Fincher gives fans an earful
'Benjamin' director pays visit to Lincoln Center
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"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."
