David Fincher: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Coming of Age
The most difficult technical challenge in creating a realistic film was in establishing the ages of Pitt and Blanchett in such a way that the prostheses and effects never blocked their performances.
“It’s not a special effects movie,” says Fincher. “But spanning that kind of time, there were a lot of difficulties. First, aesthetically, will you believe it’s Brad? Because he has to start out old, the audience has to see him as wizened and grizzled as we could make him and still be able to recognize him and see his performance in it.”
But Fincher again found an answer in digital technology that was ready for Pitt’s close-ups. Using sophisticated performance capture techniques, digital effects teams scanned sculpted life casts of Pitt, and then of his face as he was recording dialogue. These were entered into a 3D database, which eventually could generate age-appropriate “talking head” images that could be digitally transplanted onto the bodies of the actors who played Button at different periods.
Dailies and “Hourlies”
To move footage more quickly into the post-production pipeline than they were able to do on “Zodiac,” Mavromates asked for an important workflow change for “Button.” “My joke is that the two four-letter words in my life are load and render,” he says. “And so when it came to this movie, I just said, “We are not rendering dailies.”
Mavromates was able to eliminate rendering by adding an S.two iDock on set, which acted as a kind of virtual VTR, allowing the digital capture manager to batch capture files and play them out directly into Final Cut Pro as DVCPRO HD dailies. These files were immediately shipped from location to the editors set up in Fincher’s Hollywood production offices. By the next day, Fincher could look at scenes cut by the editors in Final Cut Pro and posted as QuickTime movies on PIX (Picture Information Exchange), used throughout production and post for remote collaboration.
Editor Angus Wall explains that rushing the dailies returned significant benefits to the set and ultimately to the final film. “David really wanted to go from dailies to “hourlies” in terms of turnaround. The whole idea was to keep pace with production by having something posted to David the same night footage was received. This allowed him to assess what he had, in edited form, quickly. And if he needed to get additional coverage or reshoot a scene, he could make that decision.”
Final Cut, First Meeting
Wall, of Santa Monica-based Rock Paper Scissors, introduced Fincher to Final Cut Pro in 2001, when they used it to edit a commercial in HD. They used it again to cut “Zodiac.” That went so well that they decided to roll with the same editorial workflow for “Button,” on which Wall was joined by co-editor Kirk Baxter, also of Rock Paper Scissors.
“Every editor works in a different way,” says Fincher. “Given the way Angus’s and Kirk’s minds are organized, Final Cut Pro works really, really well for them.”
Easy Assembly
During the nine months of on-location shooting in New Orleans and Montreal, Baxter worked alone in Fincher’s production offices, assembling a loose cut of the film as Fincher shot it. Wall joined him to finish the assembly and then make the final edits, working alongside Baxter on shared Final Cut Pro editing stations. Overall, the movie was two years in post.
“I assembled the picture and it was pretty loose,” says Baxter. “I think in the beginning Angus took the first half and I took the second half. But after David shot all of the hospital scenes and some late footage of Julia Ormond, that footage was sprinkled throughout the whole film. So whoever was editing that scene would just automatically start touching everything else.”
Wall says: “It was a kind of a ‘unimind’ approach. And it was actually remarkable how fluidly and unconsciously things worked.”
Editing “Button”
Among the chief editorial challenges was working through the sheer amount of footage produced by so many takes from the multiple camera angles favored by Fincher. “In working with David, with the amount of material and the specificity of pieces that he’s looking for, one key benefit is how much more organized Final Cut allows you to be,” says Wall. “We could zoom out far enough to get a handle on how much footage there really was.
“We could also customize the things we worked with most. I love being able to have two timelines open and three playback windows, which I could never have on other systems. And when you’re looking at 200 hours of material, every little tweak can improve your efficiency, which turns into hours and even days saved.”
Working with his custom window setup was a particular help to Wall as he edited footage from the first part of the movie that featured “faceless” actors who had not yet received the CGI transplants of Pitt’s digitally reconstructed head. “There was a little mortised Brad head playing over on the side of the frame, and in your mind you’d have to marry his little picture-in-picture performance onto the body of the actor that you were watching in the scene.”
Wall describes a particularly useful customization, developed for “Zodiac” and recycled for “Button”: “Because David does circle takes and star takes, I use color coding to make circle takes gold and star takes red. When I’m pulling selects, I always put those at the beginning of the sequence, then everything else in descending order. My thinking is, you might as well look at the best take first. Wall says the scheme helped him quickly understand “where David got to and where he had come from in a set up.”
Although the amount of footage was large, how Fincher shot it made editing the movie surprisingly smooth. “He shoots for the edit,” says Wall. “Things really cog and dovetail together in ways that he’s designed. It’s never like you’re trying to find the movie; the movie is there.”
Having spent two years discovering that movie, Baxter predicts audiences will share his opinion of the results. “You could watch any individual scene within the film and there’s nothing flabby, nothing indulgent. It’s a long story, but it’s really tight. David’s completely made the movie that he wanted to make. It’s an extremely emotional film, and the performances are outstanding. In my opinion, it’s his greatest success.”
