The New York Times checked into the development of David Fincher’s “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” in a feature that was published over the weekend. Longtime followers of this film probably won’t find too much detail that they haven’t already read (yes, it’s about a man who ages backwards and was based on a 9,000 word 1922, short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald) , but there’s definitely some interesting quotes from the director that give his perspective on what makes this story unique and moving.
You’ll recall that at one point, the film was being envisioned as a comedy for Martin Short, Steven Spielberg was once involved and so was Spike Jonze.
“I don’t remember if Spielberg was involved, or about to be involved, or maybe he had already abandoned it at that point,” Fincher said of the time when ‘Button’ was first brought to his attention. “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.” (dark and dirty, like “Seven” and “Fight Club”)
The biggest hurdle producers had, was whether it was feasible to make someone age backwards from a technical point of view. Would it be possible? Would people buy it?
“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.”
If you’ve read the ‘Benjamin Button’ script (which we have), you know it would be expensive, and apparently it was obvious to everyone else as well. The film was purposely shot in New Orleans so the production could bring the budget it under $135 million thanks to the various tax breaks that state offers movie shoots.
A lot of people are guessing that Taraji P. Henson could nab herself a Best Supporting Oscar role for the part of Benjamin’s defacto mother in the film (she’s the one egging him on to walk in this shot to the left). We’re on the fence about that one, her role in the script is really small, but maybe on screen it takes on a bigger life.
“In the short story, Queenie was just a nanny,” Henson, said of the the role. “But when [screenwriter] 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.”
The film is also set around Hurricane Katrina to give it some modern resonance apparently (again, hence New Orleans).
Death is a heavy subject and it hangs all over “Benjamin Button” as much as love and loss do. More than one person has called it a massive “tearjerker” and screenwriter Eric Roth suggests as much.
“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.”
Some people asked, how could David Fincher, a man known for dark and desolate pictures, make a love story like ‘Benjamin Button.’ Well, to Fincher, it’s much more than just a love story.
“When I read the Robin Swicord draft, I thought, this is a love story. 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.”
Damn, this is exactly what we wanted to hear. More reason why we can’t wait. The new photos are from the L.A. Times, but the NY Times had some as well.