."

With its historical sweep, wide-ranging locations and large cast of supporting players, it was clear that "Benjamin Button" would be expensive. More years passed, even as Paramount worked out a co-production deal with Warner Brothers and Mr. Pitt, who had worked with Mr. Fincher on "Se7en" and "Fight Club," entered the picture. What finally brought the budget within range — around $135 million — were the tax breaks offered by moving the production to New Orleans.

The screenplay, like the story, had been set in Baltimore. "But as soon as I erased 'BALTIMORE' and wrote 'NEW ORLEANS — EXTERIOR — DAY,' " Mr. Roth said, "it took on a whole other life. Because, even prior to the hurricane, New Orleans has such a life and a sound and a smell and everything else associated with it, that it brings a whole other character to the piece."

Mr. Roth's screenplay retained little of either the short story or Ms. Swicord's work. "All that's left is the central idea, maybe a name or two," he said. "Robin thought of calling the girl 'Daisy' as a tribute to Fitzgerald and 'The Great Gatsby.' The Queenie character was a slight semblance of the nanny he had in the short story. Fitzgerald had the father, but he also had the mother stay alive, which we don't."

Queenie became pivotal. "In the short story, Queenie was just a nanny," said Ms. Henson, who plays the role. "But when Eric Roth adapted the story into a screenplay, he made Queenie the surrogate mother. To me, that one moment where she tells Benjamin that people are going to judge you by the way you look sometimes, they're not quite going to know how to receive you — that's an African-American woman raising an African-American child; that's a conversation I've had with my son several times."

"That's actually my favorite, most endearing moment in the movie," she said.

Another major invention is the framing story, in which Daisy's daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), reads aloud from Benjamin's diary to her elderly mother, who is dying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina beats on the windows with growing intensity.

"I wanted to tell the story through somebody else's eyes," Mr. Roth, 63, said. "It might have had something to do with my mother lying in her hospital bed, although she was at home, wondering if there had been a story to tell that would have helped define her, something from her life that I might not have known about. I took a number of things from her passing, and the work continued through my father's passing.

"My father, I remember, when he was a little confused, said: 'Time has just slipped out of me. Someone will have to come and clean it up,' which was pretty great," Mr. Roth said. "But everyone has the same things happen, whether you like it or not. That's why I'm hoping the movie gives people permission to kind of grieve together, in a good way. We're living through the death of our parents and seeing our children get older and have their own lives and become adults. Yet I'm hoping that the movie will resonate with people who are younger, too, that it will speak somehow to a younger generation and let them see what aging is about, even though it may not be foremost on their minds."

And in "Benjamin Button," age is indeed visible, in ways it has never been before in a movie. "We put our faith in a higher power that we would be able to figure out the performance-capture methodology," Mr. Fincher said, referring to the need to create a character who was clearly identifiable as Mr. Pitt while allowing him to age artistically. Benjamin "lives on a boat and is a seaman for most of his life," Mr. Fincher said. "We had these photographs of Andrew Wyeth. We loved the wrinkles in his face and the great compassion and wisdom that his face betrayed. We started with that and did sculptures based on life casts of Brad. We would hollow away material, take mass away from his cheeks, get more skulling around the eyes, do very fine wrinkling, do all this and scan it into a computer."

When it came time for Mr. Pitt to record his dialogue, a scanner was used to capture his facial movements. The results of the scan were used to manipulate the 3-D database of his digitally aged face, generating an almost literal "talking head." "We would take that and put it back in the scene on the shoulders of actors who were cast to play Benjamin at the different ages," Mr. Fincher said. "All of this would go into a pipeline, and 15 months after that we would be able to look at little Benjamin and know what he would look like when he was 5 years old."

Mr. Roth, referring to Mr. Fincher's track record of gritty, often violent films, noted: "People say, 'Well, gee, how does David Fincher do this movie?' It's very different for him. But if someone is artistic, they can have all sorts of various interests, which is true of David Fincher."

Mr. Fincher, of course, has his own perspective, "When I read the Robin Swicord draft, I thought, this is a love story," he said. "But when I read the Eric Roth draft, I thought, this is a love story, but it's really about death, about the total frailty of humanity. He's a character whose entire childhood is defined by the people that die around him and by how comfortable he gets with that. Imagine that you're raised with a bunch of 85-year-olds. They're not sweating the same things teenagers are. And that's where he learns everything.

"I don't know if it's a departure. I think it is. But don't you hope that they all are, in some way? After my dad died and my daughter was born, I had other things, other movies that I wanted to make. It's not a special-effects movie, that's for sure. It ain't spaceships. It's not explosions. It's about people, hopefully."

Egyptian theater:

Wednesday, December 10 – 7:30 PM

Sneak Preview! David Fincher In-Person!

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, 2008, Paramount, 165 min. "I was born under unusual circumstances." And so begins this adaptation from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man (Brad Pitt) who is born in his eighties and ages backwards. A man, like any of us, but unable to stop time. We trace his story set in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918 into the 21st century, following his journey that is as unusual as any man's life can be. Directed by David Fincher, this is a time traveler's tale of the people (amongst them Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Elias Koteas) and places he bumps into along the way, the loves he loses and finds, the joys of life and the sadness of death...and what lasts beyond time. (Screened from a digital source.) Discussion following with director David Fincher.

'Button' undone by digital dilemma
Screening of Oscar hopeful goes awry
Source: Variety

"Welcome to digital," wrote producer Frank Marshall in a morning-after email following Thursday night's aborted unveiling of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Paramount had sweated every detail Thursday as the studio prepared to screen its long-anticipated Oscar hopeful to a hand-picked audience of press and prominent bizzers at the DGA Theater. Marshall and partner Kathy Kennedy were on hand to introduce the $150 million-plus pic, which they had been nurturing for 18 years.

Par execs were so eager to get the movie in front of guild and Academy members and key press that they weren't willing to wait another week for release prints. In any case, finicky director David Fincher preferred to showcase his technologically ambitious digital movie -- which deploys complex visual effects to make Brad Pitt age backward -- with a digital projector. The two trial runs during the day had gone smoothly.

But "Benjamin Button" became the latest Oscar-season victim of digital gremlins.

The picture had a peculiar green tint, and in the audience, d.p. Claudio Miranda got a sinking feeling. "Initially I thought there was something wrong with my eyes for a second. I was rubbing them," he told Daily Variety, "I said 'no way.' "

He dashed to the projection booth, and a few minutes later brought the lights up and stopped the screening. "We like green but not that much," he apologized to the packed house. "The movie's not supposed to look like that."

After several abortive attempts at addressing the absence of magenta, the screening was canceled. "On the right setting it was wrong and on the wrong setting it was right," explained Marshall, who apologized to various invitees gathered in the lobby for an impromptu party, helping themselves liberally to the planned post-show food and drink.

"When you shoot a movie digitally," Kennedy told Daily Variety later, "you're dependent on those projectors being calibrated perfectly and everything working perfectly. Even the condition of the screen is important."

Marshall added, "This is a modern-day version of the film breaking, but you can't paste it back together and keep going."

Across town at the ArcLight, another digital screening for Screen Actors Guild members went off without a hitch.

The chagrined publicists and filmmakers hastily scheduled a slew of screenings beginning Saturday at noon to accommodate those who missed the film Thursday.

Everyone pointed to the digital projection system, which Par rented for the occasion, as Thursday night's culprit.

Of course screening glitches are nothing new; broken film, busted projector bulbs and switched or missing reels have long plagued screenings. One publicist recalls with horror an unspooling of "Six Weeks" in which the second reel turned into a rabid killer dog movie. The 2006 Toronto Film Fest world premiere of "Borat" broke down and was canceled.

But pristine and perfect digital was supposed to solve all that.

An October digital screening at the Landmark of Steven Soderbergh's Spanish-language "Che" took cinema verite to a new level as it played without subtitles for 15 minutes before the lights went up and everyone was sent home. A few weeks later at the Wilshire Screening Room, subtitles from "Che" spilled over the opening minutes of "Doubt"; the problem was quickly fixed. A Miramax spokesman said the digital projector had not been "properly vetted" after the previous screening of "Che."

"Doubt" writer-helmer John Patrick Shanley laughed when told about the glitch, and recalled sitting through the entire premiere of "Joe vs. the Volcano" with the movie out of focus. "You just feel terrible," he said. "You work so hard and here are people getting their first exposure to the movie. Maybe their only exposure."

These recent problems raise questions about screening room hardware and projection-room expertise in operating new d-cinema projectors.

When Kennedy welcomed the Saturday noontime aud at the far grander Paramount Studio Theater, she quipped that it was like being "upgraded to first class." The pic proceeded with notably better color.

Afterward Kennedy and Miranda agreed that the Par venue was better for "Benjamin Button" anyway.

"Most cinemas are like this one," said Miranda. The digital projector "lives there. This one is flawless."

Aside from the DGA snafu, Par found one upside to digital screenings this season. At a Nov. 16 screening of "Revolutionary Road" at the Raleigh Pickford screening room, a woman became ill during the pic's final scene. When the audience yelled to turn on the lights, the projectionist halted the film, and an ambulance took the woman away.

After rewinding a few minutes, the movie resumed, so the audience could get the full impact of the climax. That would have been impractical with a film print.

International Trailer here. (http://wbads-46.vo.llnwd.net/e1/wbol/uk/movies/benjaminbutton/tccobb_0l0x62_tlrf4_qt_High.mov)

As awesome as this film looks, and as excited as I am about it... I'm kinda fed up of it already.

Get David Fincher rewrite! And a director!

A surprisingly clunky Q&A session took place last night after the screening of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Three times director David Fincher was asked what theme in the film attracted him to devote five years to making "Button" — twice by the moderator and once by an audience member.

"I dunno," Fincher replied. "I made the movie because I read the script and liked it. I don't have an answer to that question." The moderator tried to help Fincher along by rephrasing the question a bit, give him another chance to sound a bit more thoughtful and articulate, but Fincher shrugged off the inquiry with a similar cavalier reply.

Later, a timid gal in the audience, awestruck by the film, told Fincher how moved she was emotionally by its epic themes of shifting time and doomed romance and asked him if they were reasons he wanted to make "Benjamin Button." "No," he said. "I just liked the script."

Fincher didn't seem to care at all about what inspired the film, not even the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald short story upon which it was based. When asked about differences between the two versions, Fincher said he doesn't know and, basically, doesn't care. He confessed that he didn't bother reading the story until two years into making the movie version and now can't remember it.

Each time Fincher gave such startling replies, he giggled and shrugged his shoulders, as if the questions were utterly ridiculous. Afterward, in the lobby, you could hear lots of attendees express shock at how poorly he came off.

See, that's why he's a good director.  THEMES???  Fug dat shit.  HOW CLOSE THE FILM ADHERES TO THE SHORT STORY???  Double fug dat shit.  HOW HE COMES OFF AT A Q&A???  Triple fug dat shit!

This movie's gonna be great!

i really want a bootleg of that for his delivery. it's the only way to know if he was being genuine or a jerk.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fmoviesmedia.ign.com%2Fmovies%2Fimage%2Farticle%2F934%2F934015%2Fthe-curious-case-of-benjamin-button-20081126112758948_640w.jpg&hash=009360697c2e45161a2fa65cab306432e7cb0fc8)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fmoviesmedia.ign.com%2Fmovies%2Fimage%2Farticle%2F934%2F934015%2Fthe-curious-case-of-benjamin-button-20081126112754605_640w.jpg&hash=66a77f9fd0e233e29d871da5d09b42d2939395e7)

i saw this amazing tv spot for this with Arcade Fire "My Body Is A Cage" playing and i can't find it anywhere online!

Quote from: modage on December 01, 2008, 12:01:58 PM
i saw this amazing tv spot for this with Arcade Fire "My Body Is A Cage" playing and i can't find it anywhere online!

I saw it during Heroes tonight.

HERE MOD. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpZGV_m0twg&e)

Quote from: JG on December 04, 2008, 09:29:24 AM
HERE MOD. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpZGV_m0twg&e)

This was great and exactly how I imagined it when Mod mentioned it. Thanks.

WOW. that's exactly what the ad campaign for this needs. it's getting too predictable and mushy.

Went to the BAFTA screening last night at WB.

Movie was excellent, although there were some things in the film that were very un-fincher-esque. Not that they were bad, but it does show the guy can tell a whole different kind of story. I can't wait to see all of the special effects work that went into this on the DVD (or BLu-Ray). Only once in the opening framing device did something look terrible and stylistically just bomb IMO. A few times the sentimentality just went overboard, nothing to be worried about though.

Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood Elsewhere describes it as "Forrest Gump without all of the fat"...which is a pretty accurate description and while watching the film it's hard not to use the comparisson when it follows a similar structure and Benjamin is sort of an observer like Forrest Gump or Peter Sellers in Being There.

For what it's worth i'd give it a 8.5 to 9 out of 10.

The cool thing was Eric Roth, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy introduced the film. Eric Roth seemed like he hated life, probably just sick of introducing the film at free industry screenings maybe? Frank Marshall said to stick around for Fincher who would come and answer some questions after the screening.

After the film, our Scottish moderator announced Fincher came with some special guests: So out comes Fincher, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond, Jared Harris, Jayson Fleming and Taraji P. Henson.

I hate screenings like this because people usually ask fairly dumb obvious questions (How long did you shoot for? Was it hard to wear all that make-up?) to the dick measuring contest questions (So tell me, i noticed this type of film stock look you were going for although you shot on digital, blah blah fucking blah, was this serendipitous or a choice you made?)

Fincher, as claimed to be in his NYC screenings, wasn't so shitty as he was reported to be then. He gave in depth answers about certain things (actors, rehearsals etc.) but when asked about the SFX, he clammed up and just said  "Head shrinking and voodoo". A funny moment happened when someone asked (not the first time for this film I imagine) why he does so many takes. Fincher just sighs, puts his head down and snappily says "Well, I do a lot of takes because I'm going for something. Okay? People always bring this up and I have no idea why you care."

Brad Pitt was gracious and gave canned answers about the "company you keep" and how it's due to his co-stars and fincher his performance was good and so on. (He was still in Inglorious Bastards mode/look). He did tell one funny story about being at a table read and Fincher elbowing him and whispering "Look, (Eric) Roth's got a prose boner" and seeing Eric Roth sitting on the other side of Fincher with tears streaming down his face. Cate Blanchett was very gracious and had only seen the film the night before and seemed geniunely blown away by it still.

Taraji P. Henson, who was excellent in the film in a role that could have been too overly sentimental, gave great answers about how she researched the role by following her grandmother around for a month watching her mannerisms and what not. Julia Ormond looked like she had a stick up her ass about something.

Then to wrap up the Q&A they asked everyone what they were doing next...when it came to Brad Pitt..."*sigh*I'm doing a WWII movie in Berlin..." he sounded dejected...maybe he hates it now that he is involved with Tarantino or maybe he didnt want to come off as bragging? I don't know. Thought it was interesting.

When it came to Fincher; "I have nothing yet, but if this movie opens big, I will have something interesting"

Chef? Rendezvous With Rama?

Overall, I liked it very very much with some minor nit picky bullshit exceptions. Go pay to see it so Fincher can make something more interesting in the future. (No that this wasn't interesting)

man, i was disappointed. i can't remember the last time i was so into a movie for the first half only to be so let down by the end. right about when brad pitt starts getting handsome this thing begins to fall apart. i'm sure some of you will agree. dramatic moments just weren't hitting, people were laughing when they weren't suppose to. also, some of you complained about bale's batman voice, but blanchett's old person voice is the worst thing ever. i have no idea why they even needed flashbacks to tell this story.

i really wanted to like this :doh:

Quote from: JG on December 11, 2008, 11:57:19 AM
man, i was disappointed. i can't remember the last time i was so into a movie for the first half only to be so let down by the end. right about when brad pitt starts getting handsome this thing begins to fall apart. i'm sure some of you will agree. dramatic moments just weren't hitting, people were laughing when they weren't suppose to. also, some of you complained about bale's batman voice, but blanchett's old person voice is the worst thing ever. i have no idea why they even needed flashbacks to tell this story.

i really wanted to like this :doh:

Were you at the Egyptian?  Or do you live in NY and it played there?

I don't think the movie was very honest, but I think its intentions were.  I think that because Fincher came out after the movie and said he wanted to make a movie about life that you could connect to for at least a 43 minute chunk, one that reflected reality, and so I know he honestly wanted to reach the audience in a personal way.  He admitted it was stylized, the camera and the dialogue, and his 43 minute quote reveals that he knows what kind of film he made.  I thought Fincher was a great speaker by the way, and he was very candid, not at all like what the report earlier in this thread would lead you to think.  Other things he said:  it was like making 10 independent films back-to-back, he brought up the $140million budget repeatedly for some reason, even breaking it down to $240K a day, and he said he matured from two word film titles to six word film titles but his process is exactly the same and "come on, how many thrillers can you make?"

I'm talking more about Fincher than the film.  I probably liked Fincher more than I liked his film.  Everyone at my screening laughed appropriately.  There's perspective in the film, and the characters are developed in intriguing ways, so depending on how you feel about the film and read into the film you might really like it.  I kind of thought it was some Hollywood bullshit overall, with a few key moments that were so touching, and a few key moments that were so beautiful.  I won't see it again, but I'll cherish what it gave me.

For example I woke up this morning, and surprisingly one scene was in my thoughts.  It was a scene that I didn't even know I had liked until I woke up this morning sort of missing the moment like it was a moment from my past that I couldn't reenter.  But it was the film, and not many films can give you that feeling.

Filmmakers on the 'Curious Case'
Fincher, Roth talk about 'Benjamin Button'
Source: Variety

Initially troubled with issues of casting, special effects and location, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" took almost seven years to move from script to theaters.

Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story about a man who ages in reverse, the story demanded special effects but as screenwriter Eric Roth pointed out, "This isn't 'Jurassic Park.' It's a living, breathing character."

However, director David Fincher says he didn't question whether the film was feasible. "In the first five minutes of discussion of the film (with Roth), we dispensed with 'Could this be done,'" said Fincher. "With my background in special effects, I knew we could."

Casting Brad Pitt was something less of a sure thing.

"Brad has a process. It's like clockwork. He gets excited and about six weeks out you get the phone call: 'I'm the wrong guy for this,'" remembered Fincher. "His big caveat was: 'If I play the guy, I want to play the whole guy.' I thought it would be six or seven actors that would hand over the role like a relay. Brad said, 'I don't want to play seven years of a man's life. I want to play the whole thing."

Aging Pitt accordingly required subtle Hollywood wizardry to avoid looking hokey, especially when it came to have the 45-year-old actor revert to his teens.

"That's the biggest special effect of it all," Fincher said. "We have never seen (Pitt) as an 85-year-old, but we all saw 'Thelma and Louise.'"

ATTN: NYC

David Fincher on the Making of Benjamin Button
Sunday, January 4, 2009 at 7:30pm
Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of at Jazz at Lincoln Center

The filmmaker joins Kent Jones on stage to discuss his work, with a special emphasis on the technical processes behind the creation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

On Sunday, January 4 at 3pm there will be a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center.

http://www.jalc.org/concerts/details.asp?EventID=1869

"Benjamin Button" took decades to reach big screen

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – It's a pity that the best parts of life come at the beginning, the worst parts at the end.

That notion of Mark Twain's -- as related to F. Scott Fitzgerald by his editor, Maxwell Perkins -- was the genesis of Fitzgerald's 1922 short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and, in turn, the genesis of the acclaimed film that finally opens on Christmas Day after decades in development.

When Fitzgerald conceived his fantastical tale of a man who ages backward, it was a trifle, nothing that could compare to works like "The Great Gatsby" or "Tender is the Night." But the story generated interest almost immediately.

Fitzgerald was working as a screenwriter when "Button" was initially developed as a movie, but he never got to adapt it. That was left to his contemporary William Faulkner, who began a script while a contract writer at Warner Bros. in 1943. But Warners never obtained the rights, and when Faulkner asked the studio to acquire them, studio chief Jack Warner killed the project.

It would be four decades before "Button" came to life again thanks to Ray Stark, a former agent and studio executive who was one of Hollywood's most successful producers. Stark brought "Button" to Ron Howard, recalls his longtime collaborator Marykay Powell, believing that the director of "Splash" might be right for the project.

Howard agreed, and discussed such actors as John Travolta, Johnny Depp and Martin Short for the lead. He even did tests using Digital Domain for effects. But the projected budget was so high nobody wanted to make it.

"There was also the question of how many actors would be needed to play the (title) role," recalls Powell. "That was the key thing that kept it locked in development hell."

Howard left the project, but Stark kept going and convinced then-executive Josh Donen at Universal to finance a screenplay. Writer Robin Swicord ("Little Women") was hired to adapt.

"I decided to make it a story that would encompass a whole American life," she notes. "It would concentrate more or less on what it feels like to be the outsider. I also came up with the love story that's still at the core."

After some to-and-fro over rights, in February 1990 Swicord turned in her first draft. Over the following decade, she would do many more drafts.

The script eventually landed at Amblin Entertainment, where Steven Spielberg expressed interest, as did his then-executives Kathleen Kennedy and her husband Frank Marshall.

"Spielberg began to develop it," Swicord recalls, noting that the filmmaker considered Tom Cruise as the lead and even held a table reading at his home. But when Cruise dropped out and Spielberg went off to do "Hook" and "Jurassic Park" -- sparking a furious memo from Stark, demanding to know if Spielberg was going to do "that dinosaur picture" instead -- the project landed with Kennedy and Marshall, who never let go.

The pair took "Button" to Paramount when they made their first producing deal in 1992.

"(Kennedy) had a real passion," says Powell. "She kept it alive even when Ray couldn't do it any more."

Stark died in 2004, but Kennedy stayed with the movie. Along the way, other directors came and went like some of the characters in the picture itself -- from Agnieszka Holland ("Europa Europa") to Phil Alden Robinson ("Field of Dreams") to Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich").

Eventually, Swicord exited the movie over creative issues with Paramount. Other writers tried to tackle the story, including Oscar winners Charlie Kaufman ("Adaptation") and Jim Taylor ("Sideways"), but it was not until Eric Roth, the Oscar-winning writer of "Forrest Gump," reconceived the project that "Button" once again came back to life.

"My goal was to talk about the shape of a man's life, which has this odd distinction of going backward," he says. "How would that affect him? The conclusion was that it is about the quality of life one leads, going forward or backward."

It was Roth's script that hooked director David Fincher. Fincher had read Swicord's script in the early 1990s, but was not then at a point in his career where he could be considered for such an ambitious movie. By 2002, all that had changed. Even so, with movies like "Fight Club" to his name, Fincher seemed unlikely for a romantic love story.

"From my body of work I wasn't the most obvious choice," he admits.

But Fincher brought one crucially important element to the project: Where other directors had wanted to use several actors to play the lead at various ages, Fincher believed one could do it alone. The former visual effects artist showed Paramount how the story could work with one star and characters aged over decades using digital effects.

"They couldn't understand how we would accomplish the aging, so we did a test in about five weeks and we showed them," he remembers.

"When David Fincher came in and knew how to do this with the technology, that was really a breakthrough," Kennedy acknowledges. "When you are dealing with a story that's this emotional, it's very difficult to change actors."

Executives at Paramount still had issues -- the biggest of which was the projected budget, well over $150 million.

"When we priced out the whole movie," says Fincher, "it was too high."

For a while, Fincher exited the project, frustrated by budget restrictions. But he agreed to return when Brad Pitt signed on and wanted to reteam with his "Fight Club" and "Seven" director. Now, however, there was another hitch: Fincher had agreed to make "Zodiac" for Warners -- the very studio where "Button" was first mooted.

But when Warners and Paramount agreed to split the cost of both films -- and even agreed to shoot "Zodiac" first so that Pitt could make "Babel" -- it seemed as if the movie would finally get made. Paramount even stayed committed when studio chief Sherry Lansing was replaced by Brad Grey.

Both studios wanted to bring down the budget, then at $180 million. That meant considering a shoot in Louisiana, where they could benefit from a tax rebate worth just over $27 million.

"We had money issues," says Cean Chaffin, Fincher's longtime producing partner. "We discussed the rebate in Louisiana and, lucky for us, the location made the movie better." Pitt, she says, "was a big advocate of the switch (to Louisiana). All of us were."

And then disaster struck: Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana in August 2005.

"When Katrina hit, we wondered if we could continue to shoot in New Orleans," says Kennedy. "And the city officials called us two or three days after the hurricane and asked us to stay involved. They recognized they needed projects like 'Benjamin Button' to come into the city and create jobs."

Katrina woes inflated the budget by about $3 million, Chaffin says, but they pushed ahead.

Another hitch delayed shooting, when a production services company doing the complicated makeup effects went bankrupt, leaving some crew members owed back pay. But on November 6, 2006, the shoot at last got under way, and 148 days later, the images had been captured on a hard drive.

"This is a movie that had a real difficult time getting off the ground because it was expensive, it's a drama, it's about death," Fincher says. "It's one of those things where if it doesn't have a group of people behind it, and everybody down to the set decorators and Teamsters are enthusiastic about being part of it, it would not have been possible to make it."

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2008-12%2F44105794.jpg&hash=12b07a3fa7d9a2c40652d9d3efa43de61c5a61ae)

David Fincher's tale of the ages: 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'
The director of blood-spattered 'Se7en,' 'Zodiac' and 'Fight Club' takes a heart-rending turn in his latest film starring Brad Pitt.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Reporting from New York -- David Fincher's new film, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," opening Christmas Day, is in many respects an archetypal award-season movie: a decade-spanning tear-jerker filled with big stars and grand themes and sweeping emotions.

But for the 46-year-old Fincher -- the virtuoso auteur behind many of the most indelible serial-killer movies of the last dozen years (1995's "Se7en," last year's "Zodiac"), the fanboy favorite behind the head-banging ultraviolence of 1999's "Fight Club" and the mind-game paranoia of 1997's "The Game" and 2002's "Panic Room" -- it could reasonably be considered a departure.

"I think it was probably easy up until 'Zodiac' to say, 'That's a guy who's interested in those movies where people do horrible things to each other,' " Fincher said earlier this month, slumped on a sofa in the presidential suite of the Waldorf- Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. "But there's a much higher body count in this movie than in anything I've ever done."

Played by Brad Pitt, with the help of other actors' bodies and armies of makeup artists and CGI pros, the title character is born old and seems to grow younger as he ages. Abandoned at birth, an infant-sized octogenarian, Benjamin is raised in a New Orleans nursing home, surrounded by the frail and the dying. The specter of mortality remains even as he sheds his wrinkles and enters a robust middle age and a romance with his lifelong love, the bohemian dancer Daisy ( Cate Blanchett).

Benjamin is both a remarkable special effect and an all-purpose symbol: He may grow more youthful as he ages in reverse, but can't stall the passage of time. A tale of magical realism, a picaresque journey as strange as it is sentimental, the film is also a somber exploration of the most terrifying -- and in Hollywood, arguably the most taboo -- of subjects: aging and death.

With that angle in mind, Fincher said, he has settled on a line for those who insist on calling his new film an anomaly: "Isn't time the ultimate serial killer?"

Loosely based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Benjamin Button" has taken years to come to fruition. In the late '80s, producer Ray Stark commissioned a draft by screenwriter Robin Swicord, and for a while various directors, including Steven Spielberg, circled the project. It continued to change hands, and was resurrected in earnest a few years ago by producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, this time with a revised script by Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his "Forrest Gump" screenplay.

"It was mostly about expense," Fincher said of the project's long, on-off gestation period. (The film's budget is reportedly in the $150-million range.) "Technology has gotten cheaper. We started five years ago, and you could probably do the same amount of work for $3 million or $4 million less, with what we know now."

To create the movie's primary visual trick -- Benjamin's appearance at different ages -- Fincher cast several actors, and in most cases combined their bodies with Pitt's voice and digitally manipulated face using a motion-capture technique similar to the one Robert Zemeckis used in "Beowulf."

"I call it the Botoxing of the performance," Fincher said. "As high-resolution as it is, there's something that gets kind of dulled, something not so articulate in the lips. But when a guy's 85 years old, it's OK that he's a little soft."

Benjamin may be a state-of-the-art technical marvel but at the film's heart is Pitt's performance, a delicate feat of physiognomic control. "There are so many facial tics that make people who they are, especially movie stars," Fincher said, "and one of the things we found with Brad was it's the speed at which he does things, it's when he blinks, when he moves his eyes."

He was quick to praise Pitt, who, including "Se7en" and "Fight Club," has now starred in three of Fincher's seven features. "Some of my favorite shots in this movie have absolutely nothing to do with technology and everything to do with an actor's choices, like when Brad made these decisions that were odd and childlike, that Popeye face when he's walking for the first time," Fincher said. "It's ultimately those things that win you over."

He added, "Is Benjamin absolutely 100% believable in most shots? No, but there are a couple that I look at and go, 'Wow, we got really close.' It's just enough to get you to suspend your disbelief."

Fincher is known as a craftsman and tech-head, but he puts CGI wizardry in the service of illusion more than spectacle. "Zodiac," he said, made extensive use of digitized cityscapes in part because he couldn't get permission to shoot on the streets of San Francisco. "You don't want people to go, 'Wow, that's the most beautiful street corner in history,' you don't want to make it overly flowery," he said. "When people spend a lot of money on digital effects, I think they want it to count. I just want people to be absorbed in what's going on."

It's a lesson he learned early in his career, when he worked at Industrial Light & Magic in the early '80s and was struck by the difference between Spielberg movies and most other effects-heavy films of the period: "It wasn't just the degree of execution that made those effects, it was the way they supported the story around them. The setup is almost as important as the execution."

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," with its blank-slate hero and life-sized timeline, is among other things a curious experiment in viewer identification. "I like to think of the movie as truly experiential," Fincher said. "There's no back story. You live his back story; you're there for everything. For me it really is about living a life. He's an extraordinary man in extremely mundane circumstances. We all know the first kiss, the first hangover, the first love, the first time you get dumped. And you're intensely aware of every moment as the inverse of what you're seeing. He's not 70, he's 10; he's not 60, he just turned 20. And I hope people can chart that from an empathetic standpoint."

While "Benjamin Button" might be the only Fincher film to count as a weepie (though "Fight Club" is not without its poignant undercurrents), it shares an obsessive, control-freak quality with his other intricate entertainments.

Fincher's single-mindedness has earned him a reputation as a perfectionist taskmaster. "I've become obsessive because I think it's professional," he said. "If I'm going to take tens of millions of dollars from somebody, I'm going to try to make the best movie I can. And for the actors, I think the duty of the director is to make playing dress-up as effortless as you can. We're asking someone with a blue stretchy cap on their head to act like an 85-year-old man. So you help out as much as you can. The attention to detail, the obsessiveness that I'm saddled with -- it's me just doing my job."

'Benjamin Button' Director David Fincher Talks Brad Pitt, Fate Of 'Fight Club' Musical
The director also addresses comparisons to 'Forrest Gump' and how 'lucky' everyone was to be in a Cate Blanchett movie.
By Josh Horowitz; MTV

Witness the curious case of David Fincher — music video auteur turned embattled rookie helmer (his battles on "Alien3" are the stuff of legend). The director who blew our minds by putting Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box ("Seven"), convinced 20th Century Fox to make arguably the most subversive flick in the studio's history ("Fight Club") and, most recently, the guy who crafted the most absorbing procedural since the days of "All the President's Men": "Zodiac."

Is it possible that the man whose first three films ended with suicides (or apparent suicides) has now made the touchy-feely tearjerker of the season? You'll find out on Christmas Day when you queue up to watch Brad Pitt age backwards in the sweeping drama "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." (See exclusive photos of David Fincher on the set with Brad Pitt here.)

MTV News chatted with the usually reticent, media-shy director to talk about why he chose not to turn Brad Pitt into a baby, whether "Fight Club" will ever become a musical and why he's waiting for a phone call from Britney Spears.

MTV: "Benjamin Button" clearly is a big Oscar contender. Did the ceremony ever mean much to you growing up?

David Fincher: I liked the Oscars when I was a kid because it was the only chance to see clips of R-rated movies. My parents were not about to let me — with my fertile imagination and predisposition towards violence — see "The Godfather" or "The Exorcist." I love what it stands for, but it didn't seem as political back then.

MTV: It took a long time for this film to reach the screen and it very nearly was made by a host of talented filmmakers.

Fincher: I have no idea what Spike [Jonze] would have done with it. He tried to explain to me this incredibly intimate character piece that he was going to do for a relatively modest [budget]. I would have seen that movie.

MTV: One thing that struck me about the film is it really is just as much Daisy's [Cate Blanchett] story as Benjamin's.

Fincher: Yeah, I think so. I always say everyone was lucky enough to be in a Cate Blanchett movie. [He laughs.]

MTV: We finish the story with her because, after all, Brad Pitt can't play a baby at the end.

Fincher: We were prepared to do that.

MTV: You mean have Brad play the baby?

Fincher: We just ran out of money. We could have made him into a baby. Anything you want to do, you can do now.

MTV: You also use another actor to portray him as a boy near the end. Did you consider using Brad for that?

Fincher: I debated it a long time. I always felt that it was a coin toss. If we could get the money to do him as a 12-year-old, I would have done him as a 12-year-old.

MTV: Do the "Forrest Gump" comparisons bother you?

Fincher: "Forrest Gump"? What's that? Instead of the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, I thought of [Benjamin] as an extraordinary man in very ordinary circumstances. I don't know how much an audience can relate to a guy who's aging backwards that ends up looking like Brad Pitt. My whole thing from the beginning has been that it's not high concept. The reason it's relatable is how it's dramatized. Everybody remembers their first kiss and hangover and person they fell in love with.

MTV: You told me a year ago you wanted to bring "Fight Club" to Broadway as a musical.

Fincher: It would be great.

MTV: Do you think it will happen?

Fincher: It's too expensive. I really don't know. I've talked to [director] Julie Taymor and she sort of talked me down. I talked to [producer] Scott Rudin about it. I wanted to get him involved. He just laughed.

MTV: Did Trent Reznor ever write music for it?

Fincher: No. He's interested in it. He wanted to know more about what it was going to be. I saw it as being like a rock show — a lot of projection, a lot of computer-generated imagery, a lot of conveyor belts. It was really cinematic but really twisted.

MTV: Why haven't we ever seen you direct a superhero film? You must have been offered a few.

Fincher: I've been talked to about different things. They talked to me about "Spider-Man." Obviously they made the right choice there.

MTV: None got you excited?

Fincher: No. There's so little dialogue in comic-book movies that isn't about narrative, where you have to be next and how to get the talisman and why it has to be in a lead-lined box or whatever. I loved that stuff as an 8-year-old but I was pretty much over it by the time I was 11.

MTV: You came from music videos. Do you ever get calls from people like Britney Spears to direct their videos?

Fincher: I don't. My phone lies dust-covered.

MTV: Do you know what you're doing next?

Fincher: I've just spent five years pushing a rock up the Paramount mountain and I'm perfectly happy to do a short for an anthology and some television commercials. I'm just going to keep checking [to see] if Britney Spears calls.

Working with Fincher featurette:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thecuriouscaseofbenjaminbutton/

I have only been mildly excited to see this up 'til now but after watching Pitt's reaction shots in that clip at the end of the featurette, my excitement is now quite palpable.


*UPDATE* Just got back from seeing the flick and am sadly underwhelmed, I'm not entirely certain this will be on my top ten at all. Fincher really knocked it out of the park as far as the direction goes but the script just wasn't there. This is Forrest Gump (damn you Eric Roth) as directed by Fincher. It's the same "life is a journey, make it exciting" diatribe that has been said before and if they had a new and exciting way of broaching this topic I would be all for it, but this film felt very tired. The technology used to create the "young" Benjamin is astounding and I actually think all of the makeup should have been cg because when you had Pitt at midlife he looked less real than at the beginning when it was all digital. A minor annoyance is that the film only follows it's own logic when it deems it necessary for the plot. He's way too smart when he's seven but he worries about being scared of the dark at 80, even though his brain would still have his years of wisdom only his body would be tiny. This is one of those movies where if someone walks into a room and they call out for someone and that someone doesn't answer, you know that person is dead. It all just felt very by the numbers and there were scenes that I thought were brilliant and moving but they were too few and far between and often just involved a bit of silence or a stray image here or there, most of the dialogue was pretty shitty. I fully expected to cry and sadly didn't shed a single tear.

The hummingbird was just as on the nose and annoying, if not more so, as the rat in The Departed.

Oh and no more framing movies around someone recounting their life from their deathbed...in a hospital...during Hurricane Katrina! Shit is weak storytelling.

well first off, anyone who was way stoaked to see this a year ago but is now bummed after several "meh" reviews have rendered their anticipation null needs to relax. in fact, get your ass to your multiplex and see it pronto because it's good. brilliant even. this is a multi-cinegasm inducing film. fincher at his directorial best. beautifully photographed and acted. even if you refuse to check your cold inner cynic at the door, you'd be hard-pressed not to be moved or humored by some of many wonderful things this movie has to offer.

that all being said, there is something missing. i can't exactly articulate what. the script is always an easy scapegoat, but i don't necessarily blame it. the forrest gump comparisons, while justified, didn't bother me. the rottentomato "top critics" have their own theories. overblown. overlong. ridden with storytelling cliches. maybe these arguments hold water. but again, i can forgive a film for all that if it can hit that movie funny bone a few good times. but ultimately i found myself admiring more than loving.

The script is indeed rather tepid in parts, but still...it sure managed to make a sobbing mess out of me.

The Tilda Swinton section - and its eventualy payoff - was pure gold.

I agree that if anyone is still on the fence about Fincher being one of the greatest directors working today, this film should shove your silly ass right over. Technically this is a fucking marvel but it just felt hollow and I do blame it mostly on the script, but it was also lacking a certain spark that I suppose Fincher could have brought to it. It felt to me like he was really in love with the potential for the ideas of this movie more than the movie itself. Benjamin is a hollow character and I might say, not unlike Death in Meet Joe Black. It just doesn't make any sense why he has more personality and is more interesting at age 7 than at 37. Does anyone think they tried to have Pitt play the acne kid playing the piano and couldn't get it to look right? I knew they were going to switch before I saw the film but still it was jarring and really took me out of that scene and I don't think I ever really recovered. 

I felt like I was struck by lightning multiple times what this film did to me. I haven't cried this much since The Notebook. It is the most comprehensive film on death and life that I can remember in a long time. I felt all the characters, like they did with Benjamin, made such an impression that you couldn't help but feel their impact and weeped for them as they exited Benjamin's life. I don't think I need to describe what technical achievements Fincher utilized, because, while amazing to look at, the emotion is at the forefront here. I heard armchair reviewers as they were leaving saying, "it's too long," but I, like what I believe the film is trying to tell us about life, appreciated every moment of it. This, right now, is my Number 2 film of the year.

couldn't stop thinkin of damn lemony snicket while watchin this shit

edit: because of the general aesthetic of a lot of it

A total disappointment. The biggest problem with the film is despite its nearly 3 hour running time, you don't care or even know anything about any of the characters. There is so much narration bearing down on this film as it skips from scene to scene you are unable to feel anything for Benjamin or anyone else. If Benjamin is an observer of life, every supporting character in the film should be vivid and sympathetic but they're not. The special effects are amazing but I found myself wanting to see what happens next just to see what he looks like, not to see what happens in the story. When I heard PT was making a period piece or an Adam Sandler film I worried it would look like those films look and not like one of his, for this I gave Fincher the credit that a different genre of story and level of budget would not restrain his artistic indulgences, but unfortunately that was not the case.  This is not a movie I can see myself ever watching again. Life's too short.

http://www.joblo.com/video/joblo/player.php?video=fincherpitt-charlierose

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This was wonderful and the second movie this year that brought me to tears. Brads performance was terrific and the special effects and the makeup should get a oscar. I loved every minute but I'm cynical sentimentalist.

Quote from: cinemanarchist on December 25, 2008, 09:17:50 PM
Does anyone think they tried to have Pitt play the acne kid playing the piano and couldn't get it to look right?

yeah. and that kid looked too young for acne i thought. they should've went sans acne at least. worse than that though was applying Blanchett's voice to the little girl.

in truth, the script could've used more enthusiasm and less Gumpisms but because of what Fincher took off with, i bought into it right off the bat and i cared and felt every breath of every character met along the way. all the way up to baby Ben. Taraji & Tilda & Pitt were pretty amazing.

they stole my idea of illustrating chance & fate though. i hate when they do that.

Quote from: Pozer on January 03, 2009, 01:44:58 PM

they stole my idea of illustrating chance & fate though. i hate when they do that.

pretty sure Run Lola Run and Femme Fatale have already illustrated this point, among others I'm sure, and more gracefully than the scene in Benjamin Button.  In fact I thought that scene was completely fucked, since, suddenly, Benjamin relates his imagination as if it's fact, casting a cloud of doubt over the entirety of his story.   

i don't know about it being completely f-d. even though he is giving a play by play, it comes off as metaphoric more so than stated fact.

the CCBB montage was almost an exact replica of one i'd constructed save for mine being told in a straight forward matter and w/out narration and the dancer being a stripper and the taxi cab being a pickup truck and her fate being a blessing.

my scene was kinda completely f-d though.     

This movie was sadly a load of horseshit. Eric Roth should never pick up a fucking pen again, what a lazy writer. This was so just Forrest Gump rehashed I couldn't stand it. And maybe it could be forgiven if the character of Benjamin Button wasn't so damned unbelievably hollow and mundane. Fincher himself said it, an extraordinary man in mundane circumstances. No shit. There are so many missteps and I blame the script, which is not a scapegoat. But I also blame Fincher and co. for not having the clarity to edit the hell out of this bloated bastard. This is one my least favorite movies this year.

wtf?? this movie was baaaaadd :(

i have nothing more to say.

Fincher gives fans an earful
'Benjamin' director pays visit to Lincoln Center
Source: Variety

What about a sequel to "Se7en," David Fincher?

"I would be less interested in that than I would in having cigarettes put out in my eyes," the director confided to an inquisitive fan at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Curious Case of Benjamin Button" talkback.

Fincher kept up a steady stream of wisecracks at the Q&A with the Society's Associate Director of Programming, Kent Jones, as the topics ranged from movies that influenced him ("Days of Heaven") to what "Button" has in common with other Fincher films like "Zodiac" ("They're both about the passing of time," observed Jones. "Yes," Fincher said, "but this one has a higher body count").

Jones and some of the other audience questioners also prompted Fincher to talk about the movie's lengthy gestation. "Any time anyone says, 'Can it be done?' the answer is, 'Pretty much, yeah,'" Fincher opined. The trouble, he explained, was that in trying to create the reverse aging effects in "Button" -- processes the filmmakers had to invent for the movie -- "we made $3.5 million worth of mistakes. When you've got it figured out, you can send out for the stuff like pizza."

The Q & A was intercut with DVD extra-type shorts that delineated the process a little more clearly. During one segment, animators took footage of Pitt's face, subtracted weight from it until his jowls sagged, thinned his hair, and used it to replace the head of actor Peter Donald Badalamenti, a little person who plays Pitt's character early in his life (when he appears very old). "So you see," said Fincher when he returned, "you just do that!"

The movie also had an enormous script that had to be cut by 40 pages "before we came in looking like lunatics." Fincher characterized the back and forth: "'That's a phone book.' 'No, it's the movie we want to make!'"

Ultimately, the troubled production also had to change from its original Baltimore location to New Orleans, a switch Fincher said he resisted initially but found fascinating once he got to Louisiana. "We got a different kind of extra there. Nobody had Nose #8, like you get in LA. When we were shooting the newsroom scenes in'Zodiac,' I remember turning to the first assistant director and saying, 'All the women who work here are stacked.' There weren't that many breast implants in all of California in 1969!"

Even though Jones noted the same meticulous sensibility that informed "Zodiac" and "Fight Club" to "Benjamin Button," the new film, Fincher acknowledged, was a departure, and he was glad to be making it. "I keep trying to get out from under my own shadow," he said. "I don't want to do the same shit over and over." Not even for, say, "Ei8ht."

It could have been perfect.

I can appreciate it for it's technical marvel, but it really laid the saccharine on too thick. You're supposed to care about these characters on your own, not because they're being forced down your throat. The parallels between this and Forrest Gump are nauseating. The different characters coming and going through Benjamin's life and leaving an impression. Happened in Forrest Gump. Then the stupid hummingbird metaphor bullshit was the exact same as that feather crap in Forrest Gump. It makes you roll your eyes.

David Fincher is an amazing visual filmmaker, but he's just not a creative filmmaker. His strength lies in putting pretty pictures on the screen and in this film it almost feels like he doesn't give a shit about the story. It's like he's content letting a professional screenwriter like Eric Roth worry about that stuff. It's really been the same thing throughout his whole career. His movies have never lacked visual flare, but the stories always leave something to be desired. But what he's good at, he's really fucking good at. Although the movie is almost 3 hours long, I never found myself checking my watch and that's because I was never bored of looking at the screen. It's a beautiful fucking movie. Maybe one of the prettiest I've ever seen. It's just way too sappy for it's own good. I almost feel like a big budget works against filmmakers like Fincher. Why be creative and try to figure out a way to make your idea happen when you can just throw money at it and problem solved?

I also hated how Benjamin is almost an idiot savant. I understood it through the beginning, but by the time he reached his forties, he should have been a completely different person, but he was still the wide eyed child fascinated by the world. By the time he's in his 60's, but looking like he's 20, he should have been more than a simple blank stare with the life he's lived. Nitpicking really.

I thought the acting was really great, but even that wasn't enough to elevate this film past the melodramatic bullshit that the script gave them. I've always been on the fence with Pitt. I don't know whether to take him seriously as an actor, or come to terms with the fact that he's the male counterpart to someone like Jessica Biel. After this film, I'm certainly going with the former. I thought he did an excellent job with what he was given. There really wasn't a weak link here. Even Julia Ormond who I hadn't heard from in 10 years was solid. Cate Blanchett is absolutely gorgeous in this.

My problems with this film rests solely on the script. The golden rule to not fucking this film up should have been, "Don't overdo it with the melodramatic bullshit" but Eric Roth did the exact opposite. Maybe in that meeting he wasn't paying attention because he was too busy smelling a flower and he heard it as "lay that shit on as thick as you can!" Whatever it was, he really shouldn't be allowed near anything that isn't going to be aired on the Hallmark channel.

I'll buy it on Blu-Ray to look at, but I am VERY disappointed. I was looking forward to this idea since Spike Jonze and Tom Cruise were attached. The most frustrating part is that it has EVERYTHING else going for it, but that script is just too fucking corny. The early trailers and ad campaign was awesome and I blame that for getting my hopes up so much. Seeing the first trailer for the first time was on par with seeing the Magnolia trailer for the first time for me. That's how big of an impression it left. It just couldn't come together because of that dickhead Eric Roth.

I'll give the script a 1.3/10 and the rest an 8.9/10 for an overall score of something like, um, 4.3/10.

Fuck you Eric Roth.

Has he explained at any of these q and a's or articles why he went with a Katrina throughline?

New Orleans was cheaper than Baltimore.  he liked the image at the end of a hummingbird facing 100+mph winds.

Quote from: modage on January 06, 2009, 02:11:03 PM
he liked the image at the end of a hummingbird facing 100+mph winds.

Fuck You David Fincher

Quote from: Gamblour. on January 06, 2009, 01:49:20 PM
Has he explained at any of these q and a's or articles why he went with a Katrina throughline?

Quote from: MacGuffin on December 20, 2008, 11:11:27 AMBoth studios wanted to bring down the budget, then at $180 million. That meant considering a shoot in Louisiana, where they could benefit from a tax rebate worth just over $27 million.

"We had money issues," says Cean Chaffin, Fincher's longtime producing partner. "We discussed the rebate in Louisiana and, lucky for us, the location made the movie better." Pitt, she says, "was a big advocate of the switch (to Louisiana). All of us were."

And then disaster struck: Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana in August 2005.

"When Katrina hit, we wondered if we could continue to shoot in New Orleans," says Kennedy. "And the city officials called us two or three days after the hurricane and asked us to stay involved. They recognized they needed projects like 'Benjamin Button' to come into the city and create jobs."

Katrina woes inflated the budget by about $3 million, Chaffin says, but they pushed ahead.

Thanks for that guys. The hummingbird anecdote is just more proof that this movie was dumb dumb dumb.

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 :yabbse-thumbup:

Quote from: Stefen on January 16, 2009, 11:45:56 AM
:yabbse-thumbup:

totally. where was that 2 months ago..

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/1d76506803/the-curious-case-of-forrest-gump-from-fgump44

wow, that was amazing.

Italian writer raises case against "Button"

(Hollywood Reporter) – "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" got a little stranger Friday after an attorney representing an Italian office worker filed legal papers alleging that the screenplay was based on a story she wrote in 1994.

The David Fincher film, nominated for 13 Oscars, features Brad Pitt in the role of Benjamin Button, a man who ages backward. It was inspired by -- but not based on -- a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Adriana Pichini, a Roman office worker, said the film seems to be based on a story she wrote 15 years ago called "Il ritorno di Arthur all'innocenza" (Arthur's Return to Innocence). The story was officially registered with the proper Italian copyright authorities in 1994 and even sent to publishers in the U.S., but was never published.

According to Gianni Massaro, Pichini's lawyer, a file was opened with the Rome Tribunal Court, which means a judge will watch the film and read the story. If the judge determines there are enough similarities to warrant an investigation, the court will launch one.

Massaro, a fixture in the Italian cinema industry and a former president of the Italian audiovisual association ANICA, said in an interview that he is not sure if Pichini will seek financial damages against Fincher, screenwriter Eric Roth and the film's producers.

"At this point it's still a matter of principle," Massaro said. "What happens next will depend on what the judge rules."

It is not clear what authority an Italian court would have in this case, though Massaro noted that the film's producers, Hollywood studios Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, both have Italian operations.

No timetable has been set for the judge's viewing. The rest of Italy will be able to see the film when it goes into nationwide release February 13.

I haven't read the short story this is based on, but it sounds way more intriguing and complete than what I saw in the film. None of the characters made a particular impression on me, they all seemed to be there just to help Benjamin out, which became really boring after a while. The romance was just there, forced. And of course the main character was so exasperating in his passiveness, he just didn't seem to learn anything at all, or react to anything at all. He just didn't seemed to suffer for no one.

Forrest Gump was at least much more fun than this. I thought Fincher would go the dark humor way and use this story not to be a tear jerker but some sort of meditation on mortality. But this has the "message" of a congratulations card. Extreme let down. And it's long.

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David Fincher
Onstage at the BFI Southbank, David Fincher tells Mark Salisbury about the technical challenges of making his Oscar-nominated romance The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, why he still hates his debut feature and makes it clear he is not responsible for torture porn
Source: guardian.co.uk

Mark Salisbury: David Fincher, let's start at the end, as Button does, and talk about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It's kind of a departure for you, in that it's a love story, but with an unhappy ending.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Release: 2008 Cert (UK): 12A Runtime: 165 mins Directors: David Fincher Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond, Tilda Swinton More on this film David Fincher: Yes, everybody dies.

MS: This project has been around for a long time. You read it 16 years ago?

DF: Yeah, I read the first draft that was deemed unfilmable. And over the years, I heard about who had it and who was going to try next. I read Eric Roth's draft in 2001/2002.

MS: So what was it about this draft that sucked you in?

DF: I just thought the final image of a 74-year-old woman holding a seven-month-old baby and helping him through death, I just thought it was a beautiful way to end a love story.

MS: We have to talk about how you created this amazing character, Benjamin Button, with CGI and Brad [Pitt]'s head on other people's bodies. Let's not forget that it wouldn't have worked if Brad wasn't fantastic, and he is fantastic in this film. But technically, it's astonishing. So can you talk a little bit about that process, please?

DF: Well, the technique of using someone else's head has been around for many years – they use it in stunts, to have people jumping over burning buildings on motorcycles and stuff. So they'd lop off the heads and put the actor's head on the body. Initially, in discussions with Brad, he said that he didn't want to play seven or 15 years in somebody's life, that he wasn't interested in organising that kind of a hand-off. But if we wanted him to play the whole of somebody's life, that was something that would interest him. Now, we knew that Benjamin needed to be four feet tall and 85 years old. There was also the question, not just of the character's stature as he's learning to stand and get out of a wheelchair and walk on two crutches and then with a cane; but there was also the makeup issue. Silicone appliances – probably 80% of ageing in the movies are silicone appliances – but they can only do certain kinds of things to their faces. For instance, one classic example of old-age makeup is that they build out the cheekbones and build out the brow in order to make the eyes look sunken, because as you get older you lose fat tissue in your face and so your eyes recede. It's called "skulling". And people get gaunter as they get older, and we couldn't do that with traditional makeup techniques. And we certainly couldn't do that on a four-foot-tall body. So what we decided to do was cast actors to play Benjamin at different heights, and got them to wear blue socks on their heads and lopped their heads off and put Brad's head on them, which is easier than it sounds. We needed to have a workflow or factory assembly-line way to do that, because we had 350 shots that we had to do. So by using a lot of different techniques available from videogames and animation, we were able to figure out a way that Brad could perform the face, and we could capture his eyes and how his mouth moved, expressly frame for frame, and then puppeteer a sculpture that we could scan into a computer, a virtual version of his head, so that we could take masks away from his face and he could "puppet" himself. And that's what we ended up doing.

MS: And you got all the Brad stuff done after you shot all the other actors?

DF: Yeah. The actors in New Orleans – we called them the Smurfs because they had blue socks on their heads – they could act out the scene and people could touch them and they could interact and move around. Then later, when we decided which pieces we wanted to use, Brad came in to perform. It's like the looping stage, but instead of just the voice, he would do all the expressions, and we'd take those bits of digital information of his face and use that imagery to push the pixels of him as an 85-year-old.

MS: Let's talk a little bit about how you came to be a film-maker. You were born in Denver, Colorado, but moved to Marin County when you were two, and you lived down the street from George Lucas. As a kid you were quite artistic: you took photographs, you drew, you conned your parents into giving you a movie camera rather than a gun, so was there a eureka moment, when you realised that you wanted to direct?

DF: It was pretty clear. The eureka moment was when I saw a behind-the-scenes making-of about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was kind of a shabby EPK that had been cobbled together, but it was narrated by the director, George Roy Hill. And it was the first time I'd ever conceived that films didn't happen in real time. I was about seven years old, and I thought, "What a cool job." You get to go on location, have trained horses and blow up trains and hang out with Katharine Ross. [audience laughs] That seemed like a pretty good gig. So that was pretty much it for me. And the guy down the street was making American Graffiti and then Star Wars. I lived in Marin County at a time when they made The Godfather at the Marin Art & Garden Centre, and THX 1138 was shot at the Marin Civic Centre, and The Candidate. Michael Ritchie was making films, Phil Kaufman made Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There were a lot of people doing this; it was just everywhere. Everybody on my block wanted to be a movie-maker.

MS: And how many did? Just you?

DF: A lot of friends of mine work in animation and design websites and, for the most part, they're all kind of in the movie business, tangentially.

MS: But you didn't go to film school like a lot of your contemporaries. You chose to work in the business: you worked at ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] for three years, for example. Why did you choose to work inside rather than be a student?

DF: It was a great gig, and it was a great time to get a job working in special effects, because you could make a real living and it seemed like a better thing than spending $35,000 a year going to film school. And the other thing was, the only film school that I was interested in, because I wasn't very bright, was USC, and every film that you make, they own. So I thought, "I don't know if I want to pay them to own my movies." [audience laughs] That doesn't make sense to me.

MS: So you worked on Return of the Jedi, but nothing to do with the Ewoks, I hope.

DF: I did, but I actually worked on the tanks that tried to kill the Ewoks. That was my personal contribution. [audience laughs]

MS: For that we applaud you. And then you started to make pop videos, just when pop videos were being taken seriously.

DF: Were pop videos ever taken seriously?

MS: Well, more than they are now. People don't watch them now.

DF: OK, yeah, for good reason. It's interesting, I just grew up in a really interesting and bizarre place in a bizarre time. There was a real nexus of things. From third grade, I was making movies in 16mm, and every year, in film class – and everybody took film – they'd give you a song, a 45 and they'd say, "Make a film to this song," because there was no sync sound. So you'd go out and shoot stuff with your friends, and you'd cut it and it was made to that song. So when MTV came along, people went, "We want you to make a film to this song," and I thought, "I actually know how to do that. That may actually be the only thing I do know how to do." That was a good gig for me.

MS: So did you treat them as a film school?

DF: Yeah. I hate to say this because I took millions of dollars from people to do these things. But the day that they started to put your name on it was a horrible day for me. I just thought it was so cool that you could try out this stuff and no one would ever ... you know, they'd blame it on Michael Jackson. [audience laughs]

MS: But movies were always the goal, when you were making videos like Express Yourself, that Metropolis thing.

DF: Yeah, we thought that was good fun. I don't know, she came up with that idea. She was like, "I wanna do Metropolis," and I thought, it's her million bucks.

MS: At what point did Hollywood notice you? Was there one video that put you on their radar?

DF: No. You know, Hollywood always pretends not to notice you. I don't know. In a weird way, you have to be in LA long enough before anybody will realise that you're serious about it. The last thing they want to do is enable people who aren't going to be dedicated to their cause. I'd been making videos for 10 years, and this sounds stupid but I'd been there for six or seven years and felt like I had been there forever. I mean, I moved there in 1984 and started Propaganda Films in 1987, so I'd been doing commercials and videos for eight or 10 years before anybody gave me a shot at making a movie. And I wish they hadn't.

MS: The film we can't mention.

DF: Yeah, let's not.

MS: But there's this fantastic quote that I found, where you said of Alien 3 that "a lot of people hated Alien 3, but no one hated it more than I did."

DF: I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.

MS: At the risk of opening old wounds, what did you take from that experience that has subsequently helped you in your Hollywood career?

DF: It was a baptism by fire. I was very naive. For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid. [audience laughs] So I learned on this movie that nobody really knows, so therefore no one has to care, so it's always going to be your fault. I'd always thought, "Well, surely you don't want to have the Twentieth Century Fox logo over a shitty movie." And they were like, "Well, as long as it opens." So I learned then just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise. On that movie, I was the guy who was constantly the voice of "We need to do this better, we need to do this, this doesn't make sense". And pretty soon, it was like in Peanuts: WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP! They'd go, "He's doing that again, he's frothing at the mouth, he seems so passionate." They didn't care.

MS: Have you grown to like it since then, Alien 3?

DF: God, no! [audience laughs] But I don't look at anything after it's done.

MS: So that alternate cut on the DVD special edition whatever it is – that's not yours?

DF: I don't know who did it, I've never seen it, I can't comment on it.

MS: So after that experience, you went back to making videos. Did you think that was it as far as features were concerned?

DF: No. The great news about Hollywood is that there is no better place to fail upward. I figured that there were people who had made worse films than I had and they were still working, so I figured I'd get one more shot. So finally, I got a script by a guy who was kind of in my world, and thinking about films the same way I was, and revered the same kinds of movie that I revered – Andy Walker, who had written a script called Seven. He couldn't get it made and had rewritten it 13 times in order to make it more "likeable". [audience laughs] So this script was floating around and my agent, who's very sweet and always very hopeful, said, "You know, New Line is interested in this. You might like this, and they might want to make it with you, so maybe you should read it." So I read it, and got to the end, with the head in the box, and I called him and said, "This is fantastic, this is so great because I had thought it was a police procedural; now it's this meditation on evil and how evil gets on you and you can't get it off." And he said, "What are you talking about?" And I talked about the whole head-in-the-box thing, she's been dead for hours and there's no bullshit chase across town and the guy driving on sidewalks to get to the woman, who's drawing a bath while the serial killer sneaks in the back window. And he goes, "Oh, they sent you the wrong draft." [audience laughs] And he sent me the right draft, and there was a guy driving across town on sidewalks, serial killer sneaking in the back window. And I said that I wasn't interested in doing that. So I went and met with Mike De Luca, who was ostensibly at the time running New Line, and I said that I really liked the first draft, not the 13th draft. And he said, "Me too." So I asked what he was going to do, and I was laying out what I wanted to do on it. And he said, "Close the door." And then he said, "If we develop this and get into a dialogue about changes that could possibly be made to this material, there's no way that we could make this version of it, because I'll have 15 people looking over my shoulder who are going to be reading these pages as they come in. But if you say that you'll make this movie, starting in six weeks, we can make this version of the movie." So I said, "OK, let's go do it. Put the head in a box." And that's how the movie got made.

MS: And the look of the film is one of many things that's so fantastic about it – the decaying dark. Apparently, New Line wasn't happy with how dark it was, initially.

DF: I liked it, I thought it worked well; it could have been a little darker for me. But I just don't like it in movies, when people are wandering around with flashlights, that you can see everything behind them, when they're saying, "Oh my God, I can't see two feet in front of my face without this." With that stuff, I just want to shoot myself. So, for instance, I like this sequence in Klute where Donald Sutherland goes after a sound and he's chasing somebody who may or may not be on the roof, and he runs upstairs, and the whole thing's lit with a flashlight. And you look at that and you know that's what it's like to be running around with just a flashlight, because there are times when you just can't see anything. I like that kind of movie.

MS: Did the Saw guys give you any money for completely ripping that film off?

DF: Haven't seen it. Look, people come up to me and say, "You started torture porn." And I say, "Fuck you." I actually think we were fairly responsible about the notions of the violence. I thought what was amazing about what Andy prescribed in his script and what he was so adamant about was that you don't need to see stuff. He unlocks the Pandora's box of your imagination, in a really gripping way. Now, you watch Law & Order SVU, and they're walking in the hallways and they say, "We found semen in the eye socket." [audience laughs] I would never do that. But we had a lot of people insisting they'd seen more than they did. I almost had a fist-fight with a woman at a Beverly Hills cocktail party because she said, "There is no need to make a stand in of Gwyneth Paltrow's head to find in the box. You don't need to see that." And I said, "Well, we didn't." And she said, "Oh yes, you did." [audience laughs] So, the imagination, if properly primed, can do more than any army of makeup artists. That was always my thing: get people to fear it, get them to see it in their heads.

MS: Talking of fist-fights, we're going to skip The Game, which I think is a fantastic film, and talk about Fight Club. Clearly you were reticent to go back to Fox after your Alien 3 experience, but they supported your thing.

DF: But they were all fired, that's the beauty of it. [audience laughs] Every time somebody comes and says, "You've gotta scratch our backs," I say, "Why? You're not going to have this job in 11 months. I wanna talk to your assistant." [audience laughs]

MS: So all the assistants helped you make one of the most amazing, daring studio films of all time.

DF: No, they knew what they were doing. Look, I'm not sure Rupert Murdoch read the script or the book that the film was based on, but Bill Mechanic and Laura Ziskin, when we started talking about it, we were talking about this naughty little poke-in-the-eye cult book. I'd tried to buy the book when it was out before Fox bought it. And really, it's not Fox, it's Fox 2000; you know, when all the major studios were trying to act like they were indie too, this was Fox's indie wing, and they were trying to buy this nasty little book. If you've never read the book, it's as good as it gets – I nearly pissed myself, I was laughing so hard when I read it. The guy who became my agent, Josh Donen, who was trying to buy the book with me, had told me to read it. I was like, "I don't read books, and I'm in the middle of postproduction on the game," but he said, "You have to read it tonight." So I did, and I called him back and said, "We gotta buy this." And he said, "You waited too long. Fox bought it. But go in and meet with Laura Ziskin." So I did and I told her, "I don't want to make the $3m version of this; I want to crash planes, I want to blow up buildings and I want to do the thing that Hollywood really shouldn't do, material like this." She said, "Great!" and we agreed on this development process that I still hold true to to this day. You can't hold the hands of the people who are going to pay for this stuff and do anything marginally outrageous. You have to enter into a deal with them where you say, "We'll work with a writer that you bless, and we will go away. And when we're done and I'm ready to arm wrestle about the content of what that thing is, we'll bring it back and show it to you." She said, "Well, when will you be done?" And I said, "I don't know. It may take a year, it may take three, I don't know." So we hired Jim Uhls, who went off and wrote a draft of the screenplay that didn't have any voiceover in it. I read it and said, "This is sad and pathetic. It's just sorrow and people being horrible. Where's all the stuff where he talks about what he's thinking?" And he said, "Oh, that's kind of a crutch." And I said, "No, man, that's our only chance at being sarcastic and satirical." So he went back and put all that in. Then we came back to Laura, and we laid the script on the table, with a budget, schedule and cast, and said, "$67m, it's Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, and hopefully Helena Bonham Carter, and an 89-day shoot. You have 72 hours – let us know if you're in." And she went and scrambled Bill Mechanic and they came over, we walked them through the storyboards for the entire movie, showed them the whole thing, and they said, "Go do it." You can't make a movie like that, with that number, against the will of a studio. That's kind of what I tried to do on Alien. But if you can get them to buy off on what it is, you can move an inch towards those things that will hopefully make them immortal.

MS: So you made it, and it came out, and it polarised people.

DF: Polarised – that's a very polite way of putting it. We opened at the Venice film festival, and I think to say that they hated it would be an understatement. Let's put it this way: the youngest person in the screening was Giorgio Armani. [audience laughs] They called for our hides, and we split town. We thought it was funny. Actually, Helena Bonham Carter's mother was three seats down from me and she was just laughing and laughing – she was the only one. [audience laughs] She's cool.

MS: Then it came out on DVD and everybody loved it. Did you feel vindicated that it's become a cult movie, although it's too big to be a cult movie now.

DF: No, it's a cult movie – it's just a big cult. [audience laughs] It's funny. There's a tricky thing: if you spend $15m, it's not even a pimple on the ass of that kind of multinational media conglomerate. But if you spend $67m, they gotta release your movie. That's a big number, they can't write it down. But by the same token, you get people who go, "So it's about fighting." And they went out and sold ads for this movie on World Wrestling Federation. [audience laughs] I said, "You know, the crowd who go to the WWF are going to be made a little uncomfortable. Certainly the opening weekend, they're going to be like, 'Dude, that was gay.'" [audience laughs] So we had this tremendous word of mouth that didn't work for us, and the movie just went into the toilet and no one ever saw it. It was sold to the wrong group. You can make movies for a select audience, but you have to market it to them. The spots that were running, were running on shows that the people who were gonna get this never watched.

MS: A boring, kind of geeky question. Sound is always amazing in your films. I think you've said that you have a psychotic attention to detail when it comes to sound.

DF: Well, I think it's half the experience. When you take $12 or however much it costs to go to a movie here, and you're going to require their attention for two hours, and you're responsible for everything they're going to see and hear, it seems to me it's an opportunity to use those 15 speakers to either do something intentional or do something accidental. I'd just rather do the intentional. I work with a guy called Ren Klyce, who's worked on all my movies since Seven, and who I trust implicitly. He's just responsible for the sound. He helps choose the composer, helps spot the music and where it goes, and he works with all the source cues. On Panic Room, for instance, which is an interesting movie – maybe not from an audience's standpoint – but from a technical standpoint: you have an entire movie taking place in one space. To have that space evolve in some kind of way over the course of two hours, part of the thing he did was ... he would record all the foley, all the footsteps, all the doorknob turns, all the hard effects of everything, in the actual set that we were shooting in at the weekends. So we would shoot, and then he would come in on Saturday and Sunday and he would open the windows and shut them, jiggle the glass. He's insane about this, but it sounds so much better than the fake stuff. It's all just a lot of work. If you want to work really hard, stuff can sound good.

MS: So now we're going to throw it open to you in the audience.

Q1: Just a question on Button. Given that it's been kicking around for so long, and has been deemed unfilmable, where do you find the belief to say, "I'm going to make that movie, and I'm going to make it a success"?

DF: I didn't say the second part. I think Terry Gilliam looked at it earlier. There are just so many layers of complexity in terms of the period, the evolution of the background, that once you give up the idea of five or six people playing this one person, and you can kind of focus on one actor – that's what made it work for me. I know Brad will be able to describe this arc, he'll be able to figure this guy out, and I just have to create a world for him to do that in. The first time I read it, when I read Robin [Swicord]'s first draft of it in 1991-92, I think I was thinking of it then in terms of five or six actors, and it made my head hurt.

Q2: You always get an amazing performance from your actors – from Robert Downey Jr to Morgan Freeman, Edward Norton. Do you just let them run with it?

DF: Can I just point out that you said, "You get such great performances from Robert Downey Jr, Morgan Freeman, Edward Norton." I think you answered the question. Cast really good people, find a way to get really good people in your movie and take credit for it. [audience laughs] For eternity.

Q3: This is your second film where you use a digital camera, after Zodiac. Do you plan to do the same for your next films, and why?

DF: It's not the camera. There are certain things that digital doesn't do well – but it's more about the workflow to me. It's about the way that I'm able to make my movie. I like the idea that the first three takes, you're just rehearsing. I like the fact that actors never have to stop in the middle and watch somebody take $1,000 worth of film out the top of a camera and put another $1,000 worth in. I like the fact that there's no guilt, you can just delete stuff. If something's not worth the time that it took for everyone to say it, you can just go beep and it's gone. So I like the plastic nature of how I'm able to work in digital. I like being able to work at really, really low light levels – we shot most of Zodiac and a lot of this movie, certainly the night exteriors, we shot it in 1.6 which, for anamorphic, you normally have to shoot at 2.8, 2.85, so it's one-third or one-quarter of the light that you would normally need to do that. You can work with more manageable units and it's a smaller crew. Also, you have a giant monitor that everybody, from the boom operator to the makeup artist to the actors to the dolly grip – everybody's looking at the same thing: this is the final, release print, it's not going to change. And everyone can see, that shit's out of focus, or her eyelash is coming off in the middle of that take, or she's got a spot on her teeth. You can see the background. One of the things I hate is when you can see extras in the background; for instance, two people at a table in a restaurant, and they're both talking at the same time. Unless they're married, that would never happen – one of them would have to listen. Things that you have in the back of your mind to keep a lookout for – so finally, everyone's talking about the same picture. And also, I hate voodoo. I hate the whole thing that you're going to see seven out of eight takes that are out of focus, and somebody's going to say, "But that last one's pretty good." And you can say, "When you're directing your movie, you can get one out of eight takes." No, as a way of working, I prefer having dailies in your lap, rather than waiting to see how much you hate everything you did.

MS: And in terms of takes, you are renown for doing a few.

DF: 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.

Q4: You've made films where improbable things look realistic. Did you ever consider making a superhero movie or fantasy, where things are bit more difficult to make believable?

DF: I was asked if I might be interested in the first Spider-Man, and I went in and told them what I might be interested in doing, and they hated it. No, I'm not interested in doing "A Superhero". The thing I liked about Spider-Man was I liked the idea of a teenager, the notion of this moment in time when you're so vulnerable yet completely invulnerable. But I wasn't interested in the genesis, I just couldn't shoot somebody being bitten by a radioactive spider – just couldn't sleep knowing I'd done that. [audience laughs]

Q5: I've always been impressed by your visual flair and atmosphere of your films. How do you conceive that look and feel in your mind and how do you convey that to your cinematographer?

DF: It's like finding a character. When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behaviour editorial function – I look at someone act, and I might say, "I don't believe him when he says that." I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it. I also have rules of thumb about dialogue. For example, I feel that most people, when they speak, are lying. So, I'm looking at the eyes, I'm more interested in the body and seeing how comfortable they are saying what it is they are saying than specifically what they're saying. I think the same thing is true of cinematography: you're presented with a room and a scene. You have a feeling about this, maybe it's Thanksgiving and it's the end of the day, so there's no direct sunlight coming in because the sun's going down behind trees. So you kind of talk about it in those terms. I never really start with a photograph or a painting – you always get in trouble with that because you look at it and you go, "Fuck, this looks so great and that looks so pale in comparison." So I tend not to do that any more. Where are the people, where do the people have to go, what do they have to do, what's my relationship to them? And what do I know about horrible family get-togethers with these people and their weird guilt, and how everything's supposed to be so great on Thanksgiving and how it never is?

MS: What are you doing next? There's talk about Ness, or Heavy Metal? Keanu Reeves's chef movie?

DF: I don't know. I'm going to sleep for about four months. We did Zodiac and this movie back to back. We were shooting this movie when Zodiac opened, so we were getting commercials sent to us over the internet at the same time that we were shooting days. I don't know what I want to do. I just want to sleep.

Q6: I just want to ask about the technical element of your films – it's almost like a character in your films. In this film, it's time that is the main character. How did you achieve that?

DF: We live in a silly time, and people go to the movies to see something that they haven't seen before, and you have to promise to show them that. In a horrible way, you have to promise them a special effect. And we decided that the special effect in this movie was time and the effect of time on the background, but more importantly, the one thing that people had never done as ridiculously thoroughly as we intended to do which was the effect of time on people's faces. We knew that we had to go to Murmansk, we knew that we had to do battles at sea, we knew that we had to go back to New Orleans in the 60s, and we knew we had to go to New York in the 40s, early 50s – we knew we had all these things that were going to take place in the background but the thing was, how do you see the same person unetched or de-etched by time? I wanted Benjamin as recognisable as Brad – this is a guy who can't walk 50 feet in the civilised world without seeing a photograph of himself – so people are very used to seeing his face. So we wanted the audience to go, "Wow, those are his ears, just bigger and droopier. That is his nose, just a little bit bigger and droopier." And then when he comes back in the ballet studio, it's like him in Thelma and Louise. You look to spend the money in the right place to take the things that are going to support the story. If you're not doing that, that's not smart. So the special effect in this movie was time, and we needed to do everything we could to support that idea, and be as thorough as we could be. With Cate [Blanchett]'s face, it was the other way: we had to take her head and put her on a ballerina when she was 17. We did very subtle things because her skin's so good, it's like porcelain. But we did different things to her eyes, and of course we had to take her through to where she was the dying Daisy. I don't look at it and go, "This will be hard. It's going to be a really long movie and it's going to be hard. Let's do this." But you look at it and go, "If we're going to tell this story, where are we going to spend our money and where's the stuff where we can get in and do blindstitch?"

MS: Alas, we're out of time. David Fincher, thank you.

Dang!  What a fucking great interview.  I'd forgotten what a great teacher David Fincher is.  I'm gonna rewatch/listen to the Seven and Fight Club commentaries this weekend.  Y'know what, I've changed my mind about PTA's lack of commentaries.  Fuck that pretentious asshole ;]

http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/the-curious-case-of-benjamin-button.html

Title: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Starring: Brad Pitt
Released: 5th May 2009
SRP: $39.99 (DVD)

Further Details:
Paramount Home Entertainment has announced 1-disc DVD ($29.99), 2-disc DVD ($39.99) and 2-disc Blu-ray ($39.99) releases of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the 5th May. As far as we know, no extra material will be included on the 1-disc DVD. The 2-disc DVD and Blu-ray releases will include commentary by director David Fincher, and a 4-part The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button documentary which covers the casting of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, the decision to change the location of the story to New Orleans, costumes, visual effects, and more. We've attached the 2-disc artwork below:

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg72.imageshack.us%2Fimg72%2F2553%2Fbenjaminbutton2discr1ar.jpg&hash=fb3a9caa24d5adc859daa322ec8d8b70a611e4ca)

NO WAY!

What the fuck?! This has got to be a joke.
:yabbse-thumbdown: :yabbse-thumbdown: :yabbse-thumbdown: :yabbse-thumbdown: :yabbse-thumbdown:

lol

It could be true. When Criterion released the Royal Tennebaums, the DVD was announced on the studio's time table and not Criterions. The idea was that Criterion had little to do with the special edition DVD but were just putting their name on it because the director wanted it. It probably means less revenue for Criterion, but I doubt they mind having their name associated with major films and filmmakers. I imagine that the single disc of Curious Case of Benjamin Button could be standard Paramount DVD while Criterion retains rights to the special edition. 

Of course I'm guessing...

I just looked into this a little more. Apparently it is true.

What about the blu-ray GT?

I think it's good. Isn't it big movies like Armageddon and The Rock that keep Criterion afloat financially so they can release other smaller movies?

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rockathonrecords.com%2Fimgs%2Fhead.gif&hash=d0103454ad5171c2ddb21f96c05573fe15a5bd7d)

my god! is that the best artwork they could come up with for this film? one of the worst from any criterion right? i mean, wtf?

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi205.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fbb52%2FThe_Playlist%2Fmore%2Fbenjamin-button-criterion.jpg&hash=7a9892a3ed9bc06efd91e19c7b3953e981d24aea)

fanmade. but wouldn't that be more up their alley?

Maybe it's not final artwork. It's just the poster splashed onto a cover. Criterion has standards and something called integrity.

Quote from: SiliasRuby on March 19, 2009, 01:56:58 PM
What about the blu-ray GT?

As far as I know, Criterion is releasing it on Blu Ray, too.

I don't mind the cover because I know David Fincher isn't big on cover art the way other filmmakers are. But, it could be just cardboard art to the real DVD art. The Royal Tennebaums DVD had a cardboard cover on top of the real design work. It was there so buyers would recognize the film when buying it.

Quote from: Stefen on March 19, 2009, 02:00:25 PM
I think it's good. Isn't it big movies like Armageddon and The Rock that keep Criterion afloat financially so they can release other smaller movies?

But those are good films.

Quote from: Sleepless on March 20, 2009, 11:38:01 AM

Quote from: Stefen on March 19, 2009, 02:00:25 PM
I think it's good. Isn't it big movies like Armageddon and The Rock that keep Criterion afloat financially so they can release other smaller movies?

But those are good films.

What really keeps Criterion afloat is a dedicated following and the importance their collection has to institutions so libraries and univerisities send away for them.

But, Sleepless, not to sound brash, but really?

Quote from: Sleepless on March 20, 2009, 11:38:01 AM

Quote from: Stefen on March 19, 2009, 02:00:25 PM
I think it's good. Isn't it big movies like Armageddon and The Rock that keep Criterion afloat financially so they can release other smaller movies?

But those are good films.

I wouldn't say good. They're certainly fun (especially The Rock) but I wouldn't ever consider either a good film.

Okay, I really like Armageddon. Maybe "good" is too strong, if you wanted to get down to the nittier-grittier aspects of the film-making. But yeah, they're fun, certainly. I would much rather watch one of those than BB again. In fact I'd rather have my toenails pulled out than watch BB again.

aww the Rock is really fun I LOVED LOVED it as a kid... but Armageddon even my 12 y-o self was bored

Hollywood to Bollywood: Spare 'Benjamin Button'

Advertisements placed by Warner Brothers warned Bollywood film producers not to proceed with a planned Hindi remake of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Agence France-Presse reported. Last month The Times of India reported that the Bollywood actors Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai would star in a film called "Action Replay," about a man who ages in reverse. The plot appears to mirror "Benjamin Button," the David Fincher film that starred Brad Pitt as a man who is born elderly and dies as a baby; that movie was produced by Warner Brothers and Paramount. In the advertisements, which appeared in The Times of India and local trade publications on Monday, a New Delhi law firm representing Warner Brothers said it would pursue legal action against any film made "either in English or Hindi or other language, having a similar script, screenplay or story line or character sketches or interplay of characters or sequence of events" to "Benjamin Button," according to Agence France-Presse.

Already my vote for Best DVD for next year's xixax awards. The three hour doc is superb. Looks and sounds incredible.

Here's a video essay on Button by Matt Zoller Seitz, the same guy who did the Wes Anderson essay Mod posted:

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/present-tense-20090508#

That documentary is astounding and by the end of it I really thought I could go back and like the movie, but that script is still garbage and Fincher was still the wrong guy for the film.

Quote from: cinemanarchist on May 16, 2009, 07:13:08 PM
That documentary is astounding and by the end of it I really thought I could go back and like the movie, but that script is still garbage and Fincher was still the wrong guy for the film.

Ha ha, I felt the same way.