1
00:00:01,468 --> 00:00:03,766
It's easy to be there
when they cut the cord.

2
00:00:03,871 --> 00:00:06,135
It's a wonderful experience for anybody.

3
00:00:06,240 --> 00:00:12,338
I mean, the kind of ancillary good will
that comes from babies being born,

4
00:00:12,446 --> 00:00:15,040
as beautiful as it is,

5
00:00:16,183 --> 00:00:20,279
it's so much easier
than holding somebody's head or hand

6
00:00:21,922 --> 00:00:24,653
when they get that look
in their eye about,

7
00:00:24,758 --> 00:00:27,455
"That was my last breakfast," you know.

8
00:00:27,761 --> 00:00:31,061
At this point, I think my father had died,

9
00:00:31,164 --> 00:00:33,599
and I'd gone through that experience.

10
00:00:33,700 --> 00:00:36,761
I had that call in the middle of the night.

11
00:00:36,970 --> 00:00:41,339
You know, he had cancer
for almost two years,

12
00:00:41,441 --> 00:00:45,241
pancreatic cancer, which is...
You know, two years is a long time.

13
00:00:45,345 --> 00:00:47,643
And then one night, you get this call,

14
00:00:47,748 --> 00:00:51,048
and my mom said, "His back's hurting,"

15
00:00:51,151 --> 00:00:54,052
and so we went to his house,
and we had to call the ambulance,

16
00:00:54,154 --> 00:00:56,851
but it's one of those things
where you really think,

17
00:00:56,957 --> 00:01:00,120
"Okay, this is what the next six months
is gonna be."

18
00:01:00,227 --> 00:01:03,686
You have to get yourself ready,
prepare yourself for this.

19
00:01:03,797 --> 00:01:06,198
And literally that night,
we walked in there and they said,

20
00:01:06,300 --> 00:01:07,358
"You need to come back in the room.

21
00:01:07,467 --> 00:01:10,368
"We've got him in the room
where people die."

22
00:01:10,804 --> 00:01:15,105
And they sort of took us down the hall,
and they said, "He's got five minutes."

23
00:01:15,175 --> 00:01:16,734
And I was like...

24
00:01:16,843 --> 00:01:19,335
You know, you kind of go, "I don't have...

25
00:01:19,446 --> 00:01:22,507
"I haven't written my speech.
I'm not ready."

26
00:01:22,616 --> 00:01:26,211
And you go in there,
and you see somebody who's breathing,

27
00:01:26,320 --> 00:01:29,620
and their system's shutting down,
and their eyes, they have this look.

28
00:01:29,723 --> 00:01:31,521
They can barely, sort of, make you out.

29
00:01:31,658 --> 00:01:34,753
They know now.
They finally realize this is it.

30
00:01:34,861 --> 00:01:36,625
And you hold their hand,
and you talk to them,

31
00:01:36,730 --> 00:01:40,291
and you whisper in their ear,
and you try to soothe them.

32
00:01:40,867 --> 00:01:43,199
But there's this...

33
00:01:48,141 --> 00:01:50,610
You know, "What can I do?
How can I do more?

34
00:01:50,711 --> 00:01:54,648
"How do I prove to you
what an impact you made

35
00:01:54,748 --> 00:01:56,182
"and what a difference you made?"

36
00:01:56,249 --> 00:01:59,150
And it's so,

37
00:02:00,087 --> 00:02:02,112
you know, impossible.

38
00:02:03,090 --> 00:02:06,025
If you haven't gone through it,
it's impossible to describe,

39
00:02:06,126 --> 00:02:12,122
but I thought that was an act of love

40
00:02:12,833 --> 00:02:14,665
that's so...

41
00:02:17,504 --> 00:02:21,873
It's so much more profound
than having a child.

42
00:02:22,242 --> 00:02:27,806
I enjoyed wholeheartedly
the experience of having my daughter,

43
00:02:27,914 --> 00:02:31,407
but it's just this outpouring of...

44
00:02:31,852 --> 00:02:34,617
But here's this thing where you
just have to be strong for somebody.

45
00:02:34,721 --> 00:02:36,815
You just have to be...

46
00:02:36,923 --> 00:02:39,517
You have to go to this place
that you just never...

47
00:02:39,626 --> 00:02:41,924
You know, you want it to be over
as quickly as possible,

48
00:02:42,029 --> 00:02:43,793
and yet you don't want it to be over.

49
00:02:44,898 --> 00:02:47,560
And I read this script, and I thought,

50
00:02:49,736 --> 00:02:52,671
"This is what this is."

51
00:02:52,773 --> 00:02:54,707
It's something else.

52
00:02:54,808 --> 00:03:01,043
It's love measured against
this graph paper

53
00:03:01,581 --> 00:03:07,452
of the thing that we try
so desperately to ignore.

54
00:04:00,640 --> 00:04:05,544
Ray Stark had this project
in 1986, 1987,

55
00:04:05,645 --> 00:04:09,980
but we didn't take a look at it until 1990,
when Casey Sliver brought it to us.

56
00:04:10,083 --> 00:04:14,247
I was an executive at Universal,
where the project was developed.

57
00:04:15,322 --> 00:04:18,952
Ray brought in a short story,
F. Scott Fitzgerald short story,

58
00:04:19,059 --> 00:04:20,117
which I really loved.

59
00:04:20,227 --> 00:04:23,857
This was, I would say,
probably'88 or something like that.

60
00:04:23,964 --> 00:04:25,022
I don't know how long ago.

61
00:04:25,132 --> 00:04:30,434
And we gave it to Frank Oz,
and Frank Oz wanted to develop it,

62
00:04:31,171 --> 00:04:33,936
and Frank brought a writer in.

63
00:04:34,207 --> 00:04:38,201
They went away and they worked
for a number of months on it,

64
00:04:38,845 --> 00:04:43,248
and finally threw their hands up
and said, "We can't figure it out."

65
00:04:43,416 --> 00:04:44,440
There's no conflict.

66
00:04:44,551 --> 00:04:51,480
It just sort of unfolds in a simple,
very nice but very undramatic way.

67
00:04:51,658 --> 00:04:53,683
At the core of it,
there's a wonderful idea.

68
00:04:53,794 --> 00:04:55,387
Born old. Die young.

69
00:04:55,662 --> 00:04:57,653
It's just a magical story,

70
00:04:57,764 --> 00:05:00,426
and I think the premise
always fascinated us

71
00:05:00,834 --> 00:05:04,532
in looking at what it would be like
to go the other way.

72
00:05:04,871 --> 00:05:10,002
Casey Silver, who was the president
of production at the time,

73
00:05:10,110 --> 00:05:15,173
lived next door, in Santa Monica,
to Nick Kazan and Robin Swicord,

74
00:05:16,116 --> 00:05:18,244
and Casey said to me,

75
00:05:18,351 --> 00:05:21,753
"You should read this writer,
Robin Swicord. She's talented."

76
00:05:21,855 --> 00:05:25,120
So I read her material.
I thought she was great.

77
00:05:25,225 --> 00:05:27,853
I sent her the story and she loved it,

78
00:05:27,961 --> 00:05:31,454
and we had months and months
of discussions,

79
00:05:31,565 --> 00:05:34,626
and she worked incredibly hard
and she wrote a script.

80
00:05:34,734 --> 00:05:36,793
And it was a great first draft.

81
00:05:38,538 --> 00:05:41,769
Even though it is not the movie
that they made,

82
00:05:41,875 --> 00:05:45,175
a very long time ago, it showed
there was this great movie in here.

83
00:05:45,278 --> 00:05:48,077
I think Robin deserves
an incredible amount of credit

84
00:05:48,181 --> 00:05:54,382
for taking this short story
and reinterpreting the thematic ideas

85
00:05:54,487 --> 00:05:59,687
behind what it means
in terms of a man aging backwards

86
00:05:59,793 --> 00:06:02,854
and what that new perception on life
might be.

87
00:06:05,265 --> 00:06:07,666
The script was given
to Steven Spielberg,

88
00:06:07,767 --> 00:06:10,361
and Steven Spielberg said,
"Wow, this is great."

89
00:06:10,470 --> 00:06:13,440
And Robin Swicord and I
had a meeting with Steven,

90
00:06:13,540 --> 00:06:17,101
and it was this really exciting meeting
very early on,

91
00:06:17,210 --> 00:06:19,042
and Kathy Kennedy was in the room.

92
00:06:19,145 --> 00:06:24,481
And then that sort of developed
into a long working relationship

93
00:06:24,584 --> 00:06:28,680
and what happened was,
Steven got busy doing other things.

94
00:06:28,989 --> 00:06:34,155
Steven gave the project very serious
consideration for about a year.

95
00:06:34,261 --> 00:06:36,389
We did some read-throughs with actors.

96
00:06:36,496 --> 00:06:40,057
Tom Cruise was somebody
that we were very serious about,

97
00:06:40,166 --> 00:06:42,157
and he came over to Steven's house
for a read-through

98
00:06:42,269 --> 00:06:44,397
with several other actors.

99
00:06:44,571 --> 00:06:46,767
And then, in the course of that year,

100
00:06:46,873 --> 00:06:51,310
we were also working on
Schindler's List and Jurassic Park,

101
00:06:51,411 --> 00:06:55,041
obviously two very different
but two very big projects.

102
00:06:55,215 --> 00:06:57,274
And Steven ultimately decided

103
00:06:57,384 --> 00:07:01,548
he was gonna do those two projects
back to back, so he stepped away.

104
00:07:01,821 --> 00:07:04,620
Then, for about a year or two,

105
00:07:04,724 --> 00:07:09,059
it languished, and right around'91,'92,

106
00:07:09,162 --> 00:07:12,928
Frank and I segued
out of running Amblin

107
00:07:13,033 --> 00:07:14,865
and formed our own company.

108
00:07:14,968 --> 00:07:17,403
And we set up a deal at Paramount,

109
00:07:17,504 --> 00:07:19,632
and this was the first project

110
00:07:19,739 --> 00:07:24,768
under our new banner of
Kennedy/Marshall that we set up.

111
00:07:31,351 --> 00:07:34,218
This agent, who is now dead,
Jay Maloney,

112
00:07:34,321 --> 00:07:36,688
introduced me to David's work.

113
00:07:37,424 --> 00:07:41,691
Of course I flipped, and I met David,

114
00:07:41,795 --> 00:07:44,230
and we talked about various things.

115
00:07:44,331 --> 00:07:47,892
And I told him about this movie,
and I gave him the script right away.

116
00:07:48,168 --> 00:07:50,865
Even though it was still
Steven Spielberg's movie,

117
00:07:50,971 --> 00:07:52,905
he just seemed interested in the idea,

118
00:07:53,006 --> 00:07:54,599
and I sent it to him
and he really liked it.

119
00:07:54,708 --> 00:07:58,508
And that was the beginning
of a relationship with David

120
00:07:58,611 --> 00:08:00,807
where we would talk about material
over the years.

121
00:08:00,914 --> 00:08:02,848
The first time I read the script,

122
00:08:02,949 --> 00:08:04,815
I think it had been floating around
for a couple of years.

123
00:08:04,918 --> 00:08:08,047
I think Spielberg had abandoned it
at that point in time.

124
00:08:08,154 --> 00:08:09,485
Tom Cruise had abandoned it.

125
00:08:09,589 --> 00:08:12,615
And Josh Donen took an interest
in some of the early stuff

126
00:08:12,726 --> 00:08:14,558
that i had done and sent it to me.

127
00:08:14,661 --> 00:08:18,529
I don't know if it was
sort of a taste barometer,

128
00:08:18,631 --> 00:08:21,862
but it came highly,
highly recommended.

129
00:08:22,068 --> 00:08:24,560
He said, "I want you to read a script.
I think it's a beautiful script."

130
00:08:24,671 --> 00:08:27,606
It was written by Robin Swicord,
and it was a beautiful script,

131
00:08:27,707 --> 00:08:32,235
but it sort of hinged
on the audience's affinity for

132
00:08:32,345 --> 00:08:35,178
and knowledge of jazz,

133
00:08:35,281 --> 00:08:39,081
which, as a betting man in Hollywood,

134
00:08:39,185 --> 00:08:43,486
that's not something
I'm really ready to put it all down on.

135
00:08:43,590 --> 00:08:47,959
So, I loved it. I appreciated it.
I thought it was moving and beautiful,

136
00:08:50,697 --> 00:08:53,997
but it wasn't the kind of thing that I said,

137
00:08:54,100 --> 00:08:57,092
"Before you die..." I just thought

138
00:08:58,471 --> 00:09:02,203
someone will do really well with this
if they can ever figure out how to do it.

139
00:09:02,342 --> 00:09:08,372
The stumbling block for so long,
with anyone looking at this material,

140
00:09:08,481 --> 00:09:12,850
was everyone looked at it
as though five or six different actors

141
00:09:12,952 --> 00:09:15,614
were gonna have to play
the part of Benjamin Button.

142
00:09:15,889 --> 00:09:18,415
When you broke it down
and you saw how little it was,

143
00:09:18,525 --> 00:09:21,688
and you might have to have
four or five people playing Benjamin,

144
00:09:21,795 --> 00:09:26,255
it became a big issue about,
"It's really not a movie-star role."

145
00:09:26,499 --> 00:09:29,332
I couldn't figure out how it could
be done, to be honest with you.

146
00:09:29,436 --> 00:09:32,303
At the time, this is like 1991,'92.

147
00:09:33,573 --> 00:09:37,703
I mean, in'92,
I was still trying to convince ILM

148
00:09:37,811 --> 00:09:41,975
to do the alien for Alien3 in CG,
and they were saying,

149
00:09:42,082 --> 00:09:44,676
"We're years away.
That'll never happen."

150
00:09:44,784 --> 00:09:47,310
So you can imagine what
the greatest minds

151
00:09:47,420 --> 00:09:51,516
that could be brought to bear
on this aging problem...

152
00:09:51,691 --> 00:09:55,127
It was basically a hand-off
between five or six different actors

153
00:09:55,228 --> 00:09:56,923
and a lot of rubber work.

154
00:09:57,030 --> 00:09:59,294
We talked to everybody.
We talked to Stan Winston.

155
00:09:59,399 --> 00:10:01,993
We talked to a lot of people
about how we could do this,

156
00:10:02,102 --> 00:10:05,436
and my biggest fear was that you had...

157
00:10:06,573 --> 00:10:10,407
I didn't wanna see somebody look like
the Kraken

158
00:10:10,510 --> 00:10:12,171
from the Ray Harryhausen movie.

159
00:10:12,278 --> 00:10:15,976
You know, where the brow gets really
protruded and the cheekbones...

160
00:10:16,082 --> 00:10:21,851
So I was reticent to discuss with anyone
the notion of silicone

161
00:10:21,955 --> 00:10:26,517
or certainly latex pieces
that would be applied,

162
00:10:26,626 --> 00:10:30,756
because it just seemed like you would
need a thousand-day schedule.

163
00:10:30,930 --> 00:10:32,489
As elaborate as the movie was,

164
00:10:32,599 --> 00:10:35,432
you would need forever
to be able to shoot it.

165
00:10:35,835 --> 00:10:37,803
And Frank and I
have always had this issue,

166
00:10:37,904 --> 00:10:42,740
when production problems
start getting in the way creatively,

167
00:10:42,842 --> 00:10:45,174
we always step back and go,
"Okay, wait a second.

168
00:10:45,278 --> 00:10:48,839
"This should not be
what's interfering with storytelling."

169
00:10:48,948 --> 00:10:53,442
So, there came a time
when I seriously thought about,

170
00:10:53,553 --> 00:10:54,987
I don't know, eight or nine years ago,

171
00:10:55,088 --> 00:10:56,954
I thought, "This is never
going to get made."

172
00:10:57,056 --> 00:11:01,425
This is gonna be one of those scripts
that everybody writes about and says,

173
00:11:01,528 --> 00:11:04,554
"This is the wonderful script
that never got made,"

174
00:11:04,664 --> 00:11:06,496
and nobody really understood why.

175
00:11:51,945 --> 00:11:55,438
I think the next time I heard about it,
I heard about it through Spike Jonze,

176
00:11:55,548 --> 00:11:57,175
who had a take on it.

177
00:11:57,283 --> 00:12:01,379
That was a radically different movie.
That was much quirkier.

178
00:12:01,754 --> 00:12:05,190
I would throw it
into the Coen brothers sensibility,

179
00:12:06,826 --> 00:12:09,318
more of a comedy, a quirky comedy.

180
00:12:09,429 --> 00:12:13,366
He talked about making it
a much more intimate movie,

181
00:12:13,466 --> 00:12:16,663
and I think it was at that moment in time
that Sherry Lansing,

182
00:12:16,769 --> 00:12:20,797
who was running Paramount,
hired Eric Roth.

183
00:12:21,140 --> 00:12:26,476
And I don't think
it was against Spike's wishes,

184
00:12:26,579 --> 00:12:28,547
but it certainly was...

185
00:12:28,948 --> 00:12:32,714
I'm not so sure he was involved
in the decision at all,

186
00:12:32,819 --> 00:12:37,814
and I think he felt like he couldn't
be involved in something

187
00:12:37,924 --> 00:12:41,918
that he wasn't charting the course of.

188
00:12:42,228 --> 00:12:43,992
And I remember we had lunch
and I said to him,

189
00:12:44,097 --> 00:12:48,261
"You know, Eric Roth's talented.

190
00:12:49,435 --> 00:12:52,405
"Before you give this up, you may
want to wait till you read the script."

191
00:12:52,905 --> 00:12:55,636
I wasn't really that aware of it except

192
00:12:56,943 --> 00:13:01,380
for vaguely knowing about the project
having been around for a long time.

193
00:13:01,481 --> 00:13:05,918
And Paramount and Sherry Lansing,
who was running Paramount at the time,

194
00:13:07,053 --> 00:13:10,079
and I had done another movie,
Forrest Gump,

195
00:13:10,189 --> 00:13:13,215
and she asked me to take a look
at the project

196
00:13:13,326 --> 00:13:14,987
and read the short story.

197
00:13:15,295 --> 00:13:17,525
Eric has a real affinity

198
00:13:17,630 --> 00:13:22,466
for being able to take
large, complex ideas

199
00:13:22,568 --> 00:13:26,562
and distill them
into character-driven pieces.

200
00:13:27,407 --> 00:13:30,069
I did some research as to why
he wrote it, F. Scot Fitzgerald.

201
00:13:30,176 --> 00:13:31,541
Obviously, I wouldn't want
to do anything

202
00:13:31,644 --> 00:13:33,271
that would besmirch his memory.

203
00:13:33,379 --> 00:13:36,679
And I've checked even
with a couple of people

204
00:13:36,783 --> 00:13:38,547
who are renowned Fitzgerald scholars,

205
00:13:38,651 --> 00:13:40,517
and said, as best as they can tell,

206
00:13:40,620 --> 00:13:44,386
he did it as sort of a fancy.

207
00:13:44,490 --> 00:13:47,983
I mean, there wasn't anything...
A little caprice, you know.

208
00:13:48,161 --> 00:13:51,893
Fitzgerald, when he wrote
the original short story,

209
00:13:51,998 --> 00:13:56,060
thematically, he was dealing
with something much more cynical.

210
00:13:56,169 --> 00:13:59,195
He was really making a commentary

211
00:13:59,305 --> 00:14:03,139
on the fact that youth is wasted
on the young.

212
00:14:03,309 --> 00:14:07,906
To me, the idea of this guy
aging backwards was a lovely conceit.

213
00:14:08,715 --> 00:14:12,982
Other than that, the storytelling was not,
to me, as interesting.

214
00:14:13,086 --> 00:14:16,249
You know, not to knock Fitzgerald,
but to just...

215
00:14:16,689 --> 00:14:20,182
I felt it didn't lend itself.
It was kind of spoofy,

216
00:14:20,293 --> 00:14:23,923
and I felt there might be
something a little more

217
00:14:24,530 --> 00:14:26,362
that you could take away from it
than that.

218
00:14:26,599 --> 00:14:29,125
I didn't hear about it for a while,

219
00:14:29,235 --> 00:14:32,637
and about a year later, there was
a draft that was floating around.

220
00:14:32,739 --> 00:14:35,504
Josh, who's great friends with Eric

221
00:14:35,608 --> 00:14:40,341
and great friends of mine, said,
"I've read it and you need to read this.'

222
00:14:40,480 --> 00:14:42,278
And so he gave it to me,
and I read it over the weekend,

223
00:14:42,382 --> 00:14:44,373
and I thought, "Wow."

224
00:14:44,484 --> 00:14:48,421
And I got a call from Kathy Kennedy
and Frank Marshall,

225
00:14:48,521 --> 00:14:51,582
who I didn't even know
were involved in it.

226
00:14:51,691 --> 00:14:53,056
I knew it was Ray Stark,

227
00:14:53,159 --> 00:14:56,094
and then I knew Sherry Lansing
was somehow involved with it,

228
00:14:56,195 --> 00:14:58,687
and then I got this call
from Kennedy/Marshall,

229
00:14:58,798 --> 00:15:01,267
and they said, "Would you like
to come in and meet with us on

230
00:15:01,367 --> 00:15:03,096
"The Curious Case
of Benjamin Button ?"

231
00:15:03,202 --> 00:15:05,432
The thing I remember most
about the first meeting was,

232
00:15:05,538 --> 00:15:08,508
the first thing
out of everybody's mouth was,

233
00:15:10,777 --> 00:15:14,680
"How do you do this?
How do you make a guy who's that tall...

234
00:15:15,148 --> 00:15:18,015
"You know, he's four years old
and he looks like he's 85,

235
00:15:18,117 --> 00:15:21,087
"and then how do you take him
to being six months old

236
00:15:21,187 --> 00:15:23,212
"and breathing his last breath?"

237
00:15:23,322 --> 00:15:27,657
And because my background initially
was at Industrial Light and Magic,

238
00:15:27,760 --> 00:15:31,390
I've learned that in that situation
you always lie,

239
00:15:31,497 --> 00:15:34,467
and you always say,
"You know, we'll figure that out.

240
00:15:34,567 --> 00:15:36,558
"That's the least of our problems."

241
00:15:36,669 --> 00:15:40,196
So we started to have this conversation
about everything else other than that

242
00:15:40,306 --> 00:15:44,470
with no one having any kind of real idea
of what that would take.

243
00:15:44,577 --> 00:15:47,706
But it was one of these meetings
that you always hope to have

244
00:15:47,814 --> 00:15:50,112
when you're discussing a film

245
00:15:50,216 --> 00:15:54,278
or the idea of setting sail on a film,
that you hope that you have

246
00:15:54,387 --> 00:15:56,856
a conversation with the writer
and the producers

247
00:15:56,956 --> 00:16:00,256
where you're talking about first kisses.

248
00:16:00,359 --> 00:16:05,490
We ended up talking about making out
for the first time, first hangovers.

249
00:16:05,698 --> 00:16:09,464
It was a really interesting round robin
of people talking about their lives,

250
00:16:09,569 --> 00:16:13,403
and I thought, "That's kind of what
this movie, I think, will do for people."

251
00:16:13,506 --> 00:16:16,168
I think it's the kind of movie
that puts you in touch, in an odd way,

252
00:16:16,275 --> 00:16:18,175
with how you defined yourself

253
00:16:18,277 --> 00:16:22,407
or how you were defined
by certain moments in time

254
00:16:22,515 --> 00:16:25,246
and what that stuff
really means to us all.

255
00:16:25,351 --> 00:16:27,877
And then, on the flip side of that,

256
00:16:28,621 --> 00:16:30,612
everybody knows that at some point

257
00:16:30,723 --> 00:16:33,385
they're going to shuffle off
this mortal coil.

258
00:16:33,626 --> 00:16:37,529
And we spend so much time
making our lives busy enough

259
00:16:37,630 --> 00:16:39,792
that we don't ever have to think
about that.

260
00:16:39,899 --> 00:16:42,527
It was kind of all the most interesting
stuff about the movie.

261
00:16:42,635 --> 00:16:44,296
You know, the technical side of it

262
00:16:44,403 --> 00:16:47,862
was either gonna take care of itself
or it wasn't,

263
00:16:47,974 --> 00:16:50,068
but that wasn't the discussion
to have on the day.

264
00:16:51,177 --> 00:16:52,872
That was gonna be a process.

265
00:16:55,748 --> 00:16:59,343
This thing had been in my periphery
for years at this point.

266
00:16:59,452 --> 00:17:01,420
It'd come in and gone.

267
00:17:01,521 --> 00:17:07,551
And I think it was more about
the technological hurdles at that time,

268
00:17:07,660 --> 00:17:09,389
instead of just using different actors.

269
00:17:09,495 --> 00:17:11,520
I think that was getting wearisome
at this point.

270
00:17:11,631 --> 00:17:13,121
And then it landed in Fincher's lap,

271
00:17:13,232 --> 00:17:17,465
and Fincher and I are always talking
about a possible project or two.

272
00:17:17,670 --> 00:17:19,832
And I really didn't think he was serious
about this one.

273
00:17:20,940 --> 00:17:23,409
I thought it was a nice idea

274
00:17:23,643 --> 00:17:29,707
given the Fincher that I know that
is seldom revealed to the outside world,

275
00:17:31,150 --> 00:17:33,517
but I really didn't think
he'd pull the trigger.

276
00:17:33,619 --> 00:17:38,682
He read it and he said,
"It's kind of a love story, isn't it?"

277
00:17:38,791 --> 00:17:42,557
And I said, "I don't think so.
I think it's a death story.

278
00:17:42,662 --> 00:17:44,187
"I think you should read it
with that in mind.

279
00:17:44,297 --> 00:17:46,026
"Remember, this guy grows up
in an old folks home.

280
00:17:46,132 --> 00:17:49,124
"Literally everybody
who passes through his life dies."

281
00:17:49,502 --> 00:17:53,063
And I also didn't think
this was something

282
00:17:53,172 --> 00:17:57,700
that I necessarily should be doing,
maybe it was a bit obvious for me to do,

283
00:17:57,810 --> 00:18:02,907
and my baggage would just encumber it
even more and slow it down.

284
00:18:03,449 --> 00:18:06,009
But it was Fincher coming
and explaining what he was after,

285
00:18:06,118 --> 00:18:08,314
and that was, he first described
what it wouldn't be,

286
00:18:08,421 --> 00:18:10,719
and that was
the ballad of co-dependency.

287
00:18:10,823 --> 00:18:14,817
You know, "You complete me,"
so to speak,

288
00:18:14,927 --> 00:18:16,588
which is a nice idea,
but it's a young idea.

289
00:18:16,696 --> 00:18:18,391
I love Romeo and Juliet.

290
00:18:18,497 --> 00:18:23,264
I love West Side Story.
I love co-dependent love.

291
00:18:25,905 --> 00:18:31,708
But it can't be the only expression
of love in narrative movie-making.

292
00:18:33,279 --> 00:18:35,338
It can't just be about that.

293
00:18:35,448 --> 00:18:36,973
He was after something else here,

294
00:18:37,083 --> 00:18:41,919
and, I have to say, I was interested.
I thought it felt right to me.

295
00:18:42,154 --> 00:18:43,588
And he read it again
and he called me and said,

296
00:18:43,689 --> 00:18:46,215
"I get what you wanna do with this.

297
00:18:46,659 --> 00:18:50,289
"I would do this
if we can figure out a way

298
00:18:50,396 --> 00:18:53,297
"that I can play this guy the entire time."

299
00:18:54,567 --> 00:18:58,003
And I said, "Well, of course.

300
00:18:58,571 --> 00:19:00,835
"That's just technology.
That's just technique.

301
00:19:00,940 --> 00:19:05,605
"We'll figure that out."
So I was back to my first meeting.

302
00:19:05,778 --> 00:19:10,944
And I think around 2004, 2005,

303
00:19:11,884 --> 00:19:16,185
when David seriously started
to turn his attention

304
00:19:16,288 --> 00:19:18,086
to how to execute the movie,

305
00:19:18,190 --> 00:19:21,524
the technology had caught up
with the story,

306
00:19:21,627 --> 00:19:25,689
and we could all begin
to have very serious discussions

307
00:19:25,798 --> 00:19:29,860
about Brad Pitt playing the part
from beginning to end.

308
00:19:30,169 --> 00:19:34,072
And that completely changed
the dynamic of the development.

309
00:19:34,173 --> 00:19:38,804
And suddenly it got traction,
and the movie started to get made.

310
00:19:40,279 --> 00:19:42,213
Somewhere in all of this,

311
00:19:42,314 --> 00:19:47,809
I had the fortune of being able to get
our script to Cate Blanchett,

312
00:19:47,920 --> 00:19:50,890
who I'm an ardent admirer of.

313
00:19:50,990 --> 00:19:53,015
And I sent her the script
and she read it,

314
00:19:53,125 --> 00:19:56,652
and she responded to it
and wanted to meet, and we met.

315
00:19:56,996 --> 00:20:02,958
And after having read the first script
15 or 1 6 years ago,

316
00:20:03,069 --> 00:20:05,003
I was shocked at our first meeting
to learn

317
00:20:05,104 --> 00:20:06,799
that she could speak more articulately

318
00:20:06,906 --> 00:20:10,740
about what this piece of material
was about than I could.

319
00:20:11,143 --> 00:20:14,579
I unashamedly loved this film
from the moment I read it.

320
00:20:15,181 --> 00:20:19,948
And I think once I knew
it was gonna be in David's hands,

321
00:20:20,052 --> 00:20:21,986
then I was really, really excited by it,

322
00:20:22,088 --> 00:20:27,549
because love is a very complex,
often contradictory state to be in,

323
00:20:27,660 --> 00:20:30,186
but David is not afraid
of those contradictions.

324
00:20:30,896 --> 00:20:33,058
And so he is such a cynic

325
00:20:33,165 --> 00:20:36,999
that when you have a cynic
dealing with matters of the heart,

326
00:20:37,103 --> 00:20:39,902
then I think you approach something
that's really interesting.

327
00:20:40,706 --> 00:20:44,074
I like to joke about this movie,'cause
it was co-financed by two studios,

328
00:20:44,176 --> 00:20:47,305
that it was so great that we were able
to find Paramount,

329
00:20:47,413 --> 00:20:50,007
who loved the first 110 pages
of the script

330
00:20:50,116 --> 00:20:53,643
and then Warner Brothers, who loved
the second 110 pages of the script.

331
00:20:53,753 --> 00:20:56,654
'Cause the first draft of the script was...

332
00:20:57,690 --> 00:21:00,250
I mean, it was like this.

333
00:21:01,393 --> 00:21:05,796
There was no Yellow Pages,
but it was a phone book.

334
00:21:06,031 --> 00:21:08,830
And so we started to go through
and cut stuff.

335
00:21:08,934 --> 00:21:11,426
Scripts always change
in increments, you know,

336
00:21:11,537 --> 00:21:13,266
and the nice part about David is,

337
00:21:13,372 --> 00:21:16,171
I think he always challenges you
to do better, you know,

338
00:21:16,275 --> 00:21:20,303
which is good. i like to, hopefully,
challenge him to do better.

339
00:21:21,247 --> 00:21:23,682
I think we cut the script down
to about 200 pages,

340
00:21:23,883 --> 00:21:27,444
turned it in to Paramount
and they read it

341
00:21:27,553 --> 00:21:29,681
and they liked it very much.

342
00:21:30,222 --> 00:21:33,453
And then we convinced them
to do a test.

343
00:21:36,729 --> 00:21:37,787
We didn't have access to Brad.

344
00:21:37,897 --> 00:21:42,596
He was off making some movie
with some other director.

345
00:21:43,402 --> 00:21:47,805
And we got this actor, a friend of mine
who I love, Joel Bissonnette, and I said,

346
00:21:47,907 --> 00:21:50,103
"Joel, we wanna do
this old-age test with you,

347
00:21:50,209 --> 00:21:53,042
"so we want you to come in.
We want to scan you."

348
00:21:53,145 --> 00:21:57,048
He said, "All right," and he came in,
and we took plaster casts of him

349
00:21:57,149 --> 00:21:59,675
and sent them off
to a sculptor in Canada

350
00:21:59,785 --> 00:22:03,050
who did this beautiful casting
and painting and sculpture.

351
00:22:03,155 --> 00:22:06,750
Then we took that information
and we scanned it into a computer,

352
00:22:06,859 --> 00:22:08,827
and then we cast this body double.

353
00:22:10,362 --> 00:22:12,421
Not a body double.

354
00:22:12,531 --> 00:22:15,125
The breakdown went out
we were looking for a body double,

355
00:22:15,234 --> 00:22:18,067
but really we were going to
use their body.

356
00:22:18,170 --> 00:22:20,036
We met this guy, Robert Towers,

357
00:22:20,139 --> 00:22:22,972
who I like to joke has actually been
on this movie longer than I have,

358
00:22:23,075 --> 00:22:28,309
but from the first test,
we just had him on a sound stage,

359
00:22:28,414 --> 00:22:30,644
and we just did
this one little camera move on him,

360
00:22:30,749 --> 00:22:33,150
put up a big wall of soft light
and did a very simple thing.

361
00:22:33,619 --> 00:22:35,713
The first scene that we see of Benjamin
in the movie

362
00:22:35,821 --> 00:22:39,587
where he's tapping this spoon or fork
on the table,

363
00:22:39,758 --> 00:22:42,090
and we'd put dots all over him,

364
00:22:42,194 --> 00:22:44,253
and we didn't know exactly
how we were gonna do it,

365
00:22:44,363 --> 00:22:46,229
but we brought in three Viper cameras.

366
00:22:46,699 --> 00:22:49,396
And then D.D.,
the guys from Digital Domain,

367
00:22:49,501 --> 00:22:53,665
went in and they lopped his head off,
and they put this sculpture on him.

368
00:22:53,772 --> 00:22:56,867
We played with shaders,
hair shaders and skin shaders,

369
00:22:56,976 --> 00:22:58,774
and we made the eyes
and we made the glasses

370
00:22:58,878 --> 00:23:00,312
and we put all this stuff on.

371
00:23:00,412 --> 00:23:02,437
We finished this test. It was crude.

372
00:23:03,048 --> 00:23:06,040
It was extremely early days.

373
00:23:06,218 --> 00:23:08,983
We showed it to them and they liked it,

374
00:23:09,488 --> 00:23:13,516
but they said it looks very expensive,
and indeed they were right.

375
00:23:13,726 --> 00:23:18,186
And it was more money
than they wanted to spend on the movie

376
00:23:18,464 --> 00:23:23,368
by about probably $75 million.

377
00:23:24,570 --> 00:23:26,766
So Brad went off to do
nine other movies,

378
00:23:26,872 --> 00:23:28,840
and I went off and I did Zodiac.

379
00:23:29,508 --> 00:23:31,442
And while I was doing Zodiac,

380
00:23:31,543 --> 00:23:34,444
we were still kind of to-ing and fro-ing

381
00:23:34,546 --> 00:23:36,537
about what it would cost
to make Benjamin Button,

382
00:23:36,649 --> 00:23:38,174
what it would really cost.

383
00:23:47,860 --> 00:23:51,160
The original story Fitzgerald wrote
was based in BaItimore,

384
00:23:51,263 --> 00:23:53,095
and Eric Roth mimicked that

385
00:23:53,198 --> 00:23:56,793
in his version of the screenplay
which was in BaItimore.

386
00:23:56,902 --> 00:24:00,361
So the first place I went to
when I took on the job,

387
00:24:01,240 --> 00:24:04,870
April 17, 2004, was I flew to BaItimore.

388
00:24:22,594 --> 00:24:24,585
We did a feasibility study on the script

389
00:24:24,697 --> 00:24:26,961
on what we thought needed
to be shot on location,

390
00:24:27,066 --> 00:24:30,661
what needed to be shot on stage,
and we sort of roughly designed sets

391
00:24:30,936 --> 00:24:32,904
and went through
a six or seven-month study on that

392
00:24:33,038 --> 00:24:36,838
and put together a budget,
and then it was shelved for a while.

393
00:24:37,076 --> 00:24:39,477
They seemed to have had
all the locations and everything,

394
00:24:41,180 --> 00:24:44,377
but it just wasn't lining up
for where the studio wanted it to be.

395
00:24:44,483 --> 00:24:47,077
It just wasn't getting it to a number.

396
00:24:47,186 --> 00:24:49,245
You know, movies, they are a business.

397
00:24:49,355 --> 00:24:52,484
They have to be made for a certain
amount of money to get out the door.

398
00:24:52,624 --> 00:24:56,083
It became more and more expensive
as we looked at it,

399
00:24:56,195 --> 00:25:01,497
so we were really looking for a way
to mitigate the cost of the movie,

400
00:25:01,600 --> 00:25:03,864
and so we started looking
at other cities.

401
00:25:04,169 --> 00:25:05,933
I kept thinking about it
and thinking about it,

402
00:25:06,038 --> 00:25:10,236
and that's when I came up with the idea
that the script could be,

403
00:25:10,342 --> 00:25:13,004
if they were willing to,
it could be redone for New Orleans.

404
00:25:13,245 --> 00:25:15,577
I think the only way that this movie
was possible

405
00:25:15,681 --> 00:25:20,585
was what Louisiana was doing
to foster a new industry,

406
00:25:21,186 --> 00:25:24,212
which were massive tax credits,
and tax credits are basically cash.

407
00:25:24,323 --> 00:25:26,121
You can sell them on the open market.

408
00:25:26,225 --> 00:25:29,092
It's literally right off the top
of your budget.

409
00:25:29,261 --> 00:25:32,458
I called Ceán up and said, "Ceán,
let's have lunch. I've got an idea."

410
00:25:32,564 --> 00:25:34,396
And she's like, "What?"

411
00:25:34,500 --> 00:25:38,061
And I sat down and I kind of gave her
my idea and my story,

412
00:25:38,170 --> 00:25:39,228
and I had to go to the studio first,

413
00:25:39,338 --> 00:25:41,067
'cause I wasn't a producer
on the film at that time.

414
00:25:41,173 --> 00:25:44,234
It was just, "Guys, we gotta figure it out.

415
00:25:44,343 --> 00:25:46,072
"Somebody's gotta come up
with an idea."

416
00:25:46,178 --> 00:25:48,146
So I asked them for the right
to go speak with them,

417
00:25:48,247 --> 00:25:51,808
and they said okay,
and I did this all on my own time.

418
00:25:51,917 --> 00:25:53,976
You know, you read the script
and you're like,

419
00:25:54,086 --> 00:25:58,751
"This is the man for this movie
at this time. It's gotta get done."

420
00:25:58,957 --> 00:26:04,020
And we made the pitch and she went,
"Yeah, that sounds great,"

421
00:26:04,129 --> 00:26:05,460
and she went and talked with David,

422
00:26:05,564 --> 00:26:07,430
and then he went
and talked with Sherry,

423
00:26:07,533 --> 00:26:09,501
and then it started back up again.

424
00:26:24,016 --> 00:26:26,644
We're gonna start
on Benjamin in the foreground.

425
00:26:26,752 --> 00:26:28,550
We're gonna track behind him,

426
00:26:28,654 --> 00:26:30,554
and over his shoulder
we see Mr. Daws.

427
00:26:30,656 --> 00:26:32,715
-We got a shot this way.
-Yeah, we don't wanna look this way,

428
00:26:32,825 --> 00:26:36,022
'cause we've got a fucking
magnolia tree in front of the Sheraton.

429
00:26:36,128 --> 00:26:37,653
He's gonna take the baby,
he's gonna throw the baby,

430
00:26:37,763 --> 00:26:39,060
and he decides not to.

431
00:26:39,164 --> 00:26:42,532
He steps down on the thing, and then
a cop comes running over there.

432
00:26:54,213 --> 00:26:56,011
I like the idea
that they're standing in here,

433
00:26:56,115 --> 00:26:58,607
and there's a little bit
of night ambience up there.

434
00:26:58,717 --> 00:26:59,809
And there's some of that.

435
00:26:59,952 --> 00:27:02,444
You can put something
in here to push back...

436
00:27:07,025 --> 00:27:09,084
Benjamin leaves
and Thomas stops and sees him.

437
00:27:09,194 --> 00:27:10,286
And then goes after him.

438
00:27:10,429 --> 00:27:12,022
I need it on both sides,

439
00:27:12,131 --> 00:27:16,500
and I need it to go to
where the next street is.

440
00:27:16,902 --> 00:27:18,028
Looking back this way,

441
00:27:18,137 --> 00:27:21,266
he comes running up, kind of like...
Trying... And then we cut to this.

442
00:27:21,573 --> 00:27:24,304
The trench going back
is like 40 feet, 60 feet,

443
00:27:24,409 --> 00:27:25,740
something like that.

444
00:27:25,844 --> 00:27:27,539
And we should have
smudge pots galore,

445
00:27:27,646 --> 00:27:29,637
just have stuff kind of flowing through.

446
00:27:32,951 --> 00:27:36,512
And I need to put a camera out
about 1 2 feet.

447
00:27:36,622 --> 00:27:38,056
Just to get it out, away from the dock.

448
00:27:38,157 --> 00:27:41,024
So that we can be out here
and he can kind of row past us

449
00:27:41,593 --> 00:27:43,288
when he rows out to sea.

450
00:27:43,395 --> 00:27:44,885
-He's in just a little rowboat.
-Yeah.

451
00:27:44,997 --> 00:27:47,523
I'd shot a couple of things
in New Orleans.

452
00:27:47,633 --> 00:27:50,159
Both New Orleans and BaItimore
have a lot of similarities,

453
00:27:50,269 --> 00:27:52,761
as 200-year-old-plus port cities.

454
00:27:53,005 --> 00:27:55,906
With those kind of great histories
and backgrounds,

455
00:27:56,008 --> 00:27:57,999
there's a lot of commonality to them.

456
00:27:58,110 --> 00:28:00,204
You could take
what had been a ship-builder

457
00:28:00,312 --> 00:28:01,802
and make it into a coton factory.

458
00:28:01,914 --> 00:28:04,645
There's a lot of easy conversion,
in my opinion,

459
00:28:04,750 --> 00:28:09,085
and a lot of big parts of the city
that still reflected 200 years ago.

460
00:28:10,622 --> 00:28:11,885
It was pretty immediate.

461
00:28:11,990 --> 00:28:14,789
I mean, it was pretty much like
we were able to see

462
00:28:14,893 --> 00:28:19,729
that not only was New Orleans as good
an idea as shooting in BaItimore,

463
00:28:19,831 --> 00:28:21,959
for all the matte paintings
we were gonna have to do in BaItimore

464
00:28:22,067 --> 00:28:23,535
and all the work
that we were gonna have to do

465
00:28:23,635 --> 00:28:27,094
to change the harbor and the port...

466
00:28:27,940 --> 00:28:29,169
It also just seemed

467
00:28:29,274 --> 00:28:33,643
like New Orleans was shrink-wrapped
in the turn of the century.

468
00:28:33,745 --> 00:28:35,770
It seemed like everywhere you went

469
00:28:35,881 --> 00:28:40,512
you could find at least 90 degrees
that was 100 years ago.

470
00:28:40,852 --> 00:28:44,083
BaItimore is like a Norman Rockwell
every man town,

471
00:28:44,189 --> 00:28:47,386
and you go to New Orleans
and it's just its own thing.

472
00:28:47,492 --> 00:28:49,517
The city becomes part of the story.

473
00:28:49,628 --> 00:28:52,598
And I don't think I ever felt that
when it was in BaItimore.

474
00:28:52,698 --> 00:28:55,998
It takes on a whole different feeling
when you say, "New Orleans."

475
00:28:56,101 --> 00:28:58,001
All of a sudden, it sort of drips,
you know.

476
00:28:58,103 --> 00:29:01,733
And in a nice way, it feels old,
and there's sort of a texture to it

477
00:29:01,840 --> 00:29:03,934
that you don't have
with some other places.

478
00:29:04,042 --> 00:29:05,840
So David thought it'd be a good idea,

479
00:29:05,944 --> 00:29:08,174
and Eric started rewriting it
for New Orleans,

480
00:29:08,280 --> 00:29:11,375
which began in earnest in 2005.

481
00:29:12,551 --> 00:29:14,144
And then Katrina hit,

482
00:29:14,253 --> 00:29:17,621
which put a bit of a damper
in everyone's enthusiasm.

483
00:29:21,360 --> 00:29:23,351
The studio sent me there
to take a look around,

484
00:29:23,462 --> 00:29:26,625
and I spent a couple of weeks going
back to my old roots as a journalist

485
00:29:26,732 --> 00:29:29,292
and interviewing people,
locals and different officials.

486
00:29:29,401 --> 00:29:32,098
And I came back and put together,
basically, a 40-page report

487
00:29:32,204 --> 00:29:33,865
and reported back to the studio on it.

488
00:29:34,039 --> 00:29:35,234
We were scouting places

489
00:29:35,340 --> 00:29:39,436
and driving by the houses
with the "X" symbol on the doors,

490
00:29:39,544 --> 00:29:42,741
and how many dead
and two dogs dead, and people...

491
00:29:42,848 --> 00:29:45,510
It was really impactful.

492
00:29:45,651 --> 00:29:49,485
And I think it, you know...
In seeing that, it set a tone for us

493
00:29:49,588 --> 00:29:54,355
for the sort of melancholy feeling
that the whole movie has.

494
00:29:54,593 --> 00:29:57,358
I had never been to New Orleans
prior to Katrina.

495
00:29:57,462 --> 00:29:59,897
And I just remember
getting off the airplane,

496
00:29:59,998 --> 00:30:02,729
and I just felt an emptiness.

497
00:30:02,834 --> 00:30:05,394
It just felt hollow,
that's the only way I can put it.

498
00:30:05,837 --> 00:30:09,671
Even though some of the natives
were able to return and rebuild...

499
00:30:09,775 --> 00:30:13,040
Even when I looked at them,
in their eyes, it seemed hollow,

500
00:30:13,145 --> 00:30:15,136
like a numb gaze.

501
00:30:15,847 --> 00:30:18,339
The state officials
got on the phone with us

502
00:30:18,450 --> 00:30:20,782
and said,
"We know what you're thinking,

503
00:30:20,886 --> 00:30:23,150
"but please, please,
for the sake of the city,

504
00:30:23,255 --> 00:30:26,452
"could you believe in us
and still commit to shooting here?

505
00:30:26,558 --> 00:30:28,526
"We'll do whatever it is that you need

506
00:30:28,627 --> 00:30:31,722
"to make this
still a viable city for shooting.'

507
00:30:33,732 --> 00:30:37,498
Everything that we need,
the Garden District, Magazine Street

508
00:30:37,602 --> 00:30:40,697
and the French Quarter
and the periphery of downtown,

509
00:30:40,806 --> 00:30:42,399
all that stuff was still there.

510
00:30:42,507 --> 00:30:45,477
So we went back to the studio,
and we said we'd still like to try.

511
00:30:45,577 --> 00:30:48,444
And it was Brad's passion and fervor

512
00:30:48,547 --> 00:30:51,346
to go down there
and to do this movie there

513
00:30:51,450 --> 00:30:53,316
that kind of reignited it.

514
00:30:53,418 --> 00:30:55,182
I'm always amazed
at people's back stories.

515
00:30:55,287 --> 00:30:57,278
I had no idea about the loss

516
00:30:57,389 --> 00:31:00,359
and even pain that people
are carrying with them, in some sense,

517
00:31:00,425 --> 00:31:01,415
or directly.

518
00:31:01,560 --> 00:31:04,120
And I think this is what
the film speaks to.

519
00:31:04,229 --> 00:31:06,789
It was almost a ghost town
when we got there.

520
00:31:06,898 --> 00:31:10,027
We would scout places
and not see a soul.

521
00:31:10,135 --> 00:31:13,696
It became trying to find people
that owned these businesses

522
00:31:13,805 --> 00:31:15,364
that we were trying to get reopened.

523
00:31:15,507 --> 00:31:19,341
I think construction,
probably more than anybody,

524
00:31:19,444 --> 00:31:24,780
felt the brunt of that in terms of
getting materials and getting labor.

525
00:31:24,883 --> 00:31:28,444
Because a lot of people
hadn't come back to the city yet.

526
00:31:29,454 --> 00:31:30,922
It was life-changing

527
00:31:31,022 --> 00:31:35,255
to go there and be there
as it kind of rose from the ashes

528
00:31:35,360 --> 00:31:38,261
and started to become
New Orleans again.

529
00:31:38,363 --> 00:31:41,822
And in the course of the filming,
we saw it change

530
00:31:41,933 --> 00:31:46,166
from, really, still gone,
a year later, after Katrina,

531
00:31:46,271 --> 00:31:51,710
to pretty much thriving again
and alive by the time we were finished.

532
00:31:51,810 --> 00:31:53,141
We were there for 10 months,

533
00:31:53,245 --> 00:31:57,478
and in those 10 months,
it totally evolved

534
00:31:57,582 --> 00:32:00,108
into coming back to life.

535
00:32:15,700 --> 00:32:17,930
Good. Come back even further.

536
00:32:18,203 --> 00:32:20,433
Come back much... Swing left.

537
00:32:22,874 --> 00:32:25,138
And stop. Okay.

538
00:32:28,180 --> 00:32:30,239
Yeah, it's not gonna be
anywhere near far enough.

539
00:32:30,348 --> 00:32:31,474
They're gonna be right here.

540
00:32:31,583 --> 00:32:35,178
I need to get the camera back in
about here. Okay.

541
00:32:35,821 --> 00:32:39,655
I think we started shooting
October, 2006, something like that.

542
00:32:40,492 --> 00:32:43,359
We wrapped May of 2007.

543
00:32:43,462 --> 00:32:46,864
So, 145 days.
Longer than Zodiac by 32 days.

544
00:32:46,965 --> 00:32:51,061
It was eight days longer than Fight Club.

545
00:32:52,370 --> 00:32:55,567
But it was less than Panic Room.
But Panic Room is a different story.

546
00:32:56,508 --> 00:32:58,738
Not only are we talking 200 locations,

547
00:32:58,844 --> 00:33:02,439
but we're also talking a change from
turn-of-the-century to present-day.

548
00:33:02,547 --> 00:33:04,572
Show me what you want, and then
we'll figure out what we can do.

549
00:33:04,683 --> 00:33:07,015
Okay. But anyway, that's what
we're doing for the train.

550
00:33:07,118 --> 00:33:08,984
-All right.
-So these cars go down...

551
00:33:09,087 --> 00:33:12,318
-How many do you want?
-Twelve.

552
00:33:12,524 --> 00:33:15,221
Any time you take a movie that
transcends that kind of time span,

553
00:33:15,760 --> 00:33:19,128
those kinds of cities and locations,
you know it's gonna be big.

554
00:33:19,531 --> 00:33:21,226
-Rolling.
-Boom down.

555
00:33:21,533 --> 00:33:25,936
But with David, he's not a guy
who wants to work 19 hours.

556
00:33:26,538 --> 00:33:29,303
He knows that you get to a point
of diminishing returns.

557
00:33:29,407 --> 00:33:34,106
So if he can do 1 40 days
in 11 -hour days or 1 2-hour days,

558
00:33:35,013 --> 00:33:37,983
you start doing the math
and you start crunching the numbers,

559
00:33:38,083 --> 00:33:40,017
and you're doing a 90-day
or 100-day shoot,

560
00:33:40,118 --> 00:33:42,644
and you're working 15, 16, 17 hours,

561
00:33:42,754 --> 00:33:46,713
it's almost the "Peter pays Paul"
principle, and it's a wash.

562
00:33:48,193 --> 00:33:49,422
For me, there's the beginning,

563
00:33:50,028 --> 00:33:51,996
and then there's the middle
and then there's the end.

564
00:33:52,097 --> 00:33:55,431
So the time didn't feel arduous
in any way.

565
00:33:55,500 --> 00:33:56,592
Cutting.

566
00:34:02,007 --> 00:34:05,204
Walk through the group right now
and say, "Gas mask."

567
00:34:05,310 --> 00:34:07,301
Have them raise their hand,
we'll get them masked up.

568
00:34:07,412 --> 00:34:09,244
Okay, background,
everybody look this way, please.

569
00:34:09,347 --> 00:34:10,678
Guys, look to the...

570
00:34:10,782 --> 00:34:13,717
Walk through and assign gas masks
to certain people.

571
00:34:13,818 --> 00:34:16,287
Remember that,'cause I'm gonna ask
the people with gas masks

572
00:34:16,388 --> 00:34:18,789
to raise their hands
so we can mask them up, okay?

573
00:34:18,890 --> 00:34:21,621
Just walk through and say,
"Gas mask, gas mask," okay?

574
00:34:21,726 --> 00:34:23,455
-All right.
-Go ahead.

575
00:34:23,895 --> 00:34:26,762
Make sure you mention to props
that you have a gas mask, okay,

576
00:34:26,865 --> 00:34:28,424
that you were just assigned.

577
00:34:28,533 --> 00:34:30,331
So, your gun,
you wanna make sure your gun,

578
00:34:30,435 --> 00:34:33,496
in real life, kind of doesn't hit the mud

579
00:34:33,605 --> 00:34:34,629
and the muzzle doesn't get clogged,

580
00:34:34,739 --> 00:34:36,002
'cause if you have to shoot
at somebody,

581
00:34:36,107 --> 00:34:38,542
you got a gun that won't fire,
you're gonna die.

582
00:34:38,643 --> 00:34:41,510
Why don't you
do it with your stunt guys?

583
00:34:41,613 --> 00:34:42,739
-Yes, ma'am.
-By what they're doing,

584
00:34:42,847 --> 00:34:44,747
-I don't want anyone to get hurt.
-Yeah.

585
00:34:44,849 --> 00:34:48,615
It's good that they have the visions
of the bombs, and they'll fog up.

586
00:34:48,687 --> 00:34:49,654
But we'll give

587
00:34:49,754 --> 00:34:51,483
-plenty of gas masks out.
-Okay, that sounds good.

588
00:34:51,590 --> 00:34:55,049
So, did he get...
He could use a gas mask.

589
00:34:55,727 --> 00:35:00,062
-Here we go. Ready and action.
-Okay!

590
00:35:07,839 --> 00:35:09,204
And cut! Got it?

591
00:35:09,307 --> 00:35:11,799
Dave is very particular
in what he wants.

592
00:35:11,910 --> 00:35:13,901
So you need to be able to give him
multiple takes

593
00:35:14,012 --> 00:35:16,344
so that he can get those nuances
he needs to make it just right.

594
00:35:16,448 --> 00:35:17,779
That was awesome. Way to stay with it.

595
00:35:17,882 --> 00:35:19,543
So, even though
it's a flashback sequence,

596
00:35:19,651 --> 00:35:21,983
we still needed to have
20 takes available

597
00:35:22,087 --> 00:35:24,112
that we could do
one right after the other.

598
00:35:24,222 --> 00:35:26,657
So, to be able to build a couple-acre set

599
00:35:26,758 --> 00:35:28,817
that has
this many soldiers running across,

600
00:35:28,927 --> 00:35:32,124
have 20 explosions and 20 takes

601
00:35:32,230 --> 00:35:35,530
and be able to do it in one day
becomes a challenge.

602
00:35:35,634 --> 00:35:37,102
-And roll it.
-Hold on.

603
00:35:38,069 --> 00:35:40,800
Ready and action !

604
00:35:45,910 --> 00:35:47,776
Our principal actors
were three and four feet away

605
00:35:47,879 --> 00:35:49,369
when these explosions were going off

606
00:35:49,481 --> 00:35:52,348
So we built every one of these
into the ground in mortars

607
00:35:52,450 --> 00:35:54,077
so we could control
where the debris went,

608
00:35:54,185 --> 00:35:57,280
using all lightweight materials,
hand-wrapping our own lifters

609
00:35:57,389 --> 00:35:59,221
and using just a flash of light

610
00:35:59,324 --> 00:36:02,385
as opposed to
using liquids like flammable gas

611
00:36:02,494 --> 00:36:03,984
or any of the other combinations

612
00:36:04,095 --> 00:36:05,893
where you could actually
get someone hurt or burned.

613
00:36:05,997 --> 00:36:09,092
To simulate the look,
but still get the action.

614
00:36:09,334 --> 00:36:12,395
These are our two mortar beds
which we're responsible for, C and D.

615
00:36:12,504 --> 00:36:15,838
This is the layout for each individual
mortar in the bed.

616
00:36:15,940 --> 00:36:18,341
And this is the layout of the whole field.

617
00:36:18,443 --> 00:36:21,708
This is where our two beds are,
in correlation to the other.

618
00:36:23,381 --> 00:36:25,406
Between myself
and the stunt coordinator,

619
00:36:25,517 --> 00:36:28,418
we had to work out
where the entire crowd of soldiers,

620
00:36:28,520 --> 00:36:30,989
some extras and some stunt people,
could run through this

621
00:36:31,089 --> 00:36:33,922
but never stepping on
where our explosions were going to be,

622
00:36:34,025 --> 00:36:35,652
and having them go off at exact points

623
00:36:35,760 --> 00:36:38,229
where certain soldiers,
certain individuals

624
00:36:38,329 --> 00:36:40,798
are supposed to be hit at certain times,
at certain cues,

625
00:36:40,899 --> 00:36:43,061
while the camera's on the move
in a trench,

626
00:36:43,168 --> 00:36:44,897
so we could have a camera
at ground height.

627
00:36:45,003 --> 00:36:48,803
So it was a very well choreographed
sequence, very well thought-out.

628
00:36:48,907 --> 00:36:50,739
And all went real well.

629
00:36:51,509 --> 00:36:53,034
Thank you very much. A great hand.

630
00:36:53,144 --> 00:36:54,703
Everyone give a round of applause

631
00:36:54,813 --> 00:36:57,578
for our stuntmen
and our special effects guys.

632
00:36:59,384 --> 00:37:02,183
You know, when you do a film
that's period and realistic

633
00:37:02,287 --> 00:37:05,120
in terms of the sets and the settings,
you don't want to do something

634
00:37:05,757 --> 00:37:08,692
that sort of overtakes
the characters in the story,

635
00:37:08,793 --> 00:37:10,557
but you want to do something
that supports them.

636
00:37:10,662 --> 00:37:12,061
That's what I see my job as.

637
00:37:12,163 --> 00:37:15,155
And then we talked about doing
some flats down the walkway.

638
00:37:15,266 --> 00:37:16,893
Okay, but where's our bench?

639
00:37:17,001 --> 00:37:19,629
Now, this is what we were gonna do
on the exterior.

640
00:37:20,505 --> 00:37:22,132
All the original sconces there

641
00:37:22,240 --> 00:37:25,141
and maybe something just right up
above on the ceiling there.

642
00:37:25,243 --> 00:37:27,337
And there's so many other elements
in expressing that.

643
00:37:27,445 --> 00:37:30,107
Where the camera is placed,
what lens is used,

644
00:37:30,215 --> 00:37:33,185
what they see in the room, how much
set dressing is left in the room,

645
00:37:33,284 --> 00:37:36,914
how much isn't. A room can feel lonely
with one or two pieces.

646
00:37:37,021 --> 00:37:41,481
There are many things that contribute
to it. The lighting, and the actors.

647
00:37:41,860 --> 00:37:45,160
Yeah. So you bring him in here,
and he goes this way,

648
00:37:45,263 --> 00:37:47,095
and then he walks along here,

649
00:37:47,198 --> 00:37:49,633
and then he stops
and he goes through that door,

650
00:37:49,734 --> 00:37:53,432
he comes in and this is her place.

651
00:37:53,538 --> 00:37:54,972
You know, it's one of many elements

652
00:37:55,073 --> 00:37:57,440
and that's what's
so fun about filmmaking, I think,

653
00:37:57,542 --> 00:37:59,670
is that in the end,
when you see the film,

654
00:37:59,778 --> 00:38:02,440
you go, "Wow,
all those pieces came together."

655
00:38:05,283 --> 00:38:06,808
The interior of the train station,

656
00:38:06,918 --> 00:38:11,947
that was a build with blue screen
for set extension, CG set extension.

657
00:38:13,958 --> 00:38:16,859
We researched train stations,
in general, of that period,

658
00:38:16,961 --> 00:38:19,658
and we sort of just combined
some different elements

659
00:38:19,764 --> 00:38:20,788
that we felt comfortable with,

660
00:38:20,899 --> 00:38:24,062
that sort of evoked the feeling
that we wanted to present.

661
00:38:24,169 --> 00:38:25,694
And roll, please.

662
00:38:26,237 --> 00:38:27,727
I hope you enjoy my clock.

663
00:38:27,839 --> 00:38:29,603
-Good.
-Curtain !

664
00:38:34,979 --> 00:38:38,108
We looked at period clocks,
in particular some French period clocks,

665
00:38:38,216 --> 00:38:40,844
because the clockmaker himself
was French,

666
00:38:40,952 --> 00:38:43,614
and we felt that there should be
some sort of influence to it.

667
00:38:43,721 --> 00:38:45,189
But again, it was a process of

668
00:38:45,290 --> 00:38:49,090
drawing up several hundred, probably,
different clocks

669
00:38:49,194 --> 00:38:52,425
and sort of fine-tuning
what we wanted it to look like.

670
00:38:52,530 --> 00:38:55,625
And make it as wide as you can.

671
00:38:56,968 --> 00:38:58,595
Okay, here we go.

672
00:38:59,003 --> 00:39:00,164
It's running backwards !

673
00:39:00,271 --> 00:39:02,035
Earl, let me see your point.

674
00:39:02,140 --> 00:39:05,201
-I'm pointing at the banner.
-Yeah, a little lower.

675
00:39:05,877 --> 00:39:07,777
-It's running backwards !
-There you go.

676
00:39:07,879 --> 00:39:09,210
-Good.
-Yeah.

677
00:39:09,314 --> 00:39:11,908
Ninety-eight percent
of shooting is compromised,

678
00:39:12,884 --> 00:39:15,251
because we could get a little glint
in the glasses,

679
00:39:15,353 --> 00:39:16,650
we could get just a little liner,

680
00:39:16,754 --> 00:39:19,689
we could do all these things
and we just never have time.

681
00:39:19,791 --> 00:39:22,192
But the broad brush-strokes are right.

682
00:39:22,293 --> 00:39:24,728
That looks nice. That looks nice.

683
00:39:25,897 --> 00:39:26,887
Flash.

684
00:39:28,800 --> 00:39:29,790
Here we go.

685
00:39:36,107 --> 00:39:38,838
One of the things we had to make
look real in the film were the fireworks,

686
00:39:38,943 --> 00:39:41,344
period fireworks, 1917, Armistice Day.

687
00:39:41,446 --> 00:39:44,472
So we're trying to do fireworks
in a town that's built out of wood,

688
00:39:44,582 --> 00:39:47,017
where they don't want any flame,
any spark of any kind.

689
00:39:47,752 --> 00:39:52,087
So we went out and tried to find
the most period, realistic.

690
00:39:52,190 --> 00:39:55,285
They still make some of the same kinds
of fireworks they did

691
00:39:55,393 --> 00:39:56,485
at the turn of the century.

692
00:39:56,594 --> 00:39:58,323
We were gonna try and do
additional fireworks,

693
00:39:58,429 --> 00:39:59,828
actual mortar bursts into the air,

694
00:39:59,931 --> 00:40:02,093
but the historical society
of New Orleans said,

695
00:40:02,200 --> 00:40:04,100
"Not over our wood city."

696
00:40:04,202 --> 00:40:05,692
So all that's gonna be CG.

697
00:40:05,937 --> 00:40:08,497
So, basically,
with Roman candles. Ready...

698
00:40:08,606 --> 00:40:11,473
You'll hear, on action,
a beat after action.

699
00:40:12,510 --> 00:40:14,842
-Action.
-Roman candle.

700
00:40:15,246 --> 00:40:16,236
Background !

701
00:40:21,152 --> 00:40:23,382
With this, too, it was a period movie.

702
00:40:23,488 --> 00:40:26,116
So that means wigs for all the extras,

703
00:40:26,224 --> 00:40:28,989
and haircuts
and mustaches and fittings,

704
00:40:29,494 --> 00:40:33,397
and cars, 1919 cars,
they didn't have coolling systems.

705
00:40:33,498 --> 00:40:35,762
So they would overheat
in the middle of the shot,

706
00:40:35,867 --> 00:40:39,098
and you'd run up to an extra and say,
"Don't stop and look at the camera.

707
00:40:39,203 --> 00:40:41,194
"Act like you're driving
and your car overheated.

708
00:40:41,306 --> 00:40:43,604
"Get out and keep it going
until you hear'cut.'

709
00:40:43,708 --> 00:40:45,107
"Stay in that moment."

710
00:40:45,176 --> 00:40:46,610
Background !

711
00:40:48,279 --> 00:40:51,806
Extras tend to do silent film acting,
really just over the top.

712
00:40:51,916 --> 00:40:55,682
And you finally just tell them,
"Hey, guys, less is more. Less is more."

713
00:40:55,787 --> 00:40:57,516
With David, you know,
you're on take 15,

714
00:40:57,622 --> 00:41:00,250
and they're bored already,
and that's when it's genuine.

715
00:41:00,358 --> 00:41:04,386
Take one and two, they're all smiles
and happy and overacting.

716
00:41:04,462 --> 00:41:05,793
USA, baby!

717
00:41:06,798 --> 00:41:08,630
But then it gets to take 1 5 and 1 6,

718
00:41:08,733 --> 00:41:11,361
and it's been beaten out of them
and they're good.

719
00:41:12,036 --> 00:41:13,231
See it again.

720
00:41:17,475 --> 00:41:20,240
-You beat them out of the way.
-Did I?

721
00:41:20,345 --> 00:41:23,679
-"Out of my way! Out of my way! "
-"I've got an ugly baby."

722
00:41:24,015 --> 00:41:25,449
Kind of great.

723
00:41:25,550 --> 00:41:29,282
Bob, make Ashley run
a little bit more crazy.

724
00:41:31,155 --> 00:41:34,147
H is shadow is not spectacular enough
for Jason.

725
00:41:34,659 --> 00:41:37,890
I'd met Fincher and Ceán socially
through Brad.

726
00:41:37,996 --> 00:41:39,964
I met Brad during Snatch.

727
00:41:40,064 --> 00:41:43,523
And, you know, he's Fincher
and Brad's Brad,

728
00:41:43,634 --> 00:41:45,500
and they're pretty good at what they do.

729
00:41:45,603 --> 00:41:48,766
And I was just this kind of English guy
that Brad knew who's an actor.

730
00:41:48,873 --> 00:41:51,706
So l sort of found the script,
got hold of the script,

731
00:41:51,809 --> 00:41:54,369
and put myself on tape for it
and sent it out to Fincher.

732
00:41:54,812 --> 00:41:57,213
The honest truth, I didn't think
I'd ever get a chance to get the part,

733
00:41:57,315 --> 00:42:00,478
but I just wanted him to know that
I could act and that that's what I did,

734
00:42:00,585 --> 00:42:01,950
rather than just be that English bloke

735
00:42:02,053 --> 00:42:04,681
who's at those dinners
who drank too much.

736
00:42:04,789 --> 00:42:07,952
And so he looked at it and he asked me
to come out and see him.

737
00:42:08,059 --> 00:42:10,824
And I kind of knew that the studios
wouldn't necessarily be interested

738
00:42:10,928 --> 00:42:12,521
in me playing that part.
So when I came out,

739
00:42:12,630 --> 00:42:14,928
I knew he'd sort of have my back
as much as he could as a friend,

740
00:42:15,033 --> 00:42:16,797
but I thought he was gonna instruct me

741
00:42:16,901 --> 00:42:20,565
about what I had to do in order to
have a chance of getting the part.

742
00:42:20,671 --> 00:42:23,663
So I was chatting away to him,
we were here and he took me through...

743
00:42:23,775 --> 00:42:26,437
It was like, "Come and have a look
at what you could've won.'

744
00:42:26,544 --> 00:42:29,138
Because he kind of took me through
all the designs and through props

745
00:42:29,247 --> 00:42:32,114
and showing me pictures of the sets
and Lake Pontchartrain.

746
00:42:32,216 --> 00:42:36,585
And I was just, in my head, going,
"This is agony. It's making it worse."

747
00:42:37,055 --> 00:42:38,216
Stand by.

748
00:42:38,322 --> 00:42:40,188
Hey, Flemyng,
you're starting on the other side.

749
00:42:40,291 --> 00:42:41,588
You're left to right, dude.

750
00:42:42,226 --> 00:42:44,820
And then at the end of the day, literally,
we spent six hours together,

751
00:42:44,929 --> 00:42:46,363
at the end of the day, I said,
"Look, David,

752
00:42:46,464 --> 00:42:48,398
"what do I have to do
to improve my chances?"

753
00:42:48,499 --> 00:42:51,594
"Oh, no, you got the part." I was like...

754
00:42:51,702 --> 00:42:55,366
So, that's what happened
and it's been an incredible ride.

755
00:42:55,807 --> 00:42:58,538
I got involved when I didn't even know
I was getting involved.

756
00:42:59,110 --> 00:43:02,978
Laray Mayfield apparently
had gone to see Hustle & Flow,

757
00:43:03,081 --> 00:43:05,675
and she called David Fincher.

758
00:43:05,783 --> 00:43:08,878
I think at that time
the project wasn't even green lit yet.

759
00:43:08,986 --> 00:43:11,284
She calls David Fincher
in the middle of the film

760
00:43:11,389 --> 00:43:12,788
and she says, "I found Queenie."

761
00:43:12,890 --> 00:43:15,086
This is all happening while I'm at home,

762
00:43:15,193 --> 00:43:18,686
poor and without a job,
thinking it's the end of the world.

763
00:43:18,796 --> 00:43:22,130
And I'm having this huge garage sale,
my agent calls and she's like,

764
00:43:22,233 --> 00:43:24,861
"You have to go in tomorrow
and meet Fincher. It's on a Saturday.

765
00:43:24,969 --> 00:43:27,267
I'm like, "I'm having a garage sale,
how will I..."

766
00:43:28,439 --> 00:43:32,103
I'm no idiot. You know,
David Fincher, garage sale, come on.

767
00:43:32,210 --> 00:43:33,905
So I go in, I'm like,

768
00:43:34,011 --> 00:43:37,072
"Okay, who are the usual suspects
I'm gonna see in the waiting room?"

769
00:43:37,181 --> 00:43:41,084
Nobody. It's just me.
She takes me right in to David Fincher.

770
00:43:41,185 --> 00:43:44,712
And I read it a couple of times,
he and I basically chit-chat.

771
00:43:44,822 --> 00:43:46,756
And after I finished the last scene,

772
00:43:46,858 --> 00:43:49,418
he's like, "So, have you ever been
in prosthetics before?"

773
00:43:49,527 --> 00:43:51,996
So, in my mind, I'm trying not to lose it,

774
00:43:52,096 --> 00:43:55,726
because I'm like,
"Okay, is he telling me I got the job?"

775
00:43:56,200 --> 00:43:58,567
Apparently he was.

776
00:43:58,669 --> 00:44:01,036
I mean, you know what I mean?
It was just something that I said.

777
00:44:01,139 --> 00:44:05,372
It's interesting. I talked to somebody
15, 20 years ago about it.

778
00:44:05,476 --> 00:44:07,945
They were talking about
another big actor at the time.

779
00:44:08,813 --> 00:44:15,150
I read the script and I was just like,
"How can you build all this stuff?

780
00:44:15,253 --> 00:44:19,156
"How are you gonna do
somebody 76 years old,

781
00:44:19,824 --> 00:44:23,089
"three, four feet high,
and the actor and match it all?"

782
00:44:23,194 --> 00:44:26,255
And it never happened
because you just couldn't pull it off.

783
00:44:26,364 --> 00:44:29,163
So, it's pretty amazing that
after all these years,

784
00:44:29,267 --> 00:44:32,703
and now with the technology,
it was the perfect time.

785
00:44:32,803 --> 00:44:35,204
It's the type of film you can't turn down,
no matter what,

786
00:44:35,306 --> 00:44:38,571
and it's the biggest film
I've ever done, makeup-wise.

787
00:44:38,676 --> 00:44:41,737
We did a mechanical baby which is
used in the beginning of the film

788
00:44:41,846 --> 00:44:43,041
when he's a young newborn.

789
00:44:43,147 --> 00:44:45,844
And my idea was to do it
like a Shar-Pei dog.

790
00:44:45,950 --> 00:44:48,351
Just did all these little
Shar-Pei wrinkles all over him

791
00:44:48,452 --> 00:44:51,353
and put age spots on him,
it was really fun.

792
00:44:51,455 --> 00:44:53,549
I remember
when I was doing my makeup test,

793
00:44:53,658 --> 00:44:55,422
they were building
the animatronic baby.

794
00:44:55,526 --> 00:44:57,722
And I remember, I was like,
"I wanna see this baby."

795
00:44:57,828 --> 00:44:58,886
Because I like to see

796
00:44:58,996 --> 00:45:01,988
so I can really fall in love with
what I'm gonna be working with

797
00:45:02,099 --> 00:45:04,158
since it's not gonna be a human
or a real baby.

798
00:45:04,268 --> 00:45:06,362
They have the baby sitting on a pole,

799
00:45:06,470 --> 00:45:08,302
and the pole is, like,
in the baby's rectum,

800
00:45:08,406 --> 00:45:10,033
that's like, "Wait a minute."

801
00:45:10,141 --> 00:45:12,337
Then I walk around the table
and I see the face,

802
00:45:12,443 --> 00:45:14,969
and I'm like, "This thing is ugly."

803
00:45:16,614 --> 00:45:17,979
It was hideous.

804
00:45:18,082 --> 00:45:20,744
And every day I would go back
just so I could attach

805
00:45:20,851 --> 00:45:23,149
and the more and more
I looked at the baby,

806
00:45:23,254 --> 00:45:25,882
the more and more
it started to look cute.

807
00:45:25,990 --> 00:45:28,516
And I guess it's so ugly that it's cute.

808
00:45:28,626 --> 00:45:30,492
You know those little fish
with the big, big eyes

809
00:45:30,595 --> 00:45:33,530
and after a while
you're like, "Oh, he's cute."

810
00:45:38,369 --> 00:45:39,962
Boy, that does look like Brad now.

811
00:45:40,071 --> 00:45:41,732
-From the bellybutton down.
-Yeah.

812
00:45:41,839 --> 00:45:44,399
Okay, so what lens is that?

813
00:45:44,508 --> 00:45:47,739
-That's a 21. Okay.
-Go to a 20.

814
00:45:47,845 --> 00:45:51,406
So, we need to take a little bit
of the sheen out of the forehead,

815
00:45:51,515 --> 00:45:53,040
just a teeny bit, just a little much.

816
00:45:53,150 --> 00:45:55,676
Yeah, we need to add a little bit in here
and a little bit here.

817
00:45:55,786 --> 00:45:58,187
Then we need to take this up
'cause this is too wet-looking.

818
00:45:58,256 --> 00:45:59,417
Okay.

819
00:46:01,459 --> 00:46:03,393
-There you go.
-And action.

820
00:46:05,496 --> 00:46:09,194
He shows all the deterioration,
the infirmities, not of a newborn,

821
00:46:09,300 --> 00:46:12,497
but of a man well in his 80s
on the way to his grave.

822
00:46:12,603 --> 00:46:17,234
This script, to me, is the ultimate
meaning of unconditional love.

823
00:46:17,675 --> 00:46:20,110
And that's a gift from God that we have.

824
00:46:20,211 --> 00:46:22,737
That's basically what we're
put on this planet Earth to do,

825
00:46:22,847 --> 00:46:24,713
is to give love.

826
00:46:24,815 --> 00:46:27,182
At the end of our cycle, what do you do?

827
00:46:27,285 --> 00:46:30,050
You move on from the flesh,
so that's life.

828
00:46:30,588 --> 00:46:32,818
But I think the best part of life is

829
00:46:32,923 --> 00:46:35,551
loving as much as you can
while you're living.

830
00:46:35,660 --> 00:46:36,684
-Cut it.
-Good.

831
00:46:36,794 --> 00:46:38,558
N ice work, guys. Good, good, good.

832
00:46:38,663 --> 00:46:40,062
Okay, now unpack that.

833
00:46:42,233 --> 00:46:45,100
I was probably the first one
that did the Viper stuff with David.

834
00:46:45,202 --> 00:46:48,934
Xelibri was the first spot that we did,
and I tested the camera.

835
00:46:49,607 --> 00:46:53,566
And then we did a bunch after that,
the Heineken "Beer Run" spots.

836
00:46:53,644 --> 00:46:54,668
Roll.

837
00:46:54,779 --> 00:46:58,147
David has used the Viper for,
I think, going on four years now,

838
00:46:58,249 --> 00:46:59,375
probably, with his commercials.

839
00:46:59,483 --> 00:47:01,918
So it's a tool that
he really knows very well.

840
00:47:02,019 --> 00:47:05,216
It's been very dependable.
It worked very well on Zodiac.

841
00:47:05,323 --> 00:47:07,621
And when it came to
working on Benjamin Button,

842
00:47:08,059 --> 00:47:10,790
as with any project
we always revisit what we've used

843
00:47:10,895 --> 00:47:13,592
and to see if there's anything
greater out there,

844
00:47:13,698 --> 00:47:17,362
anything better, anything more unique
that relates to the current project.

845
00:47:17,468 --> 00:47:21,530
Okay, and chin up.
And then some intense acting.

846
00:47:21,972 --> 00:47:26,534
Surprise and laughter. Cut it.
Ali right, good.

847
00:47:26,911 --> 00:47:29,573
We were thinking about trying to
shoot 4K, so we looked at the Dalsa.

848
00:47:29,680 --> 00:47:33,173
The Red wasn't ready at the time,
the D20 wasn't ready as well.

849
00:47:33,284 --> 00:47:35,309
I mean, we needed multiple cameras.

850
00:47:35,419 --> 00:47:40,550
And there was like one D20 ready,
so we didn't make that an option at all.

851
00:47:41,258 --> 00:47:43,522
We actually did go and test
the Dalsa camera

852
00:47:43,627 --> 00:47:45,959
which was still, in some ways,
under development,

853
00:47:46,063 --> 00:47:50,125
and it still hasn't quite matured,
but it was attractive in a few ways.

854
00:47:50,234 --> 00:47:52,328
One of them is that it had
a larger file size.

855
00:47:52,436 --> 00:47:55,497
It was somewhere between 3K and 4K,
depending upon how you measured

856
00:47:55,606 --> 00:47:57,870
and what lenses you used
and that sort of thing.

857
00:47:57,975 --> 00:47:58,999
So that was one factor.

858
00:47:59,110 --> 00:48:00,544
The other thing that's different
about the Dalsa

859
00:48:00,644 --> 00:48:02,112
is that the sensor is larger.

860
00:48:02,213 --> 00:48:04,648
The Viper sensor is really almost

861
00:48:04,749 --> 00:48:07,343
the equivalent of shooting
a 16-millimeter movie.

862
00:48:07,451 --> 00:48:09,180
So that's a different look.

863
00:48:09,286 --> 00:48:12,051
Good. Play it back. Check this out.
It's looking pretty good.

864
00:48:12,156 --> 00:48:16,389
Sometimes, it's not about 4K or 2K
or 35 or two-thirds chip,

865
00:48:16,494 --> 00:48:20,362
it's actually, "How's it look in the end?"
I think that's just kind of more important.

866
00:48:20,464 --> 00:48:22,796
And the Viper looked good.

867
00:48:24,468 --> 00:48:27,529
People are saying, like,
"You should've shot Red."

868
00:48:27,638 --> 00:48:29,766
I saw Red and there was issues,

869
00:48:31,876 --> 00:48:34,868
that I need more latitude
that was not presented there.

870
00:48:34,979 --> 00:48:38,711
Many factors came into
the final decision for the Viper.

871
00:48:38,816 --> 00:48:41,911
But probably,
the one that was the tipping point

872
00:48:42,019 --> 00:48:43,885
is actually the familiarity with it

873
00:48:43,988 --> 00:48:48,516
and that we had gotten so good at it
on Zodiac.

874
00:48:48,626 --> 00:48:50,685
And David was still happy
with the look of it

875
00:48:50,795 --> 00:48:53,355
that there was not a great incentive
to change that,

876
00:48:53,464 --> 00:48:57,560
because despite the size of the budget,
the budget was extremely tight,

877
00:48:57,668 --> 00:48:59,796
and so that little margin of error

878
00:48:59,904 --> 00:49:02,168
might be the difference of
using a camera we know

879
00:49:02,273 --> 00:49:03,798
versus one that we don't know.

880
00:49:03,908 --> 00:49:07,208
Feel that little moment,'cause
I wanna play it in the close-up outside,

881
00:49:07,311 --> 00:49:09,746
you go, "What is he gonna do?
Is he gonna go bullshit or something?"

882
00:49:09,847 --> 00:49:11,110
Or he kind of goes...

883
00:49:12,082 --> 00:49:13,709
God bless you.

884
00:49:13,784 --> 00:49:15,218
He's seven.

885
00:49:15,686 --> 00:49:20,453
In the revival tent, where we're using
these 60-watt old-fashioned bulbs,

886
00:49:20,558 --> 00:49:25,155
the period-made gloves kind of
the way they did in the old days.

887
00:49:25,262 --> 00:49:28,994
So, "Okay I'll let this room light itself
with 60-watt bulbs.

888
00:49:29,099 --> 00:49:30,328
"Should be no issue."

889
00:49:30,434 --> 00:49:32,801
I mean,
I've never had issue on film before.

890
00:49:32,903 --> 00:49:34,962
But when I get there on the day

891
00:49:35,072 --> 00:49:36,801
and it's too late for me
to change anything,

892
00:49:36,907 --> 00:49:41,640
I go to the gaffer, I go like,
"Chris, are these ail 100%?"

893
00:49:41,745 --> 00:49:45,545
And he goes,
"Yeah, yeah, they're all 100%."

894
00:49:47,051 --> 00:49:49,452
"Shit, I don't have enough light."

895
00:49:50,120 --> 00:49:52,987
There's nothing I can do. This is
the whole idea for lighting this thing.

896
00:49:53,090 --> 00:49:56,993
It was like, these bulbs light the scene
and we're calling it this.

897
00:49:57,094 --> 00:49:59,995
I don't do anything anywhere, this is it.

898
00:50:00,364 --> 00:50:02,298
And I pulled it out,

899
00:50:02,399 --> 00:50:04,629
put them all on Ferrex,
running them at like 140 volts,

900
00:50:04,735 --> 00:50:07,136
and we're just trying to get every single
ounce of light from this thing.

901
00:50:07,238 --> 00:50:08,501
I think i might've increased the shutter,

902
00:50:08,606 --> 00:50:12,770
opened a little bit more from the 1 80
to the 230 or something like that.

903
00:50:12,877 --> 00:50:16,677
I asked, "really? These are 60 watts?"
You open them up.

904
00:50:16,780 --> 00:50:19,681
I mean, normally you could
light a scene like that comfortably

905
00:50:19,783 --> 00:50:24,016
with, like, 25 watts standard,
I mean, you'd be totally fine.

906
00:50:24,121 --> 00:50:27,853
But that one was just...
That was a little bit of... Oh, God.

907
00:50:27,958 --> 00:50:32,088
I need you to pay a little bit more
attention to this area of the room.

908
00:50:32,196 --> 00:50:35,723
Project into here because
it's so nice that we have you on both,

909
00:50:35,833 --> 00:50:39,326
you know, kind of looking over
the congregation here like that.

910
00:50:39,436 --> 00:50:43,498
The first day of shooting for me
in New Orleans was the revival tent.

911
00:50:43,607 --> 00:50:48,238
And for some reason that day
it was extremely cold.

912
00:50:48,345 --> 00:50:51,315
The wind was whipping.
I thought Katrina was back.

913
00:50:52,483 --> 00:50:56,010
I think I got sick that first day, too,
because it was so cold.

914
00:50:56,120 --> 00:50:58,111
So, Lance,
let's see you pushing Taraji back

915
00:50:58,222 --> 00:51:00,714
and let me just see Taraji fall...

916
00:51:01,358 --> 00:51:03,156
-Praise God !
-Praise God !

917
00:51:03,227 --> 00:51:04,194
Hallelujah !

918
00:51:04,295 --> 00:51:05,592
In the name of God's glory...

919
00:51:05,663 --> 00:51:06,755
Rise up !

920
00:51:07,131 --> 00:51:08,462
Forget the wheelchair.

921
00:51:08,566 --> 00:51:10,694
-He's gonna walk without anything.
-Right.

922
00:51:11,502 --> 00:51:15,632
It's not like he's gonna go
from a wheelchair to a crutch. No.

923
00:51:16,540 --> 00:51:18,838
We're gonna bypass that.
We're going right to running.

924
00:51:18,909 --> 00:51:19,899
Come on. Walk.

925
00:51:21,111 --> 00:51:22,772
Walk on. Yes.

926
00:51:24,148 --> 00:51:27,641
That's right, Benjamin.
Let the Lord carry...

927
00:51:27,985 --> 00:51:33,116
I actually developed a certain love
for each different stand-in,

928
00:51:33,223 --> 00:51:34,213
which only helped

929
00:51:34,325 --> 00:51:37,727
when they superimposed Brad's face
later because it looks consistent.

930
00:51:37,795 --> 00:51:39,160
Hallelujah !

931
00:51:42,967 --> 00:51:45,527
I'm a mother and my son is 1 4 now,

932
00:51:45,636 --> 00:51:50,870
so you have different phases
of your relationship.

933
00:51:50,975 --> 00:51:52,443
And that's just how it reads.

934
00:51:52,543 --> 00:51:56,104
The shortest guy, Peter,
I had a certain love for him.

935
00:51:56,213 --> 00:51:58,307
And then the next guy, Robert,
when he came in,

936
00:51:58,415 --> 00:51:59,746
then it turned into something else.

937
00:51:59,850 --> 00:52:03,013
It reads like just a normal
mother-son relationship.

938
00:52:03,120 --> 00:52:05,521
We may go there, Mama, tomorrow.
Now, go to sleep.

939
00:52:05,623 --> 00:52:06,784
You would never know that

940
00:52:06,890 --> 00:52:09,655
"She's acting opposite
someone that's not Brad."

941
00:52:09,760 --> 00:52:12,752
Okay, and you're reaching up
for comfort. And action.

942
00:52:14,665 --> 00:52:16,463
Too fast. Once again.

943
00:52:17,701 --> 00:52:19,567
And action.

944
00:52:22,106 --> 00:52:24,097
It might be more difficult
for them because

945
00:52:24,208 --> 00:52:26,905
you're looking at somebody like me
with all these nodes and blue dots.

946
00:52:27,011 --> 00:52:32,575
And if they were looking for available
stimulus in some aspect like that,

947
00:52:32,683 --> 00:52:38,554
it might be confusing, might be irritating
for them to look at, or just funny.

948
00:52:38,622 --> 00:52:40,112
There you go.

949
00:52:40,391 --> 00:52:42,120
Okay, no. Eye line's too wide.

950
00:52:45,963 --> 00:52:47,795
One of the biggest issues we had

951
00:52:47,898 --> 00:52:49,866
along the lines
of a location manager's problem

952
00:52:49,967 --> 00:52:52,493
is that this is a city that had 800 people

953
00:52:52,603 --> 00:52:54,697
in the public works department
before the hurricane.

954
00:52:54,805 --> 00:52:59,140
And on November 1 5, 2005,
they had 1 4.

955
00:52:59,743 --> 00:53:02,371
Because they had a zero tax base,
and they couldn't pay them.

956
00:53:02,479 --> 00:53:05,540
So they literally laid off 700 people.

957
00:53:05,916 --> 00:53:09,409
So public works for a location manager,
you so rely on them.

958
00:53:09,520 --> 00:53:12,820
They're the people that deal with
your street signs and all that,

959
00:53:12,923 --> 00:53:14,584
but I'm also dealing
with a period picture.

960
00:53:14,692 --> 00:53:18,390
There's no parking meters
and electronic parking kiosks

961
00:53:18,495 --> 00:53:20,156
and those new Cobra Heads.

962
00:53:20,264 --> 00:53:22,596
These are all things that
we would normally pay

963
00:53:22,700 --> 00:53:25,192
a city's public works department
to remove,

964
00:53:25,302 --> 00:53:29,205
and we'd put up our fake things.
Well, there is nobody to pay.

965
00:53:29,306 --> 00:53:32,833
So it was a huge problem and it lasted
straight through all of production.

966
00:53:32,943 --> 00:53:34,672
We'd have to get our own contractors,

967
00:53:34,778 --> 00:53:37,372
some of them staffed by
former public works workers,

968
00:53:37,481 --> 00:53:38,471
doing as much as we can

969
00:53:38,582 --> 00:53:41,745
so David had to do as little as possible
in post.

970
00:53:41,852 --> 00:53:45,117
He already had so much to do in post,
anyways, in visual effects.

971
00:53:45,222 --> 00:53:49,056
All right, let's clear. This is picture.
Everybody, clear, please.

972
00:53:49,460 --> 00:53:50,427
I'm ready.

973
00:53:50,527 --> 00:53:52,017
Sun should hold now for about a minute.

974
00:53:52,129 --> 00:53:53,528
Thank you. Here we go.

975
00:53:54,231 --> 00:53:56,063
Officer Kaufman, lock it up, please.

976
00:53:56,266 --> 00:53:57,927
David, effects, you cool?

977
00:53:59,169 --> 00:54:02,366
In the script it has a simple scene,
calling for a trolley car.

978
00:54:02,439 --> 00:54:03,429
I go, "Great.

979
00:54:03,540 --> 00:54:06,999
"I'll get a camera, they'll hop
on the trolley car, have a nice day."

980
00:54:07,111 --> 00:54:09,842
No way.
Trolley cars were out of commission.

981
00:54:10,814 --> 00:54:13,476
The catenary system
was badly damaged in Katrina.

982
00:54:13,584 --> 00:54:15,746
And then it was finished off
at Hurricane Rita,

983
00:54:15,853 --> 00:54:17,514
which had much higher winds

984
00:54:17,621 --> 00:54:20,215
that hit right there
in the middle of New Orleans.

985
00:54:20,324 --> 00:54:21,917
So there was no running streetcar

986
00:54:22,025 --> 00:54:24,392
in a movie
that had five or six streetcar scenes.

987
00:54:24,495 --> 00:54:26,725
I mean, it's iconic for the city.

988
00:54:26,830 --> 00:54:29,458
So that was another thing
that the special effects guys,

989
00:54:29,566 --> 00:54:33,332
and in some part the location team,
but everyone had to overcome.

990
00:54:34,304 --> 00:54:37,604
So we had a three-block sequence
of a trolley car

991
00:54:37,708 --> 00:54:40,336
that has to start, stop, run and take off

992
00:54:40,444 --> 00:54:43,277
as if it was fully controlled
by the overhead wires.

993
00:54:43,380 --> 00:54:47,010
We shut down three different
crossovers on St. Charles Boulevard

994
00:54:47,117 --> 00:54:49,279
and put cable down on the ground

995
00:54:49,386 --> 00:54:52,356
so we could pull the streetcar
back and forth in the shot

996
00:54:52,456 --> 00:54:55,585
and it could stop on a dime,
like a ski lift,

997
00:54:55,926 --> 00:55:00,159
which costs a lot more than just having
the streetcar go by and do the shot.

998
00:55:01,098 --> 00:55:03,760
We couldn't tow it with another vehicle
because it would be in the shot.

999
00:55:03,867 --> 00:55:05,562
It would be too hard
to remove a tow vehicle

1000
00:55:05,669 --> 00:55:07,194
because the camera watches it
come into frame,

1001
00:55:07,304 --> 00:55:08,931
cross frame
and then follow out of frame.

1002
00:55:09,006 --> 00:55:09,973
Roll, please.

1003
00:55:10,073 --> 00:55:13,509
So we ran about a 600-foot,
half-inch cable through a pulley system

1004
00:55:13,610 --> 00:55:15,408
run by a 100-horsepower motor.

1005
00:55:15,512 --> 00:55:17,947
The cable car weighs
about 45, 000 pounds

1006
00:55:18,048 --> 00:55:20,483
and had to get going about
12 miles an hour.

1007
00:55:20,584 --> 00:55:24,020
So, you figure what it takes to start and
stop this mass once it's moving

1008
00:55:24,121 --> 00:55:27,216
and to stop it within one foot of
where our character's supposed to be,

1009
00:55:27,324 --> 00:55:28,291
because he's supposed to be
able to walk

1010
00:55:28,392 --> 00:55:31,157
and lift his foot up and step right onto it
without a pause.

1011
00:55:31,261 --> 00:55:33,958
Not catch up to it, not walk back to it.

1012
00:55:34,064 --> 00:55:36,328
And then have it
take off again right away.

1013
00:55:36,433 --> 00:55:38,925
So, to build that whole system

1014
00:55:39,036 --> 00:55:42,529
just for that sequence
was completely unexpected.

1015
00:55:42,639 --> 00:55:48,078
I thought, "Heck, we'll tell the trolley guy
to run the trolley car." Didn't happen.

1016
00:55:53,383 --> 00:55:57,081
Back in the spring of 2005,
before Katrina,

1017
00:55:57,187 --> 00:55:59,554
David came out specifically
to help pick out

1018
00:55:59,656 --> 00:56:02,182
what was gonna be our main location.

1019
00:56:07,097 --> 00:56:08,997
-Love this.
-Yeah, that's the old style.

1020
00:56:09,099 --> 00:56:10,430
-That's what we want.
-Yeah.

1021
00:56:10,534 --> 00:56:12,662
We looked at a couple examples,
David kind of liked them,

1022
00:56:12,769 --> 00:56:15,295
but there was always
one or two things wrong,

1023
00:56:15,405 --> 00:56:20,172
and we literally got in our car
and drove around the Garden District.

1024
00:56:20,510 --> 00:56:24,947
And he saw two or three houses
that he wanted further investigation.

1025
00:56:25,048 --> 00:56:28,074
And one of them was a house
at 2707 Coliseum,

1026
00:56:28,185 --> 00:56:30,279
intersection of Fourth and Coliseum.

1027
00:56:30,387 --> 00:56:33,482
We went up and knocked on the door,
there was nothing.

1028
00:56:33,590 --> 00:56:36,423
You could see that
nobody really lived in that place.

1029
00:56:36,526 --> 00:56:37,584
There was still furniture in there,

1030
00:56:37,694 --> 00:56:39,128
but there was sheets
over all the furniture.

1031
00:56:39,229 --> 00:56:40,697
So it was our mission to find out
who owned it

1032
00:56:40,797 --> 00:56:43,789
and how I can get into it and at least
photograph it to see if it'll work.

1033
00:56:43,901 --> 00:56:48,031
And it ends up being Mrs. Nolan, who
through her husband's side of the family

1034
00:56:48,138 --> 00:56:50,971
had occupied that house
since the 1870s,

1035
00:56:51,074 --> 00:56:53,600
one of the longest continuous
single family ownerships

1036
00:56:53,710 --> 00:56:55,508
of one of the houses
in the Garden District.

1037
00:56:55,612 --> 00:56:58,013
She was in her 80s
and had evacuated the house

1038
00:56:58,115 --> 00:57:00,379
because of Katrina
and gone to Houston.

1039
00:57:00,484 --> 00:57:04,011
So now we chased her down to her
youngest daughter's house in Houston,

1040
00:57:04,121 --> 00:57:06,112
and they were kind of hesitant.

1041
00:57:06,223 --> 00:57:07,349
That's when I went on the Internet,

1042
00:57:07,457 --> 00:57:10,620
found an original edition
of the jazz series,

1043
00:57:10,727 --> 00:57:11,956
with a special little bookmark

1044
00:57:12,062 --> 00:57:15,032
where the Benjamin Button story
is in that jazz series,

1045
00:57:15,132 --> 00:57:17,601
it was the first edition,
and sent it to them.

1046
00:57:17,701 --> 00:57:20,671
And that's when Mrs. Nolan
gave me a call

1047
00:57:20,771 --> 00:57:24,901
and said in a beautiful Southern accent,
because I believe

1048
00:57:25,008 --> 00:57:29,445
she was the Cotton Maid of 1937
out of Mississippi,

1049
00:57:29,546 --> 00:57:32,481
beautiful accent, said,
"We could talk about this."

1050
00:57:32,582 --> 00:57:35,347
So that's what we did.
I got on a plane, flew to Houston.

1051
00:57:35,452 --> 00:57:37,819
We had a great conversation
about what we were trying to do,

1052
00:57:37,921 --> 00:57:39,218
how long it might take

1053
00:57:39,323 --> 00:57:43,021
and the fact that it's perfect timing
'cause she's not there.

1054
00:57:43,126 --> 00:57:46,460
And she's got a little soft spot
for Paramount, which helped a lot.

1055
00:57:46,563 --> 00:57:47,928
Because she'd had a screen test

1056
00:57:48,031 --> 00:57:51,126
at Paramount back in the late '30s
with Fred MacMurray.

1057
00:57:51,234 --> 00:57:52,633
And they had offered her a contract

1058
00:57:52,736 --> 00:57:55,364
and she decided
she wasn't cut out for Hollywood

1059
00:57:55,472 --> 00:57:57,099
and that she wanted to stay
in New Orleans

1060
00:57:57,207 --> 00:57:59,039
and start a family out there

1061
00:57:59,142 --> 00:58:02,077
for the betterment of New Orleans,
and in the end it helped us out, as well.

1062
00:58:02,179 --> 00:58:03,704
She always had a little soft spot for us.

1063
00:58:03,814 --> 00:58:05,680
That's the layout here.

1064
00:58:06,450 --> 00:58:08,384
Okay. So, then back here

1065
00:58:08,485 --> 00:58:11,216
there's gonna be always
some kind of activity going on.

1066
00:58:11,321 --> 00:58:14,757
So, even in the background stuff,
we want as much as possible,

1067
00:58:14,858 --> 00:58:16,792
see kids playing,

1068
00:58:16,893 --> 00:58:19,260
people doing laundry and stuff
over there.

1069
00:58:20,364 --> 00:58:24,164
The beautiful part of that house, literally
360 degrees around you

1070
00:58:24,267 --> 00:58:27,931
was all pre-1900. Every building.

1071
00:58:28,105 --> 00:58:31,769
So all the scenes that you see filmed
there, there's no cheating.

1072
00:58:31,875 --> 00:58:35,311
You're in the house, you walk out
the front door onto the porch,

1073
00:58:35,412 --> 00:58:38,074
and everything you see there is real.

1074
00:58:40,283 --> 00:58:41,546
For the Nolan house, what we did was

1075
00:58:41,651 --> 00:58:43,847
we built a porch around
the back corner.

1076
00:58:43,954 --> 00:58:47,822
That would afford us the ability to go out
side doors and go out onto a porch

1077
00:58:47,924 --> 00:58:50,154
and have vistas into the backyard
and so forth.

1078
00:58:50,761 --> 00:58:53,321
And it had quite a bit of yard space
in the back,

1079
00:58:53,430 --> 00:58:55,330
so we were able to build
a servant quarter,

1080
00:58:55,432 --> 00:58:59,232
which is sort of a two-story,
double-gallery home in New Orleans

1081
00:58:59,336 --> 00:59:03,398
where, in the early days, servants
would often live behind the houses.

1082
00:59:03,507 --> 00:59:06,477
And we also built
an exterior kitchen there.

1083
00:59:06,576 --> 00:59:11,207
Imagine that this house, in that period,
the kitchen would have been outside.

1084
00:59:11,314 --> 00:59:16,411
So all the food's prepared here,
and it goes into the warming pantry.

1085
00:59:16,553 --> 00:59:19,250
Background and action.

1086
00:59:20,957 --> 00:59:25,952
For each new morning with its light,
for rest and shelter of the night...

1087
00:59:26,196 --> 00:59:28,631
My favorite set in the whole film
was the Nolan house,

1088
00:59:28,732 --> 00:59:32,566
because to me it's as big a character
as Benjamin.

1089
00:59:32,669 --> 00:59:35,764
And I was able to think about that set
in ways that

1090
00:59:35,872 --> 00:59:38,398
I've rarely been able to think
about any other,

1091
00:59:38,508 --> 00:59:42,706
because it lives,
it goes through so many transitions.

1092
00:59:42,813 --> 00:59:46,249
And every time we come back
to that house, it's slightly different.

1093
00:59:46,349 --> 00:59:50,115
It's just a really fantastic experience
and a lot of fun to sort of

1094
00:59:50,220 --> 00:59:54,214
take a building and make it a character
and make it change and evolve

1095
00:59:54,324 --> 00:59:57,021
and get sad and be joyful.

1096
00:59:57,227 --> 00:59:59,855
Here we go. And rolling !

1097
01:00:00,097 --> 01:00:04,398
And clearly in a movie like this that's
so vast, you can't shoot in sequence.

1098
01:00:04,501 --> 01:00:09,268
So it was a constant jumping
from decade to decade and era to era.

1099
01:00:09,473 --> 01:00:10,804
Just so everyone's on the same page,

1100
01:00:10,907 --> 01:00:14,138
we do this shot,
then we're done with this area for today.

1101
01:00:14,244 --> 01:00:16,144
Be first up tomorrow,
depending on the weather.

1102
01:00:16,246 --> 01:00:19,341
Let's bring the dark furniture in
a little bit.

1103
01:00:19,516 --> 01:00:21,143
Logistically it was tricky.

1104
01:00:21,251 --> 01:00:24,653
I mean, we were fortunate
that we had our storage nearby,

1105
01:00:24,754 --> 01:00:28,691
and we had every version of the house
sort of...

1106
01:00:28,792 --> 01:00:31,523
We tried to keep it organized
and always be able to,

1107
01:00:31,628 --> 01:00:34,757
"Okay, we're doing'36 tomorrow,
let's bring that in."

1108
01:00:34,865 --> 01:00:37,562
Okay, stand by for another rehearsal.

1109
01:00:37,934 --> 01:00:39,993
As soon as they
give you the prop, okay?

1110
01:00:40,103 --> 01:00:41,400
-Okay.
-And then you can...

1111
01:00:41,838 --> 01:00:42,999
Here we go.

1112
01:00:43,073 --> 01:00:44,040
Benjamin.

1113
01:00:44,141 --> 01:00:47,771
Might I say you are looking
strikingly youthful.

1114
01:00:47,878 --> 01:00:49,972
Grandma! Look at me !

1115
01:00:51,848 --> 01:00:54,442
That was really something.

1116
01:00:54,551 --> 01:00:56,315
Come over here, you.

1117
01:00:57,754 --> 01:00:58,880
-Cut it.
-Cut, cut.

1118
01:00:58,989 --> 01:01:00,889
-Can we just see her on the mark?
-You got it, Billy?

1119
01:01:00,991 --> 01:01:03,756
For some reason, the last time you ran
like CharIton Heston.

1120
01:01:03,860 --> 01:01:06,852
Gonna have to have you run
a little bit straighter.

1121
01:01:08,465 --> 01:01:09,762
All right now.

1122
01:01:09,866 --> 01:01:12,995
-Here we go, back to one. Sun's out.
-Here we go.

1123
01:01:14,204 --> 01:01:16,673
Watch this. You think you're so great.

1124
01:01:20,210 --> 01:01:21,769
Can you do that?

1125
01:01:23,280 --> 01:01:26,978
Sweet Jesus! Benjamin, Benjamin,
get up from there right now!

1126
01:01:27,083 --> 01:01:29,780
You are about to break
your old fool neck!

1127
01:01:29,920 --> 01:01:34,323
Usually if you're playing a character
who ages, you play a small section of it.

1128
01:01:35,525 --> 01:01:38,859
And the very fact that I'm the voice
of Daisy from the age of six

1129
01:01:38,962 --> 01:01:42,557
all the way through to 86, so there's
a part of me in every aspect of her.

1130
01:01:42,666 --> 01:01:44,634
And I pick her up when,
I think, she's 17,

1131
01:01:44,734 --> 01:01:48,671
that is an incredible,
almost impossible, opportunity.

1132
01:01:48,772 --> 01:01:51,707
So that was the challenge,
and not to shy away from

1133
01:01:51,808 --> 01:01:55,142
the intense self-involvement,
the narcissism of youth.

1134
01:01:55,512 --> 01:01:57,571
Oh, my God.
I've just been talking and talking.

1135
01:01:57,681 --> 01:01:59,445
No, no, I've enjoyed listening.

1136
01:01:59,583 --> 01:02:03,019
I found that probably the most
painful part of the film to inhabit.

1137
01:02:03,119 --> 01:02:05,918
Because, you know, when I look back
on myself as a teenager,

1138
01:02:06,022 --> 01:02:07,512
particularly now I'm a parent,

1139
01:02:07,624 --> 01:02:11,060
there's something quite abhorrent
and self-involved about it

1140
01:02:11,161 --> 01:02:14,187
that hopefully you move beyond
as you get older.

1141
01:02:14,464 --> 01:02:15,795
Background!

1142
01:02:16,800 --> 01:02:18,962
And so I went to sea.

1143
01:02:19,903 --> 01:02:23,806
It was a little bizarre, because I'd tell my
friends back home and my wife,

1144
01:02:24,207 --> 01:02:25,834
"I'm working with Brad Pitt." You know?

1145
01:02:27,477 --> 01:02:29,070
It was like,
"How was it with Brad today?"

1146
01:02:29,179 --> 01:02:30,943
"No. He wasn't there.
It was this guy called Robert

1147
01:02:31,047 --> 01:02:32,879
"with a blue hood on his head.'

1148
01:02:33,049 --> 01:02:36,883
Did I ever tell you I was struck
by lightning seven times?

1149
01:02:36,987 --> 01:02:39,615
-Start it.
-And just slightly down the bench.

1150
01:02:39,723 --> 01:02:40,713
So, Jared...

1151
01:02:40,824 --> 01:02:42,155
Not quite the eye line
that you gave me, though.

1152
01:02:42,259 --> 01:02:43,727
-Does that matter?
-Okay. No, no. You're looking at him.

1153
01:02:43,827 --> 01:02:45,625
When he stands up,
look at his face and then look at his feet

1154
01:02:45,729 --> 01:02:48,494
and look back at him like,
"You got to..." Like, "What?"

1155
01:02:48,598 --> 01:02:50,726
The tugboat, it was called the Jupiter,

1156
01:02:50,834 --> 01:02:54,464
but I think David found out that I was
a Manchester United fan,

1157
01:02:54,571 --> 01:02:57,541
so he changed the boat to the Chelsea

1158
01:02:57,641 --> 01:02:59,769
just to wind me up.

1159
01:03:00,110 --> 01:03:03,307
Anybody want to make $2
for a day's work'round here?

1160
01:03:03,413 --> 01:03:05,643
-Nobody wants a job?
-I do.

1161
01:03:09,986 --> 01:03:11,750
You got your sea legs about you,
old man?

1162
01:03:11,821 --> 01:03:14,347
I do. I think.

1163
01:03:14,858 --> 01:03:18,817
We shot the tugboat early on,
maybe week one or two in Morgan City.

1164
01:03:18,928 --> 01:03:21,420
Meanwhile Don Burt and his crew
were back here

1165
01:03:21,531 --> 01:03:23,898
building enormous sets at Sony.

1166
01:03:59,736 --> 01:04:02,706
The ship was 90 feet long,
almost 30 feet wide.

1167
01:04:03,039 --> 01:04:05,701
It's 20 feet in the air
by the time you build a base

1168
01:04:05,809 --> 01:04:07,208
and have it sitting above the trunnion.

1169
01:04:07,610 --> 01:04:09,544
It's built into a tank that's 20 feet deep.

1170
01:04:09,646 --> 01:04:13,276
It weighs about 140, 000 pounds
above the trunnion.

1171
01:04:13,383 --> 01:04:15,408
Not the base, just the actual ship.

1172
01:04:15,518 --> 01:04:19,751
That was like a movie in itself,
just building this entire structure.

1173
01:04:31,668 --> 01:04:33,636
Cut, cut. Go it again.

1174
01:04:33,737 --> 01:04:37,173
Hey, Myrt, do one with you
pantomiming the gunfire.

1175
01:04:37,273 --> 01:04:39,401
You want the lights panned on to it
a little bit more?

1176
01:04:39,509 --> 01:04:41,807
-Yeah, yeah.
-Okay. And B-bone, do one more.

1177
01:04:41,911 --> 01:04:43,208
You got to pan the light over.

1178
01:04:43,313 --> 01:04:44,781
It has to do a multitude of things.

1179
01:04:44,881 --> 01:04:47,407
It had to be able to just be
lazy on the Mississippi River.

1180
01:04:47,517 --> 01:04:50,782
It had to be able to pitch and roll
as if it was on the ocean.

1181
01:04:50,920 --> 01:04:54,288
Then it had to be able to pitch, roll and
heave as if there were heavier seas.

1182
01:04:54,391 --> 01:04:57,588
And ultimately when it crashes,
it actually has to be able to

1183
01:04:57,694 --> 01:04:59,890
hit the submarine
and ride up out of the water

1184
01:04:59,996 --> 01:05:03,398
without the stern of the ship
dipping below the surface of the water,

1185
01:05:03,500 --> 01:05:05,696
'cause it wouldn't look real,
the stern of the ship wouldn't just

1186
01:05:05,802 --> 01:05:07,827
drop below the surface
if the front goes up.

1187
01:05:10,640 --> 01:05:13,007
The bow of the ship would rise up
about 20 feet.

1188
01:05:13,109 --> 01:05:14,838
So we were doing
about a meter a second

1189
01:05:14,944 --> 01:05:16,434
with our lead actor on the bow.

1190
01:05:16,546 --> 01:05:19,982
At maximum height, he's 40 feet
from the concrete below.

1191
01:05:20,083 --> 01:05:23,815
You're really concerned about safety,
function and realism.

1192
01:05:23,953 --> 01:05:27,787
finally I'm making a movie
that's a theme park ride. finally.

1193
01:05:28,758 --> 01:05:31,250
And all the interiors for the tugboats
were separate sets.

1194
01:05:31,361 --> 01:05:34,422
The galley, the bunk area,
the wheelhouse,

1195
01:05:34,531 --> 01:05:37,626
all those were separate sets.
And those were all on gimbals as well,

1196
01:05:37,734 --> 01:05:40,294
so that we could replicate
the movement of the boat.

1197
01:05:42,238 --> 01:05:46,175
Most directors aren't like Fincher.
Fincher thinks about every prop,

1198
01:05:46,276 --> 01:05:49,871
every piece of dressing,
every flit of hair.

1199
01:05:49,979 --> 01:05:51,879
You don't get that with most directors.

1200
01:05:51,981 --> 01:05:53,608
Most directors are looking at
the big picture.

1201
01:05:53,716 --> 01:05:56,617
When you give them a set,
it's either working for them or it isn't.

1202
01:05:56,719 --> 01:05:59,416
And David is looking at
what's written in the notebook,

1203
01:05:59,522 --> 01:06:01,456
or what the palette is doing.

1204
01:06:01,558 --> 01:06:04,118
And while all those things
are usually something

1205
01:06:04,227 --> 01:06:06,525
that a good art department
and a good production designer

1206
01:06:06,629 --> 01:06:09,655
will control, and a director
will never even notice,

1207
01:06:09,766 --> 01:06:11,996
David Fincher is not that guy.

1208
01:06:12,769 --> 01:06:13,930
Cut it.

1209
01:06:14,137 --> 01:06:15,229
-Cut.
-Cut.

1210
01:06:15,338 --> 01:06:18,103
What is extraordinary about him,
from my perspective, is that

1211
01:06:18,208 --> 01:06:21,769
when somebody has a particular
leaning as a director,

1212
01:06:21,878 --> 01:06:25,712
that usually takes away from another
aspect of them as a director.

1213
01:06:25,815 --> 01:06:28,307
If they're very technically-minded,
they kind of...

1214
01:06:29,018 --> 01:06:32,044
They'll be at the monitor,
they'll never come out from it.

1215
01:06:32,155 --> 01:06:36,285
They're not so focused on the acting
or that's not their strength.

1216
01:06:36,826 --> 01:06:39,818
Not that it's not their strength,
it's not their interest.

1217
01:06:39,963 --> 01:06:40,953
Action!

1218
01:06:41,064 --> 01:06:46,434
I think he's 40% left, 40% to the left.
And then as the car pulls in...

1219
01:06:46,536 --> 01:06:50,871
So for me what was amazing about him,
and also slightly alarming,

1220
01:06:51,241 --> 01:06:54,267
was that he has all of it.

1221
01:06:54,544 --> 01:06:57,036
He's not afraid
to continue to challenge you.

1222
01:06:57,146 --> 01:06:59,240
He has very specific ideas.

1223
01:06:59,349 --> 01:07:01,784
-Can we do one more pickup?
-Pickup, reset, straight away.

1224
01:07:01,918 --> 01:07:03,716
All right, once again, here we go.

1225
01:07:03,820 --> 01:07:06,881
I think people are frightened of him.
I think he's got a reputation for

1226
01:07:06,990 --> 01:07:09,982
"If you're not really brilliant
at what you do, you will be found out.

1227
01:07:10,093 --> 01:07:11,618
"And I will rip you to shreds.

1228
01:07:13,029 --> 01:07:15,123
"Take all your clothes off
and beat you with a stick."

1229
01:07:15,231 --> 01:07:17,666
I think that's unfair,
I didn't really see that happen,

1230
01:07:17,767 --> 01:07:18,893
but he knows what he's doing

1231
01:07:19,002 --> 01:07:20,834
and you can't really pull the wool
over his eyes.

1232
01:07:20,937 --> 01:07:22,166
And he's quite direct.

1233
01:07:22,238 --> 01:07:23,399
Thank God.

1234
01:07:23,506 --> 01:07:25,998
If someone says they can't do it,
he'll go, "Why?"

1235
01:07:26,109 --> 01:07:28,134
And that can be unnerving, you know?

1236
01:07:28,244 --> 01:07:30,406
Turn and let me see your look.

1237
01:07:30,680 --> 01:07:32,910
Okay, step it back.

1238
01:07:33,016 --> 01:07:34,780
Okay, B, slide three inches to your right.

1239
01:07:34,884 --> 01:07:35,908
Can we go further?

1240
01:07:36,019 --> 01:07:39,114
No, no. Little bit more to the left
if anything. Yep.

1241
01:07:39,222 --> 01:07:41,953
The thing that David
has in spades is rigor.

1242
01:07:42,058 --> 01:07:45,722
You know, he's a perfectionist,
but not for its own sake.

1243
01:07:45,828 --> 01:07:48,889
My manager warned me,
my agent warned me.

1244
01:07:49,299 --> 01:07:50,596
I heard other actors talking about,

1245
01:07:50,700 --> 01:07:54,136
"Man, David does 40 takes
just to open a door."

1246
01:07:54,237 --> 01:07:55,500
I'm going, "Wow, really?"

1247
01:07:55,605 --> 01:07:57,539
I mean, I'm kind of getting
a little nervous.

1248
01:07:57,640 --> 01:08:01,235
I was coming down some steps,
and the shot was just on my feet.

1249
01:08:01,344 --> 01:08:03,039
We did that at least 20 times.

1250
01:08:03,146 --> 01:08:05,945
I'm just going down the stairs, "No.
Going down, 'No.

1251
01:08:06,049 --> 01:08:08,211
"Not that kind of step,
more this kind of step.

1252
01:08:08,351 --> 01:08:12,310
"Try it like this." And I'm going,
"Wow. This is really specific."

1253
01:08:12,422 --> 01:08:16,052
But I got it because he's telling a story
even down to the feet.

1254
01:08:16,192 --> 01:08:18,524
I think the bench has to go
to camera left a little bit.

1255
01:08:18,628 --> 01:08:20,255
-Greg...
-Six inches, camera left.

1256
01:08:20,363 --> 01:08:23,230
Camera left on the bench.
Six inches, please.

1257
01:08:23,333 --> 01:08:25,199
Stop, take camera left.

1258
01:08:27,971 --> 01:08:29,200
Stop.

1259
01:08:29,672 --> 01:08:30,662
There.

1260
01:08:30,807 --> 01:08:33,777
I didn't count, most of the time,
how many takes I'm taking.

1261
01:08:33,876 --> 01:08:36,971
He's the director, he knows what
he wants. If you don't give it to him...

1262
01:08:38,381 --> 01:08:42,716
Then you know... If it means that
he drills it out of you, then why not?

1263
01:08:44,287 --> 01:08:46,915
You gotta do what you're meant to do.

1264
01:08:47,423 --> 01:08:50,757
And I happen to be a goddamned artist.

1265
01:08:51,661 --> 01:08:53,322
But you're a tugboat captain.

1266
01:08:53,429 --> 01:08:56,660
I've done lots of independent films, and
you get like three takes or something.

1267
01:08:56,766 --> 01:08:59,861
Barely. They actually
hardly can afford to do one take,

1268
01:08:59,969 --> 01:09:01,232
you know, in some of these things now.

1269
01:09:01,337 --> 01:09:05,035
You have to skin me alive
to take my art away from me now.

1270
01:09:05,475 --> 01:09:09,275
So I loved it. You don't get
to act that often as an actor.

1271
01:09:09,379 --> 01:09:11,040
You know, most of the time
you spend waiting.

1272
01:09:11,147 --> 01:09:15,209
I loved the amount of time,
the amount of takes, he'd let you go

1273
01:09:15,318 --> 01:09:17,878
until you felt that you were happy,
he was happy, you know.

1274
01:09:17,954 --> 01:09:18,944
I loved it.

1275
01:09:19,055 --> 01:09:22,320
Most times in film, you get your takes
and you go away,

1276
01:09:22,425 --> 01:09:25,292
and it's like, "God, I wish
I could have tried it this way."

1277
01:09:25,395 --> 01:09:29,855
But with David you have enough time
to try it as many ways possible.

1278
01:09:29,966 --> 01:09:33,266
Finch lets you go through
the whole gamut, like, so...

1279
01:09:33,369 --> 01:09:36,669
If it's like, you know, "You're my son,"
it goes from... It would go...

1280
01:09:36,773 --> 01:09:40,710
'Cause we did like 30 takes and using it
as an example of the scenes,

1281
01:09:40,810 --> 01:09:45,441
but I'd be like, "You're my son ! "
All the way down to, "You're my son."

1282
01:09:45,581 --> 01:09:49,074
And the whole arch
that that takes you through.

1283
01:09:49,686 --> 01:09:51,814
So you get to try it in every single way.

1284
01:09:51,921 --> 01:09:55,516
And then Finch just takes the 35th take,
which was the really simple one,

1285
01:09:55,625 --> 01:09:57,184
which you probably should have done
in the first place.

1286
01:09:57,293 --> 01:10:00,058
But he kind of lets you exercise
your need to act.

1287
01:10:00,196 --> 01:10:04,394
So Taraji, you can go
a teeny bit slower. Yeah.

1288
01:10:04,534 --> 01:10:06,093
Eight tenths of a percent.

1289
01:10:06,202 --> 01:10:08,728
-We are rolling.
-Well, you do the math.

1290
01:10:08,971 --> 01:10:10,496
And action !

1291
01:10:16,279 --> 01:10:17,713
No. No.

1292
01:10:18,014 --> 01:10:21,211
She really gets up a head of speed.
And the sun came out.

1293
01:10:21,317 --> 01:10:24,947
Okay, here we go one more time.
TJ, you left a little bit early.

1294
01:10:25,054 --> 01:10:27,113
Let him get a little bit over
to the pile of leaves.

1295
01:10:27,223 --> 01:10:28,918
Let him go another 10 feet.

1296
01:10:29,358 --> 01:10:31,019
Here we go.

1297
01:10:33,596 --> 01:10:35,223
-Here, we lost her there.
-Cut it.

1298
01:10:35,331 --> 01:10:37,390
I'm being called into
the principal's office.

1299
01:10:37,467 --> 01:10:38,457
Come.

1300
01:10:39,335 --> 01:10:41,030
Now, what is that?

1301
01:10:44,040 --> 01:10:45,565
That's pretty good.

1302
01:10:45,675 --> 01:10:48,804
I'll take that one, we can do better.
Here we go. Once again.

1303
01:10:48,878 --> 01:10:50,209
Teamwork.

1304
01:10:51,647 --> 01:10:57,086
We did two weeks of makeup tests
with Taraji and Ali and Cate and Brad.

1305
01:10:57,186 --> 01:10:59,120
That's the one thing
you have to do with makeup,

1306
01:10:59,222 --> 01:11:02,385
which was so nice on this,
is they gave us time to test.

1307
01:11:06,395 --> 01:11:09,490
They started telling me horror stories
about these big muscle guys

1308
01:11:09,599 --> 01:11:11,397
that came in and they would pour
the molding over,

1309
01:11:11,501 --> 01:11:13,469
and they would start to
panic and shake,

1310
01:11:13,569 --> 01:11:15,094
and they would have to take them
out of the mold.

1311
01:11:15,204 --> 01:11:18,196
And I said, "Well, I really just wanna
do this process once,

1312
01:11:18,307 --> 01:11:20,571
"so I'm gonna be really still."

1313
01:11:20,676 --> 01:11:24,544
If I start to panic,
I will just find a way to work through it.

1314
01:11:31,988 --> 01:11:33,922
If you're not really a method actor,

1315
01:11:34,023 --> 01:11:36,321
you just really transform
through makeup

1316
01:11:36,425 --> 01:11:39,554
and costume and hair.
It's really good fun to do.

1317
01:11:39,996 --> 01:11:42,124
I had like, I think it was
eight prosthetic pieces.

1318
01:11:42,231 --> 01:11:44,632
Wherever the patchwork was,
it was eight pieces.

1319
01:11:44,734 --> 01:11:48,102
And Finch would come to the test
and he'd be like,

1320
01:11:48,671 --> 01:11:52,198
"Yeah. The forehead
is kind of ridiculous, though."

1321
01:11:52,308 --> 01:11:54,868
And I was like, "That's my forehead."

1322
01:11:54,977 --> 01:11:56,706
And he was like, "What?"

1323
01:11:56,813 --> 01:11:58,679
"I mean, that's the only bit
that's actually me."

1324
01:11:58,781 --> 01:12:00,408
And he'd be like, "Oh, okay."

1325
01:12:00,583 --> 01:12:04,042
All this looks good, it blends well.
It's just the chin.

1326
01:12:06,155 --> 01:12:07,714
-I mean this is...
-The bottom is spongy.

1327
01:12:07,857 --> 01:12:09,052
It's a little bit, yeah.

1328
01:12:09,158 --> 01:12:13,561
We take Brad over at 62,
and that was the full silicone makeup

1329
01:12:13,663 --> 01:12:17,622
with the transfer forehead and upper lip.
I did him at that stage,

1330
01:12:17,733 --> 01:12:23,866
and then I did 58 and then down to 56
and 52 and 48.

1331
01:12:23,973 --> 01:12:26,567
i did him down to about 45.

1332
01:12:26,676 --> 01:12:29,407
And at that stage I was just doing
a little stipple here and there,

1333
01:12:29,512 --> 01:12:30,604
just slightly age him,

1334
01:12:30,713 --> 01:12:33,774
which is where you take the skin
and put on the aging rubber,

1335
01:12:33,883 --> 01:12:37,148
and then you powder it and it creates
wrinkles in their own skin.

1336
01:12:37,253 --> 01:12:40,416
To take all of those stages
and make them work together,

1337
01:12:40,523 --> 01:12:43,982
the little differences you have to do,
the coloring matching

1338
01:12:44,093 --> 01:12:47,552
and the age spots matching every day,
it's insane.

1339
01:12:48,831 --> 01:12:52,290
Each character has its own reality.

1340
01:12:52,401 --> 01:12:54,301
And as long as everyone's part
of that reality,

1341
01:12:54,403 --> 01:12:56,599
-that's what you buy...
-Right.

1342
01:12:56,839 --> 01:13:01,572
Cate, she ages the most.
We took her from the 40s to 85.

1343
01:13:01,744 --> 01:13:06,045
And the 85 makeup was very difficult
because it's 14 appliances.

1344
01:13:06,249 --> 01:13:08,946
And the transfer on that forehead
covered her eyebrows,

1345
01:13:09,051 --> 01:13:12,180
'cause we thought it looked really good
without eyebrows,

1346
01:13:12,488 --> 01:13:15,924
'cause we really want her to look sickly
at that point.

1347
01:13:22,665 --> 01:13:26,226
She has these incredible cheekbones.
They're just amazing.

1348
01:13:26,335 --> 01:13:29,100
And it's the hardest age makeup
I've ever done in my life

1349
01:13:29,205 --> 01:13:31,537
because you can't put age into them.

1350
01:13:31,641 --> 01:13:34,941
If I tried putting any lines into it,
it just looked ridiculous.

1351
01:13:35,044 --> 01:13:37,479
So I ended up,
basically, keeping them the same

1352
01:13:37,580 --> 01:13:41,073
and trying to put all the age down
around the mouth and into the neck.

1353
01:13:41,284 --> 01:13:43,753
-And I think I would go there anyway.
-Yes.

1354
01:13:43,853 --> 01:13:45,184
-My stretch point.
-Yeah.

1355
01:13:45,288 --> 01:13:48,019
The great thing about Cate,
she's so professional in everything

1356
01:13:48,124 --> 01:13:52,789
that she's like, "Can we put more lines
in here so I look sadder?

1357
01:13:52,895 --> 01:13:54,158
"And more wrinkles?"

1358
01:13:54,263 --> 01:13:55,788
If someone's wearing a bad wig

1359
01:13:55,898 --> 01:13:58,299
or they have terrible makeup,
prosthetic pieces on their face,

1360
01:13:58,401 --> 01:14:01,029
you don't believe a single thing
that comes out of their mouth.

1361
01:14:01,137 --> 01:14:02,730
And this film is about life.

1362
01:14:02,838 --> 01:14:03,805
Rolling, rolling.

1363
01:14:03,906 --> 01:14:09,174
You go on the journey of a man
from his strange birth to his death.

1364
01:14:09,478 --> 01:14:12,573
And you need to know that
the parallel physical aging process

1365
01:14:12,682 --> 01:14:16,482
that's being done by the makeup artists
is as great as Brad's performance is,

1366
01:14:16,585 --> 01:14:18,576
which it absolutely was.

1367
01:14:22,758 --> 01:14:24,749
In the film, a scene takes place in Paris.

1368
01:14:24,860 --> 01:14:28,160
And the closest thing that looked
like Paris that anyone could find,

1369
01:14:28,264 --> 01:14:30,733
location department could find,
was Montreal.

1370
01:14:31,467 --> 01:14:34,164
-Ready and action!
-Action!

1371
01:14:34,637 --> 01:14:38,938
Shooting in Paris, one, is expensive
because the Euro is killing us.

1372
01:14:39,108 --> 01:14:40,940
And, two, logistically it's difficult.

1373
01:14:41,043 --> 01:14:45,173
It makes shooting in downtown
Manhattan seem easy in a lot of ways.

1374
01:14:45,381 --> 01:14:47,611
Our scope, how much control
we needed...

1375
01:14:47,717 --> 01:14:50,414
We're talking cars, it's the costumes,
it's people,

1376
01:14:50,519 --> 01:14:54,319
it's closing down blocks and blocks
of sections of Old Montreal,

1377
01:14:54,423 --> 01:14:56,289
which is much tighter
than the French Quarter.

1378
01:14:56,425 --> 01:14:58,723
It's not something
the city was real keen to doing,

1379
01:14:58,828 --> 01:15:02,059
but assisted in any way, shape or form
that they could.

1380
01:15:02,164 --> 01:15:05,964
But we needed a lot of people and
a decent amount of money to pull it off.

1381
01:15:06,068 --> 01:15:08,833
To me it reinforced
how much easier I had it

1382
01:15:08,938 --> 01:15:10,804
in the French Quarter after Katrina.

1383
01:15:10,906 --> 01:15:13,671
'Cause here, a place
that was untouched by any disaster

1384
01:15:13,776 --> 01:15:17,371
was just as dense,
and I needed just as much control.

1385
01:15:17,480 --> 01:15:18,948
And I think we shot eight days there,

1386
01:15:19,048 --> 01:15:21,676
and I personally was there prepping
for almost two months.

1387
01:15:21,784 --> 01:15:24,276
Other than that, wonderful people,

1388
01:15:24,387 --> 01:15:28,221
and it looked beautiful,
and they were All happy to see us go.

1389
01:15:32,294 --> 01:15:34,956
And in the Russian sequence,
it is supposed to be snowing.

1390
01:15:35,064 --> 01:15:37,795
And so I go, "Great. We're gonna be
in Montreal, it's cold in Montreal."

1391
01:15:37,900 --> 01:15:40,631
So we fly up there for the first scout and
realize that we're gonna be shooting

1392
01:15:40,736 --> 01:15:43,569
in the tourist part of the town,
the old part of town,

1393
01:15:43,672 --> 01:15:49,509
that you can't do anything to the town
because of pollution or residual

1394
01:15:49,612 --> 01:15:52,843
or any effect it might have
on the downtown area.

1395
01:15:52,948 --> 01:15:55,974
So the normaI paper products or some
of the foam product we would use

1396
01:15:56,085 --> 01:15:58,577
that expediate all this so that you can
make this happen quicker,

1397
01:15:58,654 --> 01:15:59,644
can't be done.

1398
01:16:00,022 --> 01:16:02,514
So we did the entire thing
in real crushed ice.

1399
01:16:02,625 --> 01:16:05,424
Some foam that we were allowed
to use in background sequences

1400
01:16:05,528 --> 01:16:07,895
and some poly product
that we could put along the sills,

1401
01:16:07,997 --> 01:16:11,695
as long as we vacuumed it all up,
so none of it got into the drain system.

1402
01:16:11,801 --> 01:16:15,066
That's why I'm saying don't.
Go back to base and talk to Brad.

1403
01:16:15,171 --> 01:16:19,574
See how things are going.
Give me half an hour. It's 7: 1 5, trust me.

1404
01:16:19,975 --> 01:16:22,444
It'll be best for both of us.

1405
01:16:22,878 --> 01:16:23,845
So that was daunting enough,

1406
01:16:23,946 --> 01:16:25,641
that we're going to have to bring in
hundreds of tons of ice

1407
01:16:25,748 --> 01:16:29,150
and crush it and place it in
multiple locations on the same day.

1408
01:16:29,251 --> 01:16:31,481
And then when we actually go
to film the sequence,

1409
01:16:31,587 --> 01:16:34,852
we have all the manpower in place,
you know, truckload after truckload,

1410
01:16:34,957 --> 01:16:38,086
40-foot truckload of ice trucks,
three ice grinding machines,

1411
01:16:38,194 --> 01:16:39,593
double crews.

1412
01:16:39,695 --> 01:16:43,154
It's in May and it's 90-something
degrees in the daytime.

1413
01:16:43,732 --> 01:16:47,225
It's 70-something at night, it's T-shirt
weather at night in Montreal in May,

1414
01:16:47,336 --> 01:16:49,168
and the ice is melting.

1415
01:16:49,271 --> 01:16:52,536
So we constantly, between takes,
have to refresh the ice, refresh the ice.

1416
01:16:52,641 --> 01:16:55,303
Grind more, grind more.
And as it's melting away,

1417
01:16:55,411 --> 01:16:58,005
you're trying to cover it up,
and David's trying to jokingly say,

1418
01:16:58,114 --> 01:17:01,345
"World's most expensive wet down.
Hey, Burt, why's your ice melting?"

1419
01:17:01,450 --> 01:17:03,578
Well, it's hot, that's why.

1420
01:17:03,919 --> 01:17:06,786
It's Murmansk, Russia
at 4: 00 in the morning.

1421
01:17:06,889 --> 01:17:09,859
Hey, guys. Claire, get out of the shot.

1422
01:17:10,693 --> 01:17:14,323
The Winter Palace Hotel, the exterior,
we actually filmed that in Montreal,

1423
01:17:14,430 --> 01:17:18,424
in the old city, and then we used
that exterior as a template for

1424
01:17:18,534 --> 01:17:21,026
an interior built here in Los Angeles

1425
01:17:21,137 --> 01:17:23,196
with a working elevator
and a dining room

1426
01:17:23,305 --> 01:17:24,500
and a kitchen and a bar.

1427
01:17:24,607 --> 01:17:26,166
Where did Brad go?

1428
01:17:28,944 --> 01:17:32,005
They're all exposed practical elevators.
They were designed and built by

1429
01:17:32,114 --> 01:17:35,175
the art department and construction,
but the function, that's our job.

1430
01:17:35,284 --> 01:17:37,719
And there's a lot of dialogue in these,
so they had to run quietly,

1431
01:17:37,820 --> 01:17:39,447
they had to run at the speed we wanted.

1432
01:17:39,555 --> 01:17:41,387
Let's say the dialogue is going on,

1433
01:17:41,490 --> 01:17:44,687
and it's ending on the wrong word
by a half a second.

1434
01:17:44,793 --> 01:17:48,752
Reprogram it to be half a second
faster, half a second slower.

1435
01:17:49,198 --> 01:17:52,793
The hotel needed to be
a place of former glamour,

1436
01:17:52,902 --> 01:17:57,271
a place stuck in time,
much like Elizabeth Abbott,

1437
01:17:57,406 --> 01:18:03,038
but still romantic and melancholy
and appropriate as a place

1438
01:18:03,145 --> 01:18:08,015
for Benjamin to have his first serious
love affair with an older woman

1439
01:18:08,150 --> 01:18:10,676
who thought she was with an older man.

1440
01:18:10,786 --> 01:18:12,686
So we're gonna go right through
you sitting,

1441
01:18:12,788 --> 01:18:14,517
and then dissolve, and you'll be asleep.

1442
01:18:14,623 --> 01:18:15,818
-I think so, right?
-Okay.

1443
01:18:15,925 --> 01:18:17,188
Then that's fine. Now just...

1444
01:18:17,393 --> 01:18:21,352
No, I think it should be something
that can evolve in and dissolve into.

1445
01:18:21,463 --> 01:18:23,261
-Just slouch over thinking about it.
-Yeah.

1446
01:18:23,365 --> 01:18:25,333
Then we can dissolve,
and you'll be asleep.

1447
01:18:25,434 --> 01:18:26,833
-You know what I mean?
-Okay.

1448
01:18:26,936 --> 01:18:29,064
-Just gotta have some kind of...
-Fantastic. Amazing.

1449
01:18:29,171 --> 01:18:31,367
-...screen direction.
-All right.

1450
01:18:32,474 --> 01:18:34,033
The ways one works.

1451
01:18:34,243 --> 01:18:37,110
In order to create a believable
environment for the actors,

1452
01:18:37,213 --> 01:18:43,016
I like to take closets and drawers
and rooms that are sort of on the set,

1453
01:18:43,118 --> 01:18:45,780
but not intended to be
played any action in,

1454
01:18:45,854 --> 01:18:46,844
and finish them

1455
01:18:46,956 --> 01:18:50,756
so that we could be in Los Angeles,
at Sony, onstage,

1456
01:18:50,859 --> 01:18:52,725
and still have this vibe

1457
01:18:52,828 --> 01:18:59,291
of this romantic, lost-in-time,
small little hotel in northern Russia.

1458
01:18:59,935 --> 01:19:02,768
It's not a matter of overdressing,
it's sort of a matter of

1459
01:19:02,871 --> 01:19:06,501
just really wanting to walk away
and say, "When they're in there,

1460
01:19:06,609 --> 01:19:09,203
"they're in the Winter Palace Hotel."

1461
01:19:14,216 --> 01:19:16,548
-Crazy Irish rant...
-Check his hair.

1462
01:19:16,652 --> 01:19:19,280
-Rip van Einstein.
-Looks like it's on fire.

1463
01:19:21,223 --> 01:19:23,521
-Looks like Barbara Bush.
-Just go with it.

1464
01:19:23,659 --> 01:19:25,957
The thing that I found fascinating
about shooting digitally,

1465
01:19:26,061 --> 01:19:30,123
which I hadn't done before, is that you
develop a different performance rhythm.

1466
01:19:30,332 --> 01:19:32,426
And I think I've been used to
the celluloid rhythm

1467
01:19:32,534 --> 01:19:33,695
where you do a take or two,

1468
01:19:33,802 --> 01:19:35,793
you stop to reload,
the actors decompress.

1469
01:19:35,904 --> 01:19:38,168
Sometimes they go back to their trailer
'cause it's gonna be...

1470
01:19:38,274 --> 01:19:40,402
You know, there's a malfunction
with the camera.

1471
01:19:40,509 --> 01:19:42,739
Whereas once you were on set
with this film,

1472
01:19:42,845 --> 01:19:44,643
you stayed there the whole time,

1473
01:19:44,747 --> 01:19:47,011
which meant that it was
more like a theater rehearsal.

1474
01:19:47,116 --> 01:19:49,483
And oftentimes we would shoot
the rehearsals.

1475
01:19:49,585 --> 01:19:52,953
So it wasn't necessarily that we did
take after take after take,

1476
01:19:53,055 --> 01:19:55,387
it's just that we harnessed
the rehearsal time

1477
01:19:55,491 --> 01:19:56,754
into the performance time.

1478
01:19:56,859 --> 01:19:59,487
I want this, and I want it with you.

1479
01:20:01,597 --> 01:20:03,929
And I won't deny you that.

1480
01:20:06,135 --> 01:20:08,126
"I don't want to be somebody's burden."

1481
01:20:08,270 --> 01:20:11,240
We had been talking about doing
Benjamin Button long before Babel.

1482
01:20:11,340 --> 01:20:12,865
And actually before The Fountain,

1483
01:20:12,975 --> 01:20:15,501
because Cate was originally gonna do
The Fountain with Brad.

1484
01:20:15,611 --> 01:20:18,239
And so, you know,
as my movie would fall apart, I would...

1485
01:20:18,347 --> 01:20:19,746
Somebody would say,
"Hey, did you hear?

1486
01:20:20,916 --> 01:20:22,406
"Brad's doing this movie
with Darren Aronofsky."

1487
01:20:22,518 --> 01:20:24,509
And I'd say, "Oh, great."
You know, "Yeah, with Cate Blanchett."

1488
01:20:24,620 --> 01:20:29,285
And I'd be like...
And then that would fall apart.

1489
01:20:30,993 --> 01:20:36,659
And I'm sorry about that, Darren,
but gleefully.

1490
01:20:36,965 --> 01:20:38,660
And then came Babel.

1491
01:20:39,735 --> 01:20:41,897
Which, when I saw it, I didn't think
was treading anywhere near

1492
01:20:42,004 --> 01:20:43,768
in the area of Benjamin Button.

1493
01:20:43,872 --> 01:20:47,308
...like that's just the problem,
it's also this and this and this.

1494
01:20:47,810 --> 01:20:51,576
The rapport that they have
was very much like siblings.

1495
01:20:51,680 --> 01:20:54,775
He's totally juvenile,
which is of course why we get along,

1496
01:20:54,883 --> 01:20:59,514
and she is so prepared and thoughtful,
and she's taking notes,

1497
01:20:59,621 --> 01:21:02,318
and she's done this and that.
So they're wonderful together.

1498
01:21:02,424 --> 01:21:04,688
You know, they're just so easy.

1499
01:21:04,793 --> 01:21:07,660
You don't turn his opinion of it, it's just...

1500
01:21:07,763 --> 01:21:09,959
"If we're gonna acknowledge it,
let's acknowledge it.

1501
01:21:10,065 --> 01:21:11,760
"Here's the thing,
it scares the shit out of me.

1502
01:21:11,867 --> 01:21:13,767
"I don't wanna pay my own babysitter,

1503
01:21:13,869 --> 01:21:16,395
"I don't wanna be the burden
for somebody else."

1504
01:21:16,505 --> 01:21:18,837
Isn't that what it is?
It's an elaboration on that thought.

1505
01:21:18,941 --> 01:21:21,706
I think that we're all...
"I'm going a different way."

1506
01:21:21,810 --> 01:21:24,472
Could be the thing that leads into,
"We all end up in diapers."

1507
01:21:24,580 --> 01:21:27,242
Doesn't matter what's your rationale.

1508
01:21:28,951 --> 01:21:31,249
You know, how do I not become
a burden to this?

1509
01:21:31,487 --> 01:21:34,582
The feeling-out process was way over.

1510
01:21:34,690 --> 01:21:36,658
So in that way I was glad that
they were in Babel.

1511
01:21:36,759 --> 01:21:38,750
Even if it was kind of...

1512
01:21:38,861 --> 01:21:42,161
The pairing of them was really my idea.

1513
01:21:42,931 --> 01:21:45,866
-And roll, please, we're rolling.
-Rolling.

1514
01:21:46,135 --> 01:21:47,728
In between my movies with Brad,

1515
01:21:47,836 --> 01:21:53,275
I forget how just stupid the world is
around and about him.

1516
01:21:53,642 --> 01:21:56,839
I guess because I know how
uncomfortable it makes him,

1517
01:21:56,945 --> 01:22:01,746
I guess I just sort of hope that it's
receding or in some way diminishing,

1518
01:22:01,850 --> 01:22:05,582
because it certainly doesn't make his
life any easier or any more enjoyable.

1519
01:22:05,821 --> 01:22:07,380
And then the door opens...

1520
01:22:07,623 --> 01:22:09,955
We were shooting this commercial
in downtown LA,

1521
01:22:10,058 --> 01:22:13,050
and it's the middle of the night and
we had shut down most of the street.

1522
01:22:13,162 --> 01:22:16,291
And I was talking to Brad
as he stepped off this curb

1523
01:22:16,398 --> 01:22:19,095
and these two women
who were walking,

1524
01:22:19,201 --> 01:22:20,999
were intent in their conversations,

1525
01:22:21,103 --> 01:22:23,128
and they realized that they were about
to run into somebody.

1526
01:22:23,238 --> 01:22:25,332
And then they both turned
and they looked at him,

1527
01:22:25,441 --> 01:22:29,344
and they both dropped to their knees
screaming.

1528
01:22:29,411 --> 01:22:30,401
And I...

1529
01:22:32,581 --> 01:22:34,447
And he sort of reached...

1530
01:22:34,550 --> 01:22:37,281
I think he thought he had tripped them
or something,

1531
01:22:37,386 --> 01:22:39,821
and he sort of reached over
to touch them,

1532
01:22:39,922 --> 01:22:43,256
and they both recoiled from him,
screaming.

1533
01:22:43,358 --> 01:22:47,591
And then they got up and then they
stood there unable to move, screaming.

1534
01:22:47,696 --> 01:22:52,532
These weren't like 17-year-olds.
These were like late 20s, early 30s.

1535
01:22:52,835 --> 01:22:54,030
Okay. Here we go once again.

1536
01:22:54,136 --> 01:22:56,730
These were responsible adults,
these were not...

1537
01:22:57,372 --> 01:23:02,105
And it was horrible.

1538
01:23:03,111 --> 01:23:04,579
Cut. Very nice.

1539
01:23:09,985 --> 01:23:12,420
Camera right. Keep going.

1540
01:23:12,855 --> 01:23:16,814
There you go, I need somebody there.
And action.

1541
01:23:17,693 --> 01:23:24,156
Cate is so stunning to look at
that you can literally lose minutes,

1542
01:23:24,533 --> 01:23:27,798
where you just find yourself...
"Oh, I'm sorry.

1543
01:23:27,903 --> 01:23:31,203
"I came to your trailer and I was gonna
talk to you about this thing and I can't...

1544
01:23:31,306 --> 01:23:33,001
"I can't remember what it is,
so I'll come back."

1545
01:23:33,242 --> 01:23:36,678
You literally lose moments of your life
where you're just sort of...

1546
01:23:37,179 --> 01:23:39,580
-Do we have speed?
-Yes.

1547
01:23:39,648 --> 01:23:41,707
And action.

1548
01:23:45,354 --> 01:23:47,322
But I think it's a girl.

1549
01:23:57,933 --> 01:24:00,197
And cut. Very nice.

1550
01:24:00,335 --> 01:24:03,999
So Cate, do you think...
I guess it doesn't bum you out at all

1551
01:24:04,106 --> 01:24:06,541
that he doesn't chime in with like,

1552
01:24:06,642 --> 01:24:09,634
"Yeah, that's great." No, I guess not.
You're just riding...

1553
01:24:09,745 --> 01:24:11,975
-'Cause the next scene is basically...
-They'll get through the next.

1554
01:24:12,080 --> 01:24:14,378
No, I know. In the next scene,
you're gonna say, "I'm not gonna...

1555
01:24:14,516 --> 01:24:16,382
"I want this,
I want this more than anything.

1556
01:24:16,485 --> 01:24:21,286
"So I wish I could have reservations
about it, but I don't have any."

1557
01:24:22,257 --> 01:24:24,624
-Do you know what I mean?
-No, I think I do, but...

1558
01:24:25,594 --> 01:24:28,996
It's just I think there are so many beats
where I could play...

1559
01:24:29,097 --> 01:24:30,189
-Yeah.
-There are so many of

1560
01:24:30,299 --> 01:24:33,860
these little vignettes where it's like...
You sort of take some time...

1561
01:24:34,002 --> 01:24:36,869
No, no, no, I'm not looking for that.
I kind of like the idea

1562
01:24:36,972 --> 01:24:42,308
that you're so on top of the wave
that maybe you don't even sense...

1563
01:24:44,346 --> 01:24:45,643
Try to bring him...

1564
01:24:45,747 --> 01:24:47,681
-Back.
-Yeah, try to bring him back.

1565
01:24:47,783 --> 01:24:50,115
I see what it is he's looking at,
and I'm saying, "Come on."

1566
01:24:50,218 --> 01:24:54,621
And then what happens is over
a course of months this continues on,

1567
01:24:54,723 --> 01:24:58,125
so then we have to have dinner
and say, "Okay. What's the problem?"

1568
01:24:58,260 --> 01:24:59,955
-Yeah.
-"Okay. I can idea with that..."

1569
01:25:00,062 --> 01:25:03,657
So the diner sequence, though,
is shortly hereafter,

1570
01:25:03,765 --> 01:25:07,633
maybe a week later or something,
and it's...

1571
01:25:08,737 --> 01:25:11,570
I don't think that it's, "Okay,
wait a minute, what's the deal?"

1572
01:25:11,673 --> 01:25:14,574
-It's, "I can see that you're troubled."
-Yeah.

1573
01:25:14,710 --> 01:25:18,578
And he says, "Oh, believe me,
I am not trying to hide it at all."

1574
01:25:18,680 --> 01:25:22,844
And you say, "I got enough enthusiasm
and I want this enough for both of us."

1575
01:25:22,951 --> 01:25:27,184
-Yeah.
-"So, I'm sorry if I can't

1576
01:25:27,289 --> 01:25:30,156
"kind of see it as
a glass half-empty like..."

1577
01:25:30,392 --> 01:25:34,420
Because the very fact that I'm looking
at what he's looking at

1578
01:25:34,529 --> 01:25:38,864
means that I am registering
the problem.

1579
01:25:38,967 --> 01:25:41,698
But I also think that you can see it in
two different ways.

1580
01:25:41,803 --> 01:25:44,238
Which is, sometimes it's wonderful
to do things

1581
01:25:44,339 --> 01:25:46,205
that you're not necessarily
comfortable with,

1582
01:25:46,308 --> 01:25:50,074
because they show you
great new things.

1583
01:25:50,178 --> 01:25:54,342
So I look across the aisle and I go,

1584
01:25:54,449 --> 01:25:56,383
"That's gonna be great for you.
That's gonna be great."

1585
01:25:56,485 --> 01:25:58,044
Yeah. And I think that,
like you were saying,

1586
01:25:58,153 --> 01:26:02,249
the power of my positivity is that
I can just drag him along with me.

1587
01:26:02,391 --> 01:26:03,688
Yeah.

1588
01:26:04,059 --> 01:26:07,552
-'Cause in the diner scene, it's not like...
-"You're the sperm donor I want."

1589
01:26:07,663 --> 01:26:09,961
-Yes.
-Okay, good. Here we go.

1590
01:26:10,565 --> 01:26:11,794
-And...
-Quiet, please.

1591
01:26:11,900 --> 01:26:13,595
As I was watching,
I was thinking, you know,

1592
01:26:13,702 --> 01:26:16,034
they are something special to look at.

1593
01:26:16,138 --> 01:26:18,163
They're beautiful, beautiful people.

1594
01:26:18,273 --> 01:26:22,437
And when he finally croaks, looking
at her old face, that will be irony.

1595
01:26:25,380 --> 01:26:27,439
The first rule they tell you,
If you're gonna write a love story,

1596
01:26:27,549 --> 01:26:29,608
is, "How are you gonna keep them apart
at the end?"

1597
01:26:29,751 --> 01:26:30,843
So you get them together and it's like,

1598
01:26:31,153 --> 01:26:34,987
"Yeah, so what?" You have to have this
sort of yearning that goes on.

1599
01:26:39,094 --> 01:26:40,255
I don't wanna see anybody together.

1600
01:26:40,362 --> 01:26:42,990
I wanna see everybody
as unhappy as me.

1601
01:26:43,932 --> 01:26:48,062
-What are you thinking?
-Well, I was thinking how nothing lasts.

1602
01:26:52,140 --> 01:26:54,734
Everyone in this movie dies.

1603
01:26:54,843 --> 01:26:59,906
So, of course, that's how
I was able to stomach All the rest of it.

1604
01:27:45,927 --> 01:27:48,794
-I was going to come and reset A and B.
-Go ahead.

1605
01:27:48,897 --> 01:27:52,458
It's really just up now,
so it doesn't really need to be reset.

1606
01:27:52,567 --> 01:27:56,367
No, that... A's over there. This is B.

1607
01:28:08,150 --> 01:28:11,279
-All right, so this is...
-Jackson, play it back, please.

1608
01:28:16,024 --> 01:28:18,152
Yeah. We gotta hear liquid.

1609
01:28:21,463 --> 01:28:25,093
Yeah, just off camera right.
That's good. That's perfect.

1610
01:28:29,337 --> 01:28:32,307
All right. Test, one, two. Test. Test.

1611
01:28:33,208 --> 01:28:34,266
Copy that. Go.

1612
01:28:36,077 --> 01:28:40,480
We wrapped April or May of 2007.

1613
01:28:40,849 --> 01:28:44,149
And then we cut
for about 10 or 1 5 weeks

1614
01:28:44,252 --> 01:28:46,380
just to sort of get a rough shape.

1615
01:28:46,755 --> 01:28:48,382
I'd gone to a whorehouse.

1616
01:28:48,790 --> 01:28:51,316
I'd had my first drink.

1617
01:28:51,426 --> 01:28:54,987
I'd said goodbye to one friend
and buried another.

1618
01:28:55,430 --> 01:28:59,424
In 1937, when I was coming to the end
of the 17th year of my life,

1619
01:28:59,534 --> 01:29:02,868
I packed my bag, and said goodbye.

1620
01:29:04,139 --> 01:29:06,904
The hardest part of the movie for me

1621
01:29:07,008 --> 01:29:09,909
was assembling it
without access to David

1622
01:29:10,011 --> 01:29:12,343
when he was in New Orleans
the whole time

1623
01:29:12,447 --> 01:29:14,176
and i was here working in his office,

1624
01:29:14,382 --> 01:29:17,010
'cause he does do a lot of coverage
and he does do a lot of angles

1625
01:29:17,686 --> 01:29:21,645
and a lot of takes,
and it can be daunting

1626
01:29:21,756 --> 01:29:25,158
if there's no initial conversation,
and there rarely is.

1627
01:29:25,260 --> 01:29:27,092
It's just, "Here it is. Begin."

1628
01:29:27,195 --> 01:29:29,095
Let's say we've got
a five-minute scene,

1629
01:29:29,197 --> 01:29:32,258
I've probably got two hours of footage

1630
01:29:32,367 --> 01:29:34,335
and may have 15 different angles.

1631
01:29:34,436 --> 01:29:36,768
There's A and B camera
and there can be

1632
01:29:36,872 --> 01:29:40,775
anywhere from five takes
to 30 takes on each specific one.

1633
01:29:40,909 --> 01:29:42,843
Probably the biggest challenge was

1634
01:29:44,179 --> 01:29:47,547
dealing with a headless character

1635
01:29:47,649 --> 01:29:50,744
for the first, you know,
quarter of the movie.

1636
01:29:50,852 --> 01:29:53,150
I mean,
there was the body actor's performance,

1637
01:29:53,255 --> 01:29:55,849
which David didn't want to see at all.

1638
01:29:55,957 --> 01:29:58,551
And he had us put
a black hole in the screen

1639
01:29:58,660 --> 01:30:01,186
wherever the body performer's
face was.

1640
01:30:01,496 --> 01:30:04,397
I think that's quite challenging,
'cause you watch it and it's really flat

1641
01:30:04,499 --> 01:30:07,958
because your lead is literally
a black hole in the screen.

1642
01:30:08,069 --> 01:30:10,663
Kirk was assembling
while we were shooting.

1643
01:30:10,772 --> 01:30:13,935
Angus was doing some assembling
while we were shooting.

1644
01:30:14,042 --> 01:30:17,535
And we were looking at stuff, you know,
we have everything on PIX,

1645
01:30:17,646 --> 01:30:19,478
the only diction I have left.

1646
01:30:19,848 --> 01:30:22,283
I showed you this, right?
So there'll be a matte painting,

1647
01:30:22,384 --> 01:30:25,354
we'll see New York City and
the Chrysler Building and all that stuff.

1648
01:30:25,453 --> 01:30:27,649
Back, and then the cars will pass
in front of it,

1649
01:30:27,756 --> 01:30:30,088
and then we'll move in...

1650
01:30:30,191 --> 01:30:33,991
You know, like, he'll get out,
pays the cabble, goes inside.

1651
01:30:35,630 --> 01:30:38,031
I love that, with the music.

1652
01:30:47,075 --> 01:30:48,440
That's terrible, that piece.
That piece is good.

1653
01:30:48,543 --> 01:30:49,533
Yeah, that's good.

1654
01:30:51,379 --> 01:30:53,143
So much underpants.

1655
01:30:54,482 --> 01:30:57,213
We need his face in there, instead of...

1656
01:30:57,452 --> 01:30:59,216
That's a nice piece, and that works.

1657
01:31:03,124 --> 01:31:04,751
That looks good.

1658
01:31:05,193 --> 01:31:06,820
So I was able to see stuff every night,

1659
01:31:06,928 --> 01:31:10,125
you know, little QuickTimes of scenes
that I had mauled

1660
01:31:10,231 --> 01:31:12,825
with my inability to think straight.

1661
01:31:12,934 --> 01:31:14,959
It's always very nerve-wracking
for an editor,

1662
01:31:15,070 --> 01:31:18,096
the first time you show an assembly
to a director.

1663
01:31:18,206 --> 01:31:21,073
David, usually it's...
You post it as a QuickTime,

1664
01:31:21,176 --> 01:31:23,770
and he looks at it, and sometimes,

1665
01:31:23,878 --> 01:31:25,642
you know, you'll get up
in the middle of the night and see

1666
01:31:25,747 --> 01:31:28,944
if he, like, accepted it or declined it.

1667
01:31:29,050 --> 01:31:31,917
There's a green... You can have
a green bar on your sequence

1668
01:31:32,020 --> 01:31:34,387
or a red bar on your sequence.
Red bar is really bad, and

1669
01:31:34,489 --> 01:31:37,151
usually, if I got one of those,
I'd just go back to bed.

1670
01:31:37,258 --> 01:31:39,124
But if it was green, I would read,
you know, what...

1671
01:31:39,227 --> 01:31:41,093
'Cause there's always comments,

1672
01:31:41,196 --> 01:31:43,631
and it's interesting,
'cause he's hyper-specific,

1673
01:31:43,732 --> 01:31:45,894
down to a syllable of a word.

1674
01:32:00,015 --> 01:32:04,543
And then we had five to eight days
of facial capture.

1675
01:32:04,652 --> 01:32:07,451
We did a day of volumetric capture,

1676
01:32:07,555 --> 01:32:10,855
which was the spattered,
the green makeup on Brad,

1677
01:32:10,959 --> 01:32:16,125
capturing the shape of his face
in different positions for the volume.

1678
01:32:16,464 --> 01:32:17,989
-Roll, please.
-Rolling.

1679
01:32:18,099 --> 01:32:20,090
Eyes a little bit further right.
There we go.

1680
01:32:20,201 --> 01:32:22,431
And then we did five days

1681
01:32:23,171 --> 01:32:26,937
of the specific performance capture
that was

1682
01:32:27,342 --> 01:32:31,904
his reacting to what was happening
in the scenes that we'd cut.

1683
01:32:32,180 --> 01:32:35,741
And that would be the material
that we would use to drive

1684
01:32:35,850 --> 01:32:38,285
the CG old-age face.

1685
01:32:38,453 --> 01:32:39,545
Okay. One last one.

1686
01:32:39,654 --> 01:32:41,679
Okay, going again.
Button it up, please.

1687
01:32:41,790 --> 01:32:44,418
And after you look to Queenie,

1688
01:32:44,526 --> 01:32:48,292
look over more to your mark towards
the kids, the eye line towards the kids.

1689
01:32:48,396 --> 01:32:50,455
Just a little bit... Yeah.
Not the face, just the eyes.

1690
01:32:50,565 --> 01:32:52,192
Just get them over there, there you go.

1691
01:32:52,300 --> 01:32:56,032
Yeah, it's a little too far, but a little bit
more... Yeah, over in that direction.

1692
01:32:56,538 --> 01:33:00,168
Yeah. And I like the lip thing,
but I'm not sure, I mean...

1693
01:33:00,275 --> 01:33:02,937
I think we have to
recreate the tongue digitally,

1694
01:33:03,044 --> 01:33:06,537
anyway, but I like the lip thing.
Here we go. And roll it.

1695
01:33:08,983 --> 01:33:09,973
-And, speeding.
-Speed.

1696
01:33:10,085 --> 01:33:13,544
Super-lost in your own little world
at the beginning.

1697
01:33:24,032 --> 01:33:25,329
Hey, boy.

1698
01:33:42,717 --> 01:33:46,847
Benjamin ! That is dangerous.
Come back over here.

1699
01:33:46,955 --> 01:33:49,049
Stay put, child.

1700
01:33:50,925 --> 01:33:52,290
-Cut. That was it.
-Cut it.

1701
01:33:52,393 --> 01:33:54,259
Okay, play me the last three back.

1702
01:33:54,362 --> 01:33:57,263
It's one of these great scenarios
where there's this amazing amount

1703
01:33:57,365 --> 01:34:00,960
of technology going on, yet,
in certain instances in the process,

1704
01:34:01,269 --> 01:34:03,397
we were very low-rent
about how we did it,

1705
01:34:03,505 --> 01:34:05,030
because there was no other way
to do it.

1706
01:34:05,273 --> 01:34:09,574
And so we would shoot Brad
just to capture his facial performances,

1707
01:34:09,677 --> 01:34:12,874
hoping that it would fit into
the performance that another actor did

1708
01:34:12,981 --> 01:34:15,006
who was wearing
a blue sock on his head.

1709
01:34:15,116 --> 01:34:17,608
And to Brad's credit,
it was pretty amazing.

1710
01:34:17,719 --> 01:34:20,154
It was one of those scenarios
where, as I was on the set,

1711
01:34:20,255 --> 01:34:22,587
I'd be sitting there looking
at what he was doing, thinking, like,

1712
01:34:22,690 --> 01:34:24,158
"I don't know if that's really gonna work."

1713
01:34:24,259 --> 01:34:26,887
And then we would take it back to the
edit room, and then we would edit it

1714
01:34:26,995 --> 01:34:29,157
and put it together,
and it was pretty amazing.

1715
01:34:29,264 --> 01:34:32,029
-It's a night for firsts.
-How's that?

1716
01:34:32,133 --> 01:34:34,864
I've never been to a brothel, either.

1717
01:34:34,969 --> 01:34:40,373
I don't mean to be rude, but your hands.
Is that painful?

1718
01:34:40,475 --> 01:34:43,604
Well, I was born
with some form of disease.

1719
01:34:43,711 --> 01:34:45,509
What kind of disease?

1720
01:34:45,580 --> 01:34:47,742
I was born old.

1721
01:34:49,417 --> 01:34:51,476
-I'm sorry.
-No need to be.

1722
01:34:51,586 --> 01:34:54,112
There's nothing wrong with old age.

1723
01:34:56,691 --> 01:35:00,753
It really worked incredibly well.
I just couldn't see it on the set.

1724
01:35:00,862 --> 01:35:03,991
And obviously David could, he walked
away feeling pretty good about it.

1725
01:35:04,065 --> 01:35:05,692
-Cut it.
-Cut it.

1726
01:35:08,069 --> 01:35:11,937
SW 83-20, version 58, final.

1727
01:35:13,241 --> 01:35:16,438
TI 89-1 30, comp version 39, final.

1728
01:35:17,946 --> 01:35:23,646
BT 92-30, the first face-fall when
she says "I feel sorry for you,"

1729
01:35:23,751 --> 01:35:27,381
and then the second face-fall
wait for on "Die before you do."

1730
01:35:27,789 --> 01:35:29,883
Check the light on the teeth as well.

1731
01:35:30,558 --> 01:35:33,789
FR 47-1 80, comp version 25.

1732
01:35:33,895 --> 01:35:37,388
A little bit more out of focus
inside the glass lenses.

1733
01:35:38,633 --> 01:35:41,125
Too Harvey Dent?

1734
01:35:43,471 --> 01:35:46,099
And so that's probably something
we can just do as a comp treatment

1735
01:35:46,207 --> 01:35:48,505
or do we need to re-render
the glasses out of focus?

1736
01:35:48,610 --> 01:35:51,773
It will be just comp.
We should google Harvey Dent.

1737
01:35:52,714 --> 01:35:54,512
Google? Okay, I'll do that.

1738
01:35:54,782 --> 01:35:57,649
ST 49-40, version 9, final.

1739
01:35:57,752 --> 01:36:00,983
The head was already final,
but we finalled the cable car stuff.

1740
01:36:01,089 --> 01:36:02,853
The human performance
has always been considered

1741
01:36:02,957 --> 01:36:05,551
the Holy Grail of the CG world.

1742
01:36:05,660 --> 01:36:08,152
It's very daunting for many reasons.

1743
01:36:08,263 --> 01:36:12,029
Well, everyone just kind of is afraid of it

1744
01:36:12,133 --> 01:36:14,659
because it's such a challenge.
It's like, where do you start?

1745
01:36:15,203 --> 01:36:17,103
How old are you?

1746
01:36:17,205 --> 01:36:20,641
I'm seven. But I look a lot older.

1747
01:36:20,742 --> 01:36:23,336
Seven. But I look a lot older.

1748
01:36:23,444 --> 01:36:25,208
He's gonna see that you walk
from faith...

1749
01:36:25,313 --> 01:36:27,338
-Hallelujah !
-...and divine inspiration alone !

1750
01:36:27,515 --> 01:36:29,142
All right. Yes !

1751
01:36:33,087 --> 01:36:38,218
No one's ever really tried to do
just a regular CG person as a character

1752
01:36:38,326 --> 01:36:40,021
because it's been so scary.

1753
01:36:40,128 --> 01:36:45,965
Tests and attempts, over the years,
have not necessarily been successful.

1754
01:36:46,067 --> 01:36:49,799
And I've even been part
of some of those attempts.

1755
01:36:49,904 --> 01:36:53,363
It was tough. He had to be cute,
like he always had to be cute.

1756
01:36:53,474 --> 01:36:54,464
And he's not cute.

1757
01:36:54,575 --> 01:36:59,012
He's an 80-year-old guy in a wheelchair
who's four feet tail.

1758
01:36:59,113 --> 01:37:00,945
-I think it really came through.
-He's a likeable character.

1759
01:37:01,049 --> 01:37:03,381
-Yeah, he's...
-It could have been so easy for him

1760
01:37:03,484 --> 01:37:05,680
to be actually... Try to be a monster.

1761
01:37:06,020 --> 01:37:09,684
You're gonna meet this guy
at his least recognizable.

1762
01:37:09,791 --> 01:37:12,488
You know, he's gonna be four feet tall,

1763
01:37:12,593 --> 01:37:14,857
and he's got to look 80...
I mean, he's got to look like Einstein.

1764
01:37:14,962 --> 01:37:17,158
You know, I mean, like Yoda.
You know what I mean?

1765
01:37:17,265 --> 01:37:19,097
He's got to be...
He's got to start at the...

1766
01:37:19,200 --> 01:37:21,931
He's got to be this like wizened,

1767
01:37:22,036 --> 01:37:26,405
wrinkled, hairless gnome of a guy.

1768
01:37:40,221 --> 01:37:43,282
It occurred to me that this might be
a better place to put the audience,

1769
01:37:43,391 --> 01:37:47,350
if it was somebody that you really knew
what their face looked like

1770
01:37:47,462 --> 01:37:50,523
because they could peer into it
and kind of go,

1771
01:37:51,199 --> 01:37:54,260
"I know who that is. How do I know..."

1772
01:37:54,369 --> 01:37:56,201
And that was the thing
that we found, eventually,

1773
01:37:56,304 --> 01:37:58,272
was that when you could see it was him,

1774
01:37:58,373 --> 01:38:00,239
there was something
sort of exciting about that,

1775
01:38:00,341 --> 01:38:01,365
and you're talking about somebody...

1776
01:38:01,476 --> 01:38:05,606
You can't walk 35 feet
in the civilized world

1777
01:38:05,713 --> 01:38:07,203
and not see a picture of him.

1778
01:38:07,315 --> 01:38:09,613
I mean, literally,
like, every 10 seconds it's like,

1779
01:38:09,717 --> 01:38:10,946
"And here he is
getting on his motorcycle,

1780
01:38:11,052 --> 01:38:14,022
"and here he is taking his helmet off,
and here he is having a snow cone,

1781
01:38:14,122 --> 01:38:17,092
"and here he is..."
I mean, it's like you see him so much,

1782
01:38:17,191 --> 01:38:18,681
in a weird way it kind of helped us.

1783
01:38:26,067 --> 01:38:30,903
Early on, there were sculptures done of
Brad at the different ages playing Ben.

1784
01:38:31,005 --> 01:38:35,465
They take a cast of Brad Pitt,
then they start sculpting it in clay,

1785
01:38:35,576 --> 01:38:37,203
to make him look old,

1786
01:38:37,311 --> 01:38:40,941
and then they turn that clay into a mold
and cast that in silicone.

1787
01:38:41,048 --> 01:38:45,042
And eventually, those ages were taken
from five to three basic sculptures

1788
01:38:45,153 --> 01:38:48,248
that we would need
and handed to Rick Baker and Kazu

1789
01:38:48,356 --> 01:38:51,018
to sculpt and create
the designs and likenesses

1790
01:38:51,125 --> 01:38:54,060
that we would then recreate
for our digital models.

1791
01:38:54,162 --> 01:38:57,860
And you end up with this
incredibly life-like bust.

1792
01:38:57,965 --> 01:38:58,932
And they actually made three of them.

1793
01:38:59,033 --> 01:39:02,663
They made an 80-year-old Brad Pitt,
70-year-old and 60 years old.

1794
01:39:02,770 --> 01:39:06,468
So, we would just be
sitting at our desks with this bust

1795
01:39:06,574 --> 01:39:11,273
of a 100% realistic-looking Brad Pitt
staring at us while we are trying to work.

1796
01:39:11,379 --> 01:39:15,282
And it was invaluable.
It was a little creepy at times.

1797
01:39:15,583 --> 01:39:16,880
From that sculpture,

1798
01:39:16,984 --> 01:39:20,284
we create a digital scan
that then gets put into the computer.

1799
01:39:21,289 --> 01:39:24,850
A very complex system is put together
to represent hair and skin

1800
01:39:24,959 --> 01:39:28,361
and also animation
of how the head will move.

1801
01:39:28,663 --> 01:39:32,861
Yeah, but I think the glasses help him
with stuff to even here.

1802
01:39:32,934 --> 01:39:34,231
It's bifocal.

1803
01:39:34,335 --> 01:39:37,396
Whatever they are, they're fucking huge.

1804
01:39:38,339 --> 01:39:40,364
So I was just thinking it's like,
you know, like this,

1805
01:39:40,475 --> 01:39:42,341
so he has to use them.

1806
01:39:42,944 --> 01:39:46,005
-Or looks down, so he sees over them.
-Okay.

1807
01:39:46,113 --> 01:39:50,744
Okay. we'll try it both ways.
Okay, neutral pose. Record. Rolling.

1808
01:39:51,953 --> 01:39:54,047
Okay. Just give me 1 5.

1809
01:39:54,155 --> 01:39:56,715
Just head down the hallway
in your wheelchair,

1810
01:39:56,824 --> 01:40:01,386
then seeing over your glasses.
And looking little bit from side to side.

1811
01:40:04,699 --> 01:40:06,133
Widen your eyes from the sun.

1812
01:40:06,234 --> 01:40:08,703
We use the MOVA Contour system
in a way that we felt

1813
01:40:08,803 --> 01:40:10,703
was the most straightforward approach.

1814
01:40:10,805 --> 01:40:13,331
You know, we were able to
grab performance pieces

1815
01:40:13,441 --> 01:40:17,400
and nuances from Brad that then
we were able to build into a rig.

1816
01:40:17,512 --> 01:40:19,708
Rig being,
If you think of it in marionette terms,

1817
01:40:19,814 --> 01:40:24,479
the armature that you can pull on
to then control how the face moves.

1818
01:40:24,585 --> 01:40:28,647
A rig is really just
whatever mechanism you're gonna use

1819
01:40:28,756 --> 01:40:33,284
to make a static mesh or static piece
of geometry move over time.

1820
01:40:33,394 --> 01:40:36,489
Once you started putting in
lots of muscle recreations

1821
01:40:36,597 --> 01:40:39,032
and heavy deformers
to move the face around,

1822
01:40:39,133 --> 01:40:41,659
your interaction, for the animator,
goes down.

1823
01:40:41,769 --> 01:40:45,899
And so my goal was to make
an interactive, pretty much real-time rig

1824
01:40:46,007 --> 01:40:48,533
that mimicked
what Brad's face would do.

1825
01:40:48,643 --> 01:40:52,341
Maybe the muscles on his left side
pull harder than the right side,

1826
01:40:52,446 --> 01:40:54,938
or whatever happens to be Brad.

1827
01:40:56,017 --> 01:40:59,715
When the project started,
I sort of watched a lot of Brad,

1828
01:40:59,820 --> 01:41:02,050
or re-watched a lot of his films.

1829
01:41:02,156 --> 01:41:05,888
And the most recent one that had come
out was Babel or Babel,

1830
01:41:05,993 --> 01:41:09,156
I don't know how people
actually say that anymore.

1831
01:41:11,632 --> 01:41:15,762
Throughout that film,
he had this look that was kind of

1832
01:41:15,870 --> 01:41:17,861
brows pinched,
inner brows pinched and up,

1833
01:41:17,972 --> 01:41:21,465
and like, worried, and it was just...

1834
01:41:21,576 --> 01:41:23,806
So many shots of him had this look.

1835
01:41:23,911 --> 01:41:26,175
When we were looking at
how we were distilling out

1836
01:41:26,280 --> 01:41:29,079
the different aspects of the face,
and saying, "Okay, this is inner brow up,

1837
01:41:29,183 --> 01:41:31,743
"this is outer brow up,
this is lip corner pull left,"

1838
01:41:31,852 --> 01:41:33,081
whatever, blah, blah, blah.

1839
01:41:33,187 --> 01:41:37,420
I was like, "You know, he was always
doing this in this other film,

1840
01:41:37,525 --> 01:41:43,123
"so let's put in a control. Let's get that
data in there and just call it The Brad."

1841
01:41:43,230 --> 01:41:46,165
And that was a huge mistake

1842
01:41:46,267 --> 01:41:49,464
because the very first thing
that people wanted to do was go,

1843
01:41:49,570 --> 01:41:51,868
"Well, we gotta turn Brad on."

1844
01:41:53,207 --> 01:41:57,576
So we had to go back
and take Brad out of all of Brad.

1845
01:41:59,313 --> 01:42:03,875
So that rig then allows us to
build all of Brad's...

1846
01:42:03,985 --> 01:42:08,752
The way he moves his face,
the way he emotes, his expressions,

1847
01:42:09,290 --> 01:42:11,759
even taking a look
at some of his timings

1848
01:42:11,859 --> 01:42:13,520
and how things move together.

1849
01:42:13,628 --> 01:42:15,653
You know, there was talk like,
"Hey, can we CAT scan Brad?"

1850
01:42:15,763 --> 01:42:18,892
And they are like,
"Yeah, sure you can. No."

1851
01:42:19,000 --> 01:42:22,061
We ended up building a system
that was based off of Brad's face,

1852
01:42:22,169 --> 01:42:24,866
that moved exactly
like Brad's face moves.

1853
01:42:25,306 --> 01:42:27,035
That was kind of the directive
from the beginning,

1854
01:42:27,141 --> 01:42:29,303
which was why I almost quit.

1855
01:42:30,011 --> 01:42:32,708
'Cause that's insane. We can't do that.

1856
01:42:34,682 --> 01:42:37,344
This is the only project, I think,
I worked on where

1857
01:42:37,451 --> 01:42:41,979
I seriously considered quitting
many, many times over.

1858
01:42:42,623 --> 01:42:45,456
Especially when we are sitting in
a conference room with David Fincher

1859
01:42:45,559 --> 01:42:49,860
and the people that are more important
at the company than me

1860
01:42:49,964 --> 01:42:52,490
are promising David things
that I'm going,

1861
01:42:52,600 --> 01:42:54,694
"Don't promise that.

1862
01:42:54,802 --> 01:42:57,567
"We have no evidence that supports
that we can do this at all."

1863
01:43:00,241 --> 01:43:05,372
Then I leave zoo, go here, go there.
Wandered most of the time.

1864
01:43:05,479 --> 01:43:06,742
You were all alone?

1865
01:43:06,847 --> 01:43:09,942
You'll see, little man,
plenty of time you'll be alone.

1866
01:43:10,618 --> 01:43:13,918
When you're different like us,
it's gonna be that way.

1867
01:43:14,021 --> 01:43:16,353
There were some scenes
where i was thinking,

1868
01:43:16,457 --> 01:43:18,516
"Oh, my God,
how are we gonna do this?"

1869
01:43:18,626 --> 01:43:20,720
And David Fincher would come up
and ask,

1870
01:43:21,595 --> 01:43:25,054
"So what do you think?
Is it gonna work?"

1871
01:43:25,166 --> 01:43:28,158
My reply was,
"Yes, we have to make it work."

1872
01:43:28,269 --> 01:43:31,295
But deep inside, there was always
that moment where you're like,

1873
01:43:31,405 --> 01:43:34,340
"Is this really gonna work?
How painful is this gonna be?"

1874
01:43:34,442 --> 01:43:39,972
I knew that we were gonna get there
or a lot of people were gonna die trying.

1875
01:43:40,748 --> 01:43:43,547
Our software program, ironically,
it's called Track.

1876
01:43:43,651 --> 01:43:46,951
Got a Academy Award for Technical
Achievement many, many years ago.

1877
01:43:47,054 --> 01:43:50,024
So it's pretty robust,
but we had to take it to the next level

1878
01:43:50,124 --> 01:43:53,719
because it was never designed
to track ahead

1879
01:43:53,828 --> 01:43:56,456
directly onto someone else's spine.

1880
01:43:57,598 --> 01:44:02,160
-We are going to put that one here.
-Very decisive. I'm impressed.

1881
01:44:03,070 --> 01:44:05,664
As soon as these witness cams are set,
we can do this.

1882
01:44:05,773 --> 01:44:08,470
-And the sun is moving.
-Sun's moving.

1883
01:44:09,310 --> 01:44:11,642
Do you know the sun is moving?

1884
01:44:11,746 --> 01:44:13,612
Can't believe his brain.

1885
01:44:15,216 --> 01:44:16,809
-Let's do it.
-Break it up.

1886
01:44:16,917 --> 01:44:18,112
-Ready?
-We're ready.

1887
01:44:18,753 --> 01:44:23,884
We used high definition video cameras
to facilitate the tracking.

1888
01:44:24,191 --> 01:44:28,424
And having the separate angle of view
after tracking the main camera,

1889
01:44:28,529 --> 01:44:33,262
we were now able to triangulate
the performer in this case,

1890
01:44:33,367 --> 01:44:37,702
and really get a good sense
of where he's at in 3D space.

1891
01:44:37,805 --> 01:44:41,435
That's a big advantage
from prior ways of doing it.

1892
01:44:41,542 --> 01:44:44,876
In the old ways,
we would just track single camera view.

1893
01:44:45,246 --> 01:44:47,112
It's the tracking and the animation.

1894
01:44:47,214 --> 01:44:49,478
If it's off, and the head's moving
different than the body...

1895
01:44:49,583 --> 01:44:50,744
Then you're always gonna be fighting it.

1896
01:44:56,123 --> 01:44:59,149
In most cases,
we would shoot the live plate,

1897
01:44:59,260 --> 01:45:02,230
you'd do another second pass,
a clean plate,

1898
01:45:02,329 --> 01:45:04,627
and combine those two together.

1899
01:45:10,104 --> 01:45:14,666
Our department comes in
the early stages.

1900
01:45:14,775 --> 01:45:16,470
Sarahjane and her roto team

1901
01:45:16,577 --> 01:45:19,046
-go in and start rotoing.
-Chopping off heads.

1902
01:45:19,146 --> 01:45:22,275
Yes, so they start chopping off heads
and rotoing around the collar line.

1903
01:45:23,517 --> 01:45:25,576
I have some form of disease.

1904
01:45:29,323 --> 01:45:32,156
Well, I was born
with some form of disease.

1905
01:45:34,829 --> 01:45:38,629
The tracking team recorded the position
of every single light

1906
01:45:38,732 --> 01:45:41,030
and lighting instrument
that they could, on the set.

1907
01:45:41,135 --> 01:45:42,603
The exact physical locations.

1908
01:45:42,703 --> 01:45:45,798
Our lighting artists would get
these high dynamic range textures

1909
01:45:45,906 --> 01:45:49,137
based on photographs,
with blockers and bounce cards,

1910
01:45:49,243 --> 01:45:51,837
and big lights and scrims
and that kind of thing.

1911
01:45:51,946 --> 01:45:56,008
And you could just open your scene up
and it looks exactly like it did on set.

1912
01:46:07,328 --> 01:46:11,356
The bust photographs very realistically,

1913
01:46:11,465 --> 01:46:14,059
so what we were able to do
is take the bust

1914
01:46:14,168 --> 01:46:18,435
and place it into
what's called the light stage.

1915
01:46:18,539 --> 01:46:23,636
And basically, you photograph it
from every single angle, 360 degrees.

1916
01:46:23,744 --> 01:46:26,441
So what we do is
we take all of this footage

1917
01:46:26,547 --> 01:46:29,073
and we use that
to calibrate our Shaders.

1918
01:46:29,183 --> 01:46:32,483
Granted it wasn't Brad Pitt,
we knew that this thing was synthetic,

1919
01:46:32,586 --> 01:46:34,384
but it was a fantastic starting point.

1920
01:46:34,488 --> 01:46:38,982
I mean, it's like the front
three-quarter size.

1921
01:46:39,093 --> 01:46:41,425
I write little program,
what's called the Shader.

1922
01:46:41,528 --> 01:46:44,259
And the biggest challenge
for this project was

1923
01:46:44,365 --> 01:46:47,096
believable, full realistic skin.

1924
01:46:47,201 --> 01:46:50,728
To achieve that, we had to study
how light comes in,

1925
01:46:50,838 --> 01:46:54,536
inside of the flesh, and then a light
bounces around and it comes out.

1926
01:46:54,642 --> 01:46:56,974
And there are actually multiple layers.

1927
01:46:57,077 --> 01:47:00,945
And this is one of the layers,
and it's actually called dermis,

1928
01:47:01,048 --> 01:47:06,782
and this is where all the blood flows,
so that's why it all gets tinted to red,

1929
01:47:06,887 --> 01:47:11,381
and that's how we get
the reddish color on the skin.

1930
01:47:11,492 --> 01:47:13,961
It's a phenomenon that everyone
is sort of familiar with

1931
01:47:14,061 --> 01:47:17,258
by placing a flashlight
up against their hand,

1932
01:47:17,364 --> 01:47:19,731
and seeing a red glow
through their skin.

1933
01:47:19,833 --> 01:47:23,394
It's incredibly difficult to get
everything working exactly right

1934
01:47:23,504 --> 01:47:26,530
because of the different thicknesses
and thinnesses of the skin,

1935
01:47:26,640 --> 01:47:28,233
where there's bone,
where there's not bone,

1936
01:47:28,342 --> 01:47:32,210
where there's cartilage,
where there's more veins or less veins,

1937
01:47:32,313 --> 01:47:36,546
backlit, high sunlight, the way it
interacts with different colors of light.

1938
01:47:36,650 --> 01:47:39,779
It's a tremendous challenge
to get it to be just right.

1939
01:47:41,388 --> 01:47:46,485
We never did Benjamin's body below,
around the bust line.

1940
01:47:46,593 --> 01:47:49,790
We were just interested in
a connection point near the sternum

1941
01:47:49,897 --> 01:47:53,424
and then the head replacement.
In fact, in shots like in the bathroom,

1942
01:47:53,534 --> 01:47:57,835
where you see no collar or anything
that can hide that transition point,

1943
01:47:57,938 --> 01:48:00,908
we hid the transition point
back sort of underneath the chin.

1944
01:48:01,008 --> 01:48:05,639
And tried to keep as much of the neck
from the live actor as possible.

1945
01:48:05,746 --> 01:48:09,478
Meanwhile, the hair team is busy
also taking the track.

1946
01:48:09,583 --> 01:48:11,608
-Changing styles all the time.
-Yeah, changing style.

1947
01:48:11,719 --> 01:48:14,620
I think they were originally told
there was going to be three styles,

1948
01:48:14,722 --> 01:48:16,588
and they ended up with 28.

1949
01:48:16,690 --> 01:48:18,886
-They were the unsung heroes of..
-Yeah.

1950
01:48:18,993 --> 01:48:23,521
If there was one thing which David was
tweaking consistently, it was the hair.

1951
01:48:23,764 --> 01:48:29,168
My goal wasn't necessarily to get
the face moving 100% correct

1952
01:48:29,269 --> 01:48:32,102
because there is really no such thing.

1953
01:48:33,073 --> 01:48:35,872
But my goal was to make it move
believably enough

1954
01:48:35,976 --> 01:48:40,311
that people focus on the eyes.
You have to get the eyes right.

1955
01:48:40,414 --> 01:48:44,715
When you have dialogs with people,
when you are watching people in films,

1956
01:48:44,818 --> 01:48:47,685
you're looking at their eyes, especially
if they are talking or thinking,

1957
01:48:47,788 --> 01:48:49,085
or something like that.

1958
01:48:49,189 --> 01:48:51,351
And as soon as you lose connection
with the eyes

1959
01:48:51,458 --> 01:48:53,825
and you start looking
at the rest of the face,

1960
01:48:53,927 --> 01:48:58,091
it will look weird, because
people actually kind of look weird.

1961
01:48:58,198 --> 01:49:00,826
If you watch someone's mouth
as they are talking,

1962
01:49:01,435 --> 01:49:04,132
it doesn't look like
you may think it should look.

1963
01:49:04,238 --> 01:49:06,502
You're not seeing the phonemes
pronounced exactly.

1964
01:49:06,607 --> 01:49:10,908
You're not seeing
"oos" and "ees" and "aas" and...

1965
01:49:11,011 --> 01:49:14,777
It looks like sort of a Muppet mouth,
like flapping around.

1966
01:49:15,816 --> 01:49:18,342
So once you lose the eyes,
someone could go look at the mouth,

1967
01:49:18,452 --> 01:49:22,411
and even if the mouth looks completely
believable, really,

1968
01:49:22,523 --> 01:49:25,788
they won't think it does
because it moves like it really does.

1969
01:49:25,893 --> 01:49:29,955
So the hard part is really keeping
the audience engaged in his eyes.

1970
01:49:37,471 --> 01:49:40,873
One of our artists became
sort of the resident eye expert.

1971
01:49:45,679 --> 01:49:48,307
He would have like three monitors
on his desk.

1972
01:49:48,415 --> 01:49:49,814
He would have Brad Pitt's eyes
on one monitor,

1973
01:49:49,917 --> 01:49:52,682
he would have these in-development
CG eyes on another monitor,

1974
01:49:52,786 --> 01:49:57,189
and then on his third monitor,
he had video footage he shot of himself

1975
01:49:57,291 --> 01:50:01,558
looking in every direction and he shot
probably hours of this footage.

1976
01:50:01,662 --> 01:50:05,826
You walk by his desk and there's just
all these eyes staring at you.

1977
01:50:08,969 --> 01:50:13,429
It's pretty amazing how good
humans are at reading other humans,

1978
01:50:13,540 --> 01:50:16,168
and knowing what they may be
feeling or thinking

1979
01:50:16,276 --> 01:50:19,302
based on very minute changes
in their face.

1980
01:50:19,413 --> 01:50:25,045
I mean, you can take an eyelid
that is just slightly too wide

1981
01:50:25,152 --> 01:50:26,950
and narrow it slightly and he goes from

1982
01:50:27,054 --> 01:50:31,992
crazed killer to thoughtful,
or the tiniest smirk.

1983
01:50:32,092 --> 01:50:34,857
I mean, we are talking about
millimeters of motion

1984
01:50:34,962 --> 01:50:38,364
in the corner of a lip,
and that was a real challenge.

1985
01:50:43,737 --> 01:50:46,104
This has been the Holy Grail of CG,
and it's kind of,

1986
01:50:46,206 --> 01:50:49,836
"What do you after you do
the Holy Grail?"

1987
01:50:49,943 --> 01:50:54,039
It will be hard. You can't just go
and do another simple show

1988
01:50:54,148 --> 01:50:57,015
because where's the challenge in...

1989
01:50:57,117 --> 01:51:00,143
I certainly like to be challenged,
that's the only reason to do this.

1990
01:51:00,254 --> 01:51:02,279
You know, I tell my artists like,
"Look, at the end of the day,

1991
01:51:02,389 --> 01:51:04,483
"the money gets spent,
the time goes by,

1992
01:51:04,591 --> 01:51:06,025
"but you need to have something
to look back on

1993
01:51:06,126 --> 01:51:09,585
"and say you're proud of the work. "
And that's just the artist in me talking.

1994
01:51:17,037 --> 01:51:19,802
Well, I hope
people leave the theater wondering,

1995
01:51:19,907 --> 01:51:22,467
"Wow, where did they get that guy
that looks like Brad old?

1996
01:51:22,576 --> 01:51:24,977
"I mean, that's a great makeup job.
How did they do that?"

1997
01:51:25,078 --> 01:51:28,241
And they don't really even think about
that till after they have left the film.

1998
01:51:28,348 --> 01:51:31,648
I hope they just enjoy the film
that David's crafted.

1999
01:51:37,291 --> 01:51:40,420
Unfortunately, for me, I hope people
go, see the film and have no idea

2000
01:51:40,527 --> 01:51:42,621
that I had ever been there.

2001
01:51:43,897 --> 01:51:47,856
If that happens, I think
this film's gonna be hugely successful.

2002
01:51:49,102 --> 01:51:54,666
I hope we didn't hurt it for
David and Brad and the rest of the crew

2003
01:51:54,775 --> 01:51:57,836
by making something
that pulls people out of the film,

2004
01:51:57,945 --> 01:52:00,141
'cause it is pretty amazing.

2005
01:52:03,850 --> 01:52:06,444
How is it when you showed up

2006
01:52:06,553 --> 01:52:10,387
you were no bigger than a bollard
with one foot in the grave,

2007
01:52:10,490 --> 01:52:14,757
but now, either I drink a hell
of a lot more than I think I do,

2008
01:52:15,929 --> 01:52:17,556
or you sprouted?

2009
01:52:18,599 --> 01:52:20,363
What's your secret?

2010
01:52:21,735 --> 01:52:23,260
Well, Captain,

2011
01:52:25,072 --> 01:52:26,836
you do drink a lot.

2012
01:52:30,877 --> 01:52:36,008
Lola's a company that I came up with
the idea for about four, five years ago.

2013
01:52:36,116 --> 01:52:38,312
And it was something we really
wanted to do, which was

2014
01:52:38,418 --> 01:52:44,448
explore where we could take
digital de-aging of talent.

2015
01:52:44,558 --> 01:52:46,390
Essentially, we're doing digital facelifts.

2016
01:52:46,493 --> 01:52:50,191
We actually call it DCE,
Digital Cosmetic Enhancements.

2017
01:52:50,597 --> 01:52:54,898
And it's just... You know, if you're
shooting late, you have some eye bags,

2018
01:52:55,002 --> 01:52:56,527
you know, you're a little tired, I mean,

2019
01:52:56,637 --> 01:53:00,938
not everyone looks perfect every day,
even Hollywood royalty has off-days,

2020
01:53:01,041 --> 01:53:02,668
so, you know, using these techniques,

2021
01:53:02,776 --> 01:53:04,642
we can just make everyone look
a little bit better.

2022
01:53:04,745 --> 01:53:07,077
And with Benjamin Button,
it's been great working on this project,

2023
01:53:07,180 --> 01:53:09,672
because we can actually tell people
what we're doing.

2024
01:53:09,783 --> 01:53:13,310
Most of the work we do is so secretive
that we can't tell anyone.

2025
01:53:13,420 --> 01:53:15,479
In this case, we can, because,

2026
01:53:15,589 --> 01:53:17,421
you know, we're taking Brad Pitt

2027
01:53:17,524 --> 01:53:20,152
and making him look 20 years younger
as a story point.

2028
01:53:20,794 --> 01:53:24,753
-You are so much younger.
-Only on the outside.

2029
01:53:25,699 --> 01:53:27,292
Originally, we got involved
with Benjamin Button

2030
01:53:27,401 --> 01:53:28,869
when they were trying to find

2031
01:53:28,969 --> 01:53:32,496
a two-and-a-half-D solution
to make Brad look younger.

2032
01:53:32,773 --> 01:53:35,140
By two-and-a-half-D,
I mean that we'll do 3D tracking,

2033
01:53:35,242 --> 01:53:36,368
we'll do planar tracking,

2034
01:53:36,476 --> 01:53:41,038
you know, if a head is turning,
we'll track the head in 3D space,

2035
01:53:41,148 --> 01:53:43,583
but then we'll typically put 2D patches
back on top of it

2036
01:53:43,684 --> 01:53:45,812
in 3D space, like a Band-Aid,

2037
01:53:45,919 --> 01:53:49,549
which is like a two-dimensional object,
versus something that has depth.

2038
01:53:49,656 --> 01:53:52,648
We do have a scan of Brad,
but we typically didn't use that.

2039
01:53:52,759 --> 01:53:56,024
Most of the time, we just do tracking
based off the features of his face.

2040
01:53:56,129 --> 01:53:58,291
We use Boujou, which is a 3D program,

2041
01:53:58,398 --> 01:54:00,696
and it literally creates a cloud of points,

2042
01:54:00,801 --> 01:54:04,362
and as he's rotating,
the cloud of points will rotate with him,

2043
01:54:04,471 --> 01:54:07,099
and then that's what generates
the 3D information.

2044
01:54:07,407 --> 01:54:11,844
We're not having to create CG masks
that we replace actors with,

2045
01:54:11,945 --> 01:54:14,937
we're using all the subtlety
and performance of the actor.

2046
01:54:15,048 --> 01:54:19,246
We're just using the compositing tools
that turn back the clock 20 years

2047
01:54:19,353 --> 01:54:22,812
and remove the artifacts of the lighting
and, you know, the wrinkles

2048
01:54:22,923 --> 01:54:26,450
and adjust the tissue densities
and those kind of changes that happen.

2049
01:54:26,560 --> 01:54:30,360
As a person ages, their...
Gravity pulls your face down.

2050
01:54:30,464 --> 01:54:32,990
So the first thing was,
we'll take mesh warpers

2051
01:54:33,100 --> 01:54:35,762
and push the face back up
where it used to be.

2052
01:54:35,869 --> 01:54:37,963
And then we'll go back
and kind of remap the lighting.

2053
01:54:38,071 --> 01:54:40,802
So if there's harsh shadows,
we'll remove the shadows,

2054
01:54:40,907 --> 01:54:42,636
we'll fill in the shadows with lightness,

2055
01:54:42,743 --> 01:54:45,235
where you start losing density

2056
01:54:45,345 --> 01:54:48,178
around your temples,
you lose fat in your cheeks.

2057
01:54:48,281 --> 01:54:49,874
So we'll replace fat

2058
01:54:49,983 --> 01:54:53,715
and smooth out shadows,
is essentially what we're doing.

2059
01:54:54,521 --> 01:54:57,081
We do have a plastic surgeon,
Dr. Andrew Frankel.

2060
01:54:57,190 --> 01:55:00,057
He's one of the top
Beverly Hills surgeons.

2061
01:55:00,160 --> 01:55:03,061
He's been invaluable,
because the surgeon will come in,

2062
01:55:03,163 --> 01:55:06,656
and he'll say specifically, you know,
the nostril needs to move over,

2063
01:55:06,767 --> 01:55:07,962
you know, one half millimeter,

2064
01:55:08,068 --> 01:55:09,934
and he's very, very specific
and scientific

2065
01:55:10,036 --> 01:55:12,403
about his approach to de-aging.

2066
01:55:12,506 --> 01:55:15,942
So he's been a great colleague
in this whole process.

2067
01:56:21,675 --> 01:56:24,372
There were the shots of

2068
01:56:24,611 --> 01:56:26,943
Cate Blanchett practicing,

2069
01:56:27,047 --> 01:56:29,038
and we needed to do
digital face replacements of her

2070
01:56:29,149 --> 01:56:32,642
putting her face
onto a stand-in dancer's body.

2071
01:57:58,638 --> 01:58:01,972
As we're refining our technique,
it's allowing us to go further and further.

2072
01:58:02,075 --> 01:58:04,169
You know, a few years ago,
we could probably get,

2073
01:58:04,277 --> 01:58:05,938
maybe eight, 10 years comfortably,

2074
01:58:06,046 --> 01:58:07,878
and now, using this
two-and-a-half-D process,

2075
01:58:07,981 --> 01:58:09,608
we can get 20 years comfortably.

2076
01:58:09,716 --> 01:58:12,845
So If you wanted to make Brad look
like he's 14, or you're 10,

2077
01:58:12,953 --> 01:58:14,216
we wouldn't be able to do it.

2078
01:58:14,321 --> 01:58:17,382
As long as your window
is from about 20 years younger

2079
01:58:17,490 --> 01:58:20,255
to about 10 years older, we can do it
with the two-and-a-half-D process.

2080
01:58:24,130 --> 01:58:27,361
Anybody want to make $2
for a day's work 'round here?

2081
01:58:27,567 --> 01:58:28,693
I do.

2082
01:58:29,603 --> 01:58:31,662
You got your sea legs about you,
old man?

2083
01:58:33,573 --> 01:58:34,699
I think.

2084
01:58:34,808 --> 01:58:37,140
Well, that's good enough for me.

2085
01:58:37,377 --> 01:58:39,971
Get your ass on board.
We'll sure as hell find out.

2086
01:58:40,080 --> 01:58:44,108
I got a phone call from David
and I came over and met with him.

2087
01:58:44,784 --> 01:58:48,687
And that was basically to cover
the ten years of Benjamin

2088
01:58:48,888 --> 01:58:51,550
at sea on the tugboat, on the Chelsea.

2089
01:58:51,658 --> 01:58:53,922
Scrape off all this bird shit!

2090
01:58:54,828 --> 01:58:56,421
Right away, sir.

2091
01:59:07,340 --> 01:59:08,830
Here it comes.

2092
01:59:14,447 --> 01:59:17,212
That's so cool.

2093
01:59:17,317 --> 01:59:19,046
That's real grand.

2094
01:59:21,688 --> 01:59:25,124
Probably the most complicated part
is that when they're photographed,

2095
01:59:25,225 --> 01:59:27,990
they're actually photographed on
a stage that's completely independent

2096
01:59:28,094 --> 01:59:31,724
from what the real lighting would be
out on the Mississippi.

2097
01:59:31,831 --> 01:59:33,959
Often in other shows
it's been really difficult

2098
01:59:34,067 --> 01:59:37,662
'cause the lighting is completely wrong
or their shadow's in the wrong spot.

2099
01:59:37,771 --> 01:59:40,502
It doesn't make sense at all.
I mean, if you expect to see a sun

2100
01:59:40,674 --> 01:59:43,405
from one direction,
then you're getting a double shadow

2101
01:59:43,510 --> 01:59:44,602
which doesn't make sense at all.

2102
01:59:44,711 --> 01:59:47,078
It's challenging to make
those things work.

2103
01:59:47,180 --> 01:59:48,511
But this show worked out really well.

2104
02:00:07,867 --> 02:00:10,359
Our water was based
on Tessendorf's code.

2105
02:00:10,470 --> 02:00:12,666
There's a standard of CG water
that's out there

2106
02:00:12,772 --> 02:00:15,503
and we used that code as our basis.

2107
02:00:15,608 --> 02:00:17,872
Jerry Tessendorf came up
with the first algorithm

2108
02:00:17,977 --> 02:00:22,414
that simulated the closest, so far,
to what real ocean water does.

2109
02:00:22,515 --> 02:00:23,778
Today they have simulations

2110
02:00:23,883 --> 02:00:26,113
that simulate what water does
in a small glass.

2111
02:00:26,219 --> 02:00:27,584
Well, when you've got an ocean,

2112
02:00:27,687 --> 02:00:30,179
it's too many calculations to go on
for something that large.

2113
02:00:30,523 --> 02:00:33,424
Basically, the waves are
not just moving up and down,

2114
02:00:33,526 --> 02:00:37,087
but they actually move
in a sort of cyclical motion,

2115
02:00:37,197 --> 02:00:40,132
and that code accounts for it.

2116
02:00:45,605 --> 02:00:46,629
Everything beyond the boat

2117
02:00:46,740 --> 02:00:50,438
and often the boat itself
from longer shots was actually CG,

2118
02:00:50,543 --> 02:00:53,774
so whenever you see the characters
up close, that's all live action,

2119
02:00:53,880 --> 02:00:57,942
and anything behind them,
anything beyond the boat is all CG.

2120
02:00:59,753 --> 02:01:04,486
And as Benjamin grows younger,
we move into 1934

2121
02:01:04,591 --> 02:01:08,186
and then we go to the Eastern
Seaboard towards New York.

2122
02:01:09,429 --> 02:01:11,454
And we needed to look
at what would be

2123
02:01:11,564 --> 02:01:13,828
surrounding the Chelsea
in New York harbor,

2124
02:01:13,933 --> 02:01:15,697
what would populate the harbor.

2125
02:01:15,802 --> 02:01:18,066
How much would you see
of the Statue of Liberty

2126
02:01:18,171 --> 02:01:20,230
versus the Manhattan skyline?

2127
02:02:00,413 --> 02:02:01,744
Cut it. Good.

2128
02:02:01,815 --> 02:02:03,146
-Cut.
-Cut.

2129
02:02:55,835 --> 02:02:57,929
We had to deal with the bodies
that are all floating in the water,

2130
02:02:58,037 --> 02:02:59,527
and they all match with the surface,

2131
02:02:59,639 --> 02:03:03,906
so that's a simulation based on
the original ocean surface simulation.

2132
02:03:10,049 --> 02:03:11,483
The attack in the Pacific obviously

2133
02:03:11,584 --> 02:03:13,951
was the most complicated sequence
in the film.

2134
02:03:14,020 --> 02:03:15,215
Fellas !

2135
02:03:27,367 --> 02:03:28,425
Sub !

2136
02:03:36,142 --> 02:03:37,837
I mean, we didn't have a U-boat,

2137
02:03:37,944 --> 02:03:40,106
so we had to obviously build
a CG U-boat.

2138
02:03:40,213 --> 02:03:43,478
The water was very much CG driven
in that sequence.

2139
02:03:51,591 --> 02:03:54,390
We sure as hell
can't outrun them fuckers.

2140
02:03:55,361 --> 02:03:57,796
There were a lot of aspects to that
sequence that were very challenging.

2141
02:03:57,897 --> 02:04:00,992
Even down to where the tracer fire
was actually traveling.

2142
02:04:01,100 --> 02:04:02,261
We had to keep that continuous

2143
02:04:02,368 --> 02:04:05,303
so, when the German sub
was firing across the boat,

2144
02:04:05,405 --> 02:04:07,840
we spent a lot of time to make sure
the continuity worked

2145
02:04:07,941 --> 02:04:09,670
and that the shots were still exciting.

2146
02:04:09,776 --> 02:04:12,302
You know, that there's
a lot of action going on

2147
02:04:12,412 --> 02:04:14,437
and it looked really, really dangerous.

2148
02:04:46,546 --> 02:04:48,071
That's it. That's a cut.

2149
02:04:48,715 --> 02:04:52,208
That last one was the best one
as far as matching all around, guys,

2150
02:04:52,318 --> 02:04:55,379
so burn that into your brains.
Thank you.

2151
02:04:58,491 --> 02:05:00,983
Once we actually hit the U-boat,

2152
02:05:01,094 --> 02:05:02,858
the actual dynamics of the wave,

2153
02:05:02,962 --> 02:05:05,090
those two boats connected
and hit each other,

2154
02:05:05,198 --> 02:05:07,462
was very difficult to pull off
using the gimbal tug,

2155
02:05:07,567 --> 02:05:11,299
so we went to the drawing board
and we CG-built the tug.

2156
02:05:26,185 --> 02:05:29,485
We took the assets of the gimbal
and we built upon that,

2157
02:05:29,589 --> 02:05:33,150
and we built a much more dynamic field
for the collision.

2158
02:05:39,899 --> 02:05:41,731
The ocean water was challenging,

2159
02:05:41,834 --> 02:05:46,203
but once we felt pretty comfortable with
that, it moved on to the next challenge,

2160
02:05:46,305 --> 02:05:48,967
which was the giant splashes
from the sub exploding.

2161
02:06:00,787 --> 02:06:04,849
We had to kind of create that explosion
and that hugeness underwater

2162
02:06:04,957 --> 02:06:07,722
and really make sure the viewer
understood that we were underwater

2163
02:06:07,827 --> 02:06:11,525
and what would it look like
if a tug hit a sub.

2164
02:06:21,474 --> 02:06:24,466
It's got hundreds of effects
and it's the perfect type of effects.

2165
02:06:24,577 --> 02:06:26,671
The effects I love are
the ones that you never see.

2166
02:06:26,779 --> 02:06:27,974
And If you've done your job well,

2167
02:06:28,081 --> 02:06:30,209
then nobody ever knows
that there was an effect there.

2168
02:06:30,316 --> 02:06:33,547
So it's kind of this, you know,
you want to show your work,

2169
02:06:33,653 --> 02:06:36,350
but then if they don't see it, perfect.

2170
02:07:13,025 --> 02:07:17,656
Visual Effects
THE SIMULATED WORLD

2171
02:07:37,250 --> 02:07:39,184
I think this film is just so rich

2172
02:07:39,285 --> 02:07:41,982
and it's complex
in the way it tells a story.

2173
02:07:42,088 --> 02:07:44,819
It tells it through many different eras.

2174
02:07:50,062 --> 02:07:52,463
And, of course, the visual effects
need to make that All plausible.

2175
02:07:52,565 --> 02:07:54,033
Craig Barron - VISUAL EFFECTS
SUPERVISOR - Matte World

2176
02:07:54,133 --> 02:07:57,660
You know, we can't go find that perfect
location from the'20s anymore

2177
02:07:57,770 --> 02:08:00,569
because there's apartment complexes

2178
02:08:00,673 --> 02:08:02,869
or parking garages or everything

2179
02:08:02,975 --> 02:08:06,104
that's not gonna say classic,
old style location.

2180
02:08:06,212 --> 02:08:08,738
They just don't exist anymore.
It's too modern.

2181
02:08:14,554 --> 02:08:17,922
So we go back and we learn about
the history of something,

2182
02:08:18,024 --> 02:08:21,050
what it should look like, what are
the elements that aren't there anymore

2183
02:08:21,160 --> 02:08:23,993
that really communicate
the idea of being in the past,

2184
02:08:24,096 --> 02:08:26,565
and then put those into the shots.

2185
02:08:31,304 --> 02:08:35,468
What we do comes out of what was
traditionally called matte painting,

2186
02:08:35,575 --> 02:08:39,307
and now we've taken it further
in the computer graphics age

2187
02:08:39,412 --> 02:08:41,744
to create simulations of environments,

2188
02:08:41,847 --> 02:08:45,875
because now we're moving
dimensionally through these scenes.

2189
02:08:45,985 --> 02:08:48,579
And in order to do that,
you need to mimic

2190
02:08:48,688 --> 02:08:50,918
all the phenomena
that you would expect to see

2191
02:08:51,023 --> 02:08:52,923
if you're really photographing
that scene.

2192
02:08:56,896 --> 02:08:59,160
One is a aerial scene of Paris.

2193
02:08:59,265 --> 02:09:02,929
And this is a complete simulation,
there's no live action in it.

2194
02:09:03,035 --> 02:09:04,833
It's not anything that was photographed.

2195
02:09:04,937 --> 02:09:07,463
You know, again the idea of,
"Well, why don't you just go to Paris

2196
02:09:07,573 --> 02:09:10,838
"and shoot something
from a helicopter and change it?"

2197
02:09:10,943 --> 02:09:14,902
The reason why is that, by the time
you get some piece of film that works,

2198
02:09:15,014 --> 02:09:17,540
considering that you've got the right
lighting and the right time of day

2199
02:09:17,650 --> 02:09:18,845
and the nice looking clouds,

2200
02:09:18,951 --> 02:09:21,215
which you probably didn't
If you went there to shoot it.

2201
02:09:21,320 --> 02:09:22,947
Those are all things we can put in.

2202
02:09:23,055 --> 02:09:27,049
And we also need to make it
look correct to the right time period.

2203
02:09:27,159 --> 02:09:29,958
We have to take out any of the modern
buildings that wouldn't be there.

2204
02:09:30,062 --> 02:09:32,360
So it is simulation of reality,

2205
02:09:32,465 --> 02:09:34,559
and whether the shot
is successful or not

2206
02:09:34,667 --> 02:09:37,329
depends on how well
we're able to mimic that reality

2207
02:09:37,436 --> 02:09:39,131
and make it a credible illusion.

2208
02:09:39,238 --> 02:09:41,935
So we study the phenomena
that you would expect to see

2209
02:09:42,041 --> 02:09:44,169
in a scene like that or a shot like that.

2210
02:09:44,277 --> 02:09:46,871
You want to see
highlights off of windows,

2211
02:09:46,979 --> 02:09:50,973
the glints of the sun
reflecting off of the windows of cars

2212
02:09:51,083 --> 02:09:54,713
as they drive down streets.
We have to have traffic, people,

2213
02:09:54,820 --> 02:09:58,381
steam coming off of buildings,
moving clouds,

2214
02:09:58,491 --> 02:10:01,927
flags, you know, all the things
that you'd expect to see

2215
02:10:02,028 --> 02:10:06,158
need to be there as objects and
phenomena that's telling you it's real.

2216
02:10:09,702 --> 02:10:12,069
The exterior of the train station set

2217
02:10:12,171 --> 02:10:16,005
was shot on a location in New Orleans
of the court house building.

2218
02:10:16,842 --> 02:10:19,607
Tech Scout, October 10, 2006

2219
02:10:23,716 --> 02:10:25,810
Ten cars, three horse and carriage.

2220
02:10:26,519 --> 02:10:28,078
50-foot tech...

2221
02:10:32,458 --> 02:10:33,857
Start using all the doors.

2222
02:10:33,959 --> 02:10:35,654
It could be in here.
It could be out there.

2223
02:10:35,761 --> 02:10:38,890
It could be... I think here
we'll have control of the street, right?

2224
02:10:38,998 --> 02:10:41,126
Yeah, this street we own.

2225
02:10:41,233 --> 02:10:44,863
Somewhere in here a crane shot.
Or platform.

2226
02:10:44,970 --> 02:10:46,870
-Okay.
-You know, put a parallel.

2227
02:10:46,972 --> 02:10:48,770
See, now the sunrise is over there,

2228
02:10:48,874 --> 02:10:51,775
so we wanted to do this
kind of first thing.

2229
02:10:52,745 --> 02:10:55,237
-So it's either/or.
-And I want clouds

2230
02:10:55,348 --> 02:10:57,942
just like that, a little deeper.

2231
02:10:58,050 --> 02:11:00,985
-Going left to right or right to left? Okay.
-Right to left.

2232
02:11:01,087 --> 02:11:02,646
The court house building architecture

2233
02:11:02,755 --> 02:11:05,816
wanted to be changed
to look like a train station,

2234
02:11:05,925 --> 02:11:09,259
as well as, we had to establish it
in a period of time

2235
02:11:09,362 --> 02:11:13,265
before EPA
and proper emission standards.

2236
02:11:13,366 --> 02:11:16,165
So it had to have smoke
and grime and...

2237
02:11:16,235 --> 02:11:17,202
Raw dailies

2238
02:11:17,303 --> 02:11:20,364
It needed to look really industrial
and uncomfortable.

2239
02:11:20,473 --> 02:11:22,134
So we added all these
additional elements

2240
02:11:22,241 --> 02:11:25,211
to what we shot in New Orleans,
smoke, haze.

2241
02:11:25,311 --> 02:11:26,676
And then we went way over the top

2242
02:11:26,779 --> 02:11:28,975
and Dave said,
"Okay, you can back off a little bit.

2243
02:11:29,081 --> 02:11:30,242
"It doesn't have to be that horrible."

2244
02:11:30,349 --> 02:11:33,284
Which was great,'cause you literally
couldn't see five feet in front of you.

2245
02:12:40,085 --> 02:12:43,988
The train station interior sequence
was creating this old style

2246
02:12:44,089 --> 02:12:48,856
interior union type train station
which was built as a virtual set.

2247
02:12:48,961 --> 02:12:52,522
Meaning, they built some columns
and a wall, some scaffolding,

2248
02:12:52,631 --> 02:12:55,726
and then blue screens
were surrounding the set.

2249
02:12:59,572 --> 02:13:02,098
So David was free to shoot in any angle

2250
02:13:02,208 --> 02:13:06,167
as if it was a real place, and then it's
our job to track in the rest of our world,

2251
02:13:06,278 --> 02:13:10,715
our computer generated world, to fit
the real world that he photographed.

2252
02:13:13,686 --> 02:13:17,884
And make that transition from
real world to virtual world seamless.

2253
02:13:33,606 --> 02:13:35,597
We, of course, also added people to it,

2254
02:13:35,708 --> 02:13:38,143
because we needed to
fill out the crowds.

2255
02:13:38,244 --> 02:13:41,578
And that was fun because we shot
our own employees on blue screen

2256
02:13:41,680 --> 02:13:43,273
and added them into the scenes.

2257
02:13:43,382 --> 02:13:46,682
So we actually had the people
who worked on the shot, the animators,

2258
02:13:46,785 --> 02:13:50,380
the compositors, in their own
train station shots. So that's kind of fun.

2259
02:13:50,489 --> 02:13:54,050
It's a sort of a way we can author
the shot and make it our own.

2260
02:14:05,704 --> 02:14:08,105
Another thing that's really great
about that sequence

2261
02:14:08,207 --> 02:14:12,769
is that it starts from the Armistice Day
to the'20s and we cut back to it

2262
02:14:12,878 --> 02:14:15,540
during different periods of time,
where we see it in the '40s

2263
02:14:15,648 --> 02:14:18,117
and the'60s and then,
eventually, present day.

2264
02:14:18,217 --> 02:14:20,845
So we get to show that train station

2265
02:14:20,953 --> 02:14:25,413
remodeled and what choices were
made from a design standpoint of

2266
02:14:25,524 --> 02:14:29,620
what those different shots look like,
was a lot of fun to figure out.

2267
02:14:45,744 --> 02:14:49,772
One of the set pieces
that we're creating is a clock.

2268
02:14:50,816 --> 02:14:54,343
It's in so many sequences that
keeping it as a computer graphic

2269
02:14:54,453 --> 02:14:57,855
allows you, of course, to decide
what time you want it to be.

2270
02:14:57,957 --> 02:15:00,016
And it ends up being
extremely important

2271
02:15:00,125 --> 02:15:01,957
as you're cutting a sequence together

2272
02:15:02,061 --> 02:15:03,995
and you have people standing
in front of the clock

2273
02:15:04,096 --> 02:15:07,828
to decide that in a more comfortable
post-production environment

2274
02:15:07,933 --> 02:15:10,265
about where the hands are,
and where the seconds are.

2275
02:15:10,369 --> 02:15:13,304
And just so that you maximize

2276
02:15:13,405 --> 02:15:16,397
every shot of the clock,
because If you had this thing on the set

2277
02:15:16,508 --> 02:15:18,875
you'd always be backing it up
and it would be in the wrong place.

2278
02:15:18,978 --> 02:15:22,278
Or you'd probably have to fiddle with it
in post-production anyway.

2279
02:15:22,381 --> 02:15:25,009
So it was just very easy
to create this clock

2280
02:15:25,117 --> 02:15:28,382
and then control it
and decide what it should read

2281
02:15:28,487 --> 02:15:30,512
on a shot by shot basis.

2282
02:15:36,395 --> 02:15:37,885
It has a glass front

2283
02:15:37,997 --> 02:15:42,434
and that glass, then, of course, will
reflect the interior of the train station.

2284
02:15:42,935 --> 02:15:47,634
Also, since a blind clockmaker
made the clock, we also thought about,

2285
02:15:47,740 --> 02:15:50,641
well, what kind of clock
would this blind clockmaker make?

2286
02:15:50,743 --> 02:15:53,440
And David had the idea
of wanting the numbers to be raised,

2287
02:15:53,545 --> 02:15:57,175
sort of like Braille. And so we made
a little gold rim around it

2288
02:15:57,282 --> 02:15:59,273
so there was a sweep-second hand
that would go across.

2289
02:15:59,385 --> 02:16:02,377
It would interrupt a light reflection
off of the numbers.

2290
02:16:02,488 --> 02:16:04,479
You know, clearly, this is very subtle.

2291
02:16:04,590 --> 02:16:06,957
You know, I mean,
I don't expect the audience to go,

2292
02:16:07,059 --> 02:16:08,527
"It's raised 'cause he's blind."

2293
02:16:08,627 --> 02:16:10,789
But those are the details you think about

2294
02:16:10,896 --> 02:16:13,558
to give you a direction
on how to do your work.

2295
02:16:23,375 --> 02:16:27,437
We had some stock fireworks
from a previous David Fincher movie,

2296
02:16:27,546 --> 02:16:32,245
Zodiac actually, and we used the same
fireworks in this whole sequence.

2297
02:16:32,351 --> 02:16:36,151
There were crowds shot on location
at night, in New Orleans.

2298
02:16:36,255 --> 02:16:38,087
We had to add more people.

2299
02:16:38,190 --> 02:16:40,124
There were 100 extras
that go back a block.

2300
02:16:40,225 --> 02:16:44,355
We needed to take block number
two, three, four, all off into the distance.

2301
02:16:44,463 --> 02:16:47,660
We have people up on balconies
that weren't there,

2302
02:16:47,766 --> 02:16:49,564
so those were shot
as separate elements.

2303
02:16:49,635 --> 02:16:51,069
Action!

2304
02:16:51,136 --> 02:16:52,433
Raw dailies

2305
02:16:52,538 --> 02:16:54,404
Fortunately it was
near the Fourth of July,

2306
02:16:54,506 --> 02:16:57,373
so we were actually able
to take advantage of buying sparklers

2307
02:16:57,476 --> 02:16:58,602
that we used to good effect.

2308
02:16:58,711 --> 02:17:01,942
We put that into the distance
over and over again.

2309
02:17:12,925 --> 02:17:16,623
Another full CG shot that we're doing
is of the Flatiron building.

2310
02:17:16,729 --> 02:17:18,857
It's an establishing shot of New York.

2311
02:17:18,964 --> 02:17:22,901
It's a beautiful building, of course.
It's built as a triangle on a corner

2312
02:17:23,001 --> 02:17:25,470
and it allowed us to create that
as a period shot

2313
02:17:25,571 --> 02:17:28,165
with smoke elements
coming off all the buildings.

2314
02:17:28,273 --> 02:17:30,640
We have to put traffic
running down the streets.

2315
02:17:30,743 --> 02:17:32,438
And even though we are way far away,

2316
02:17:32,544 --> 02:17:35,479
it's sort of a God's-eye view of this,
you would still see people.

2317
02:17:35,581 --> 02:17:39,211
We have very small people
walking on the streets,

2318
02:17:39,318 --> 02:17:41,343
crossing the street, dodging the traffic.

2319
02:17:41,453 --> 02:17:45,014
And then signage, we did research
to see what kind of advertisements

2320
02:17:45,124 --> 02:17:46,717
would be in the environment.

2321
02:17:46,825 --> 02:17:49,590
Anything that would be appropriate
for the time period on billboards,

2322
02:17:49,695 --> 02:17:53,290
creating this sort of environment
that would be New York.

2323
02:17:55,033 --> 02:17:59,061
As Benjamin Button goes around
the world in different time periods,

2324
02:17:59,171 --> 02:18:01,139
he actually goes also into Russia

2325
02:18:01,240 --> 02:18:03,800
during his sequence
with the merchant marines.

2326
02:18:03,909 --> 02:18:09,279
And so we created a Murmansk harbor
and had the crew walking up.

2327
02:18:09,381 --> 02:18:12,612
And we added the background
with the ships and the frozen ice

2328
02:18:12,718 --> 02:18:14,447
and the snow on the buildings.

2329
02:18:14,553 --> 02:18:18,387
And, again, that was like learning
about what Murmansk would look like.

2330
02:18:18,490 --> 02:18:20,754
There's this unusual crane
that they have there

2331
02:18:20,859 --> 02:18:23,760
that we put into the shot
to make it look like that location.

2332
02:18:25,798 --> 02:18:29,359
The Majestic Theater in New York.
We wanted to see down a street

2333
02:18:29,468 --> 02:18:31,960
and see everything
that you'd see on Broadway.

2334
02:18:32,070 --> 02:18:35,062
So we're going to have
animation of lights

2335
02:18:35,174 --> 02:18:38,667
for different theater marquees
going off into the distance,

2336
02:18:38,777 --> 02:18:40,643
and a sense that
you're in that New York canyon,

2337
02:18:40,746 --> 02:18:42,236
of being able to look off to infinity

2338
02:18:42,347 --> 02:18:47,183
in sort of a man-made canyon
of buildings going back to the horizon.

2339
02:18:47,286 --> 02:18:49,584
We also put in the Chrysler building

2340
02:18:49,688 --> 02:18:52,919
and then the marquee of the theater
has to be created.

2341
02:18:53,025 --> 02:18:55,585
There is a Majestic Theater in New York
still today,

2342
02:18:55,894 --> 02:19:00,456
and it doesn't have that beautiful sign,
that big marquee is gone now.

2343
02:19:00,566 --> 02:19:03,126
So we created it from reference
of how it looked back in the'40s,

2344
02:19:03,235 --> 02:19:04,999
The original plate as it was shot
on location in New Orleans

2345
02:19:05,103 --> 02:19:06,969
how lights would chase around
and thermometer up and down.

2346
02:19:07,072 --> 02:19:09,336
It's all something
that we're copying from stock footage,

2347
02:19:09,441 --> 02:19:12,809
that we had as reference
from the actual theater.

2348
02:19:12,911 --> 02:19:15,642
Since everything is in the digital realm,

2349
02:19:15,747 --> 02:19:17,977
a lot of our work tends to blur

2350
02:19:18,083 --> 02:19:21,610
into just the production process
of making the movie.

2351
02:19:21,720 --> 02:19:25,247
Whereas, there'll be something
on location that wasn't quite right

2352
02:19:25,357 --> 02:19:26,756
that needed to be fixed.

2353
02:19:26,859 --> 02:19:30,625
But rather than wait and stop shooting,
they went ahead and shot anyway

2354
02:19:30,729 --> 02:19:34,495
knowing that we could correct
the problem in post-production.

2355
02:19:34,600 --> 02:19:37,535
it just frees up
the production process so much.

2356
02:19:37,636 --> 02:19:39,764
You know,
if the clouds weren't quite right,

2357
02:19:39,872 --> 02:19:43,638
they don't match from shot to shot, well,
you're not gonna wait for a cloudy day

2358
02:19:43,742 --> 02:19:46,973
to continue your sequence.
So we'll go in and we'll strip those out

2359
02:19:47,079 --> 02:19:51,539
and we'll make it feel more consecutive,
like it was shot all at the same time.

2360
02:19:51,650 --> 02:19:55,245
And these little nuances
just make the difference.

2361
02:19:55,354 --> 02:19:58,790
It's all part of that process
of telling a story

2362
02:19:58,891 --> 02:20:00,655
and it's a more effective way
of telling a story

2363
02:20:00,759 --> 02:20:03,353
because it all makes sense, visually.

2364
02:20:10,302 --> 02:20:14,136
It's okay. Can you solo the effects?

2365
02:20:21,246 --> 02:20:24,614
I see, so it's sort of a big crowd.
I hear it, so he's...

2366
02:20:24,716 --> 02:20:26,241
Yeah, but this stuff is good.

2367
02:20:26,351 --> 02:20:29,685
This has been probably
the most difficult project yet,

2368
02:20:29,788 --> 02:20:33,349
just sort of the restraint
of the soundtrack.

2369
02:20:34,059 --> 02:20:36,153
You can hide in sound.

2370
02:20:36,261 --> 02:20:38,889
In other words, If you have bad dialog

2371
02:20:38,997 --> 02:20:43,059
or if you have things that are kind of
sloppy from a technical standpoint,

2372
02:20:44,002 --> 02:20:46,596
often times in sound,
you can kind of spackle over it

2373
02:20:46,705 --> 02:20:51,438
with Bondo and kind of hide
the imperfections in more noise.

2374
02:20:51,543 --> 02:20:54,604
On a gritty movie like Se7en,
it's okay to kind of have this,

2375
02:20:54,713 --> 02:20:57,307
you know, grungy, crappy track.

2376
02:20:57,416 --> 02:21:01,148
But in this film, it's all about
just the loneliness of the space

2377
02:21:01,253 --> 02:21:05,884
and nothing to do but just sit there
and hear children down the street

2378
02:21:05,991 --> 02:21:07,186
and the clip-clop of horses.

2379
02:21:07,292 --> 02:21:11,456
And so all the imperfection
is right up there in front

2380
02:21:11,563 --> 02:21:14,828
and it has to be just presented
as this period piece.

2381
02:21:14,933 --> 02:21:18,699
And so that's been very challenging
for All of us

2382
02:21:18,804 --> 02:21:23,503
in terms of the dialog editorial
and in terms of the sound

2383
02:21:23,608 --> 02:21:28,341
and in the mix, and it's also
a lengthy film. It's 10 reels long.

2384
02:21:28,447 --> 02:21:33,942
So, in a way, it feels almost like
it's two films in terms of workload.

2385
02:21:34,052 --> 02:21:35,781
Out, damnable affliction!

2386
02:21:35,887 --> 02:21:37,912
So what about right there?

2387
02:21:39,858 --> 02:21:42,486
When I was writing down the note,
it was...

2388
02:21:42,594 --> 02:21:45,791
We kind of played in
the first few words here.

2389
02:21:45,897 --> 02:21:49,299
To kind of get warmed up
to the environment,

2390
02:21:49,401 --> 02:21:53,338
and just to start absorbing
as much of the culture

2391
02:21:53,438 --> 02:21:57,568
of that period in which
Benjamin grew up in New Orleans,

2392
02:21:57,676 --> 02:21:59,371
David kept saying things like,

2393
02:21:59,478 --> 02:22:01,708
"The French Quarter,
it's live and it's bustling,

2394
02:22:01,813 --> 02:22:04,043
"and there's music coming
from all these different windows."

2395
02:22:04,149 --> 02:22:07,414
And that's acoustic music performed,
and people in different

2396
02:22:07,519 --> 02:22:10,045
restaurants or bars or pubs or brothels

2397
02:22:10,155 --> 02:22:12,954
would all be vying
for the passersby's ear.

2398
02:22:13,058 --> 02:22:16,028
So there would be this noise
coming at you.

2399
02:22:19,531 --> 02:22:23,468
And so, Aaron Zeller,
he was working on location,

2400
02:22:23,568 --> 02:22:25,468
and I thought, you know,
"This guy's from New Orleans,

2401
02:22:25,570 --> 02:22:26,935
"he knows it like the back of his hand.

2402
02:22:27,039 --> 02:22:30,202
"We should hire him to go out
and just collect background sounds."

2403
02:22:30,809 --> 02:22:35,007
So he did. He'd go into bars
and just set up his little...

2404
02:22:35,113 --> 02:22:36,877
He brought in these little
hidden microphones,

2405
02:22:36,982 --> 02:22:40,543
and put them on his sunglasses
and went and recorded.

2406
02:22:42,921 --> 02:22:45,549
A lot of these sounds,
we didn't have vintage vehicles,

2407
02:22:45,657 --> 02:22:48,285
these Model Ts and vintage trains,

2408
02:22:48,393 --> 02:22:52,887
and all these sounds of yesteryear
that we no longer can have access to.

2409
02:23:02,941 --> 02:23:05,842
Even just the sound of the swamp,
or the birds,

2410
02:23:05,944 --> 02:23:09,005
or the crickets or the cicadas
are very unique.

2411
02:23:10,849 --> 02:23:16,151
And if you listen in the track, there's that
sort of pulsating cicada texture

2412
02:23:16,254 --> 02:23:18,655
that happens often in the summertime.

2413
02:23:21,460 --> 02:23:24,361
So we were lucky
to have fresh new sounds.

2414
02:23:25,230 --> 02:23:26,789
And then, he comes up. Stand up.

2415
02:23:26,898 --> 02:23:29,060
He's up into this, like that,

2416
02:23:29,167 --> 02:23:31,864
and we see her come
in the background like that.

2417
02:23:31,970 --> 02:23:33,460
Quiet, please !

2418
02:23:36,274 --> 02:23:37,673
-Sound speed, Wayne.
-Speeding.

2419
02:23:38,276 --> 02:23:39,607
Playback!

2420
02:23:40,011 --> 02:23:41,740
On the day that David's filming,

2421
02:23:41,847 --> 02:23:43,212
all the people
that are in the background,

2422
02:23:43,315 --> 02:23:46,478
they actually don't say anything.
They're just extras that are mouthing.

2423
02:23:46,551 --> 02:23:47,916
Background.

2424
02:23:49,054 --> 02:23:50,283
And action !

2425
02:23:50,388 --> 02:23:52,652
Absolutely! Damn right!

2426
02:23:53,959 --> 02:23:57,122
So you know
what my father says to me?

2427
02:23:57,229 --> 02:24:01,689
He says,
"Who the hell do you think you are?"

2428
02:24:02,200 --> 02:24:04,635
And so they have to be replaced.

2429
02:24:07,172 --> 02:24:09,766
So you know
what my father says to me?

2430
02:24:10,609 --> 02:24:14,944
He says,
"Who the hell do you think you are?"

2431
02:24:15,046 --> 02:24:17,208
Then, often times,
when their voices are replaced,

2432
02:24:17,315 --> 02:24:20,546
they're replaced with actors who might
be from Los Angeles, you know.

2433
02:24:20,652 --> 02:24:24,919
And so, there's always that faction of
dedicated New Orleans people

2434
02:24:25,023 --> 02:24:27,287
that will be listening,
"Those aren't real accents."

2435
02:24:27,392 --> 02:24:29,554
So we wanted to make sure
they were true.

2436
02:24:29,661 --> 02:24:32,358
Same old crap every day.

2437
02:24:32,731 --> 02:24:36,497
If you watch the film, a lot of it
takes place in the Nolan House

2438
02:24:36,601 --> 02:24:39,070
which is a retirement home
with lots of old folks.

2439
02:24:39,171 --> 02:24:44,302
So capturing the sound of
old people talking about stuff,

2440
02:24:44,409 --> 02:24:47,071
but with the right accent.

2441
02:24:47,179 --> 02:24:51,446
You know, again,
you can't hire people to do it

2442
02:24:51,550 --> 02:24:54,850
as well as if you could just
sneak in some place

2443
02:24:54,953 --> 02:24:55,977
and collect all these sounds.

2444
02:24:56,087 --> 02:25:00,957
So Aaron went into the... house
and a couple of other retirement homes,

2445
02:25:01,059 --> 02:25:03,187
and poor old people were freaked out,

2446
02:25:03,295 --> 02:25:04,854
'cause they didn't know
who this guy was.

2447
02:25:04,963 --> 02:25:08,160
He's in there
and he's got these headphones on,

2448
02:25:08,266 --> 02:25:09,734
he's sitting there, looking there.

2449
02:25:09,834 --> 02:25:11,962
And if you listen through all the takes,
it's funny,

2450
02:25:12,070 --> 02:25:14,937
'cause some of these people go,
"We didn't know who you were, sugar.

2451
02:25:15,040 --> 02:25:16,405
"We thought you were some stranger

2452
02:25:16,508 --> 02:25:18,499
"looking to case the joint
or something," you know.

2453
02:25:18,610 --> 02:25:20,078
It was just hilarious.

2454
02:25:20,178 --> 02:25:22,613
But some of the recordings
that he got were great.

2455
02:25:22,714 --> 02:25:25,342
They're priceless.

2456
02:25:25,450 --> 02:25:27,714
Get that bones
and chop that up right there.

2457
02:25:27,819 --> 02:25:29,548
-Chop it up, come on.
-All right.

2458
02:25:29,654 --> 02:25:31,782
Chop up them onions real good.

2459
02:25:31,890 --> 02:25:34,154
You'll hear a great clip where

2460
02:25:34,259 --> 02:25:37,661
Brad Pitt comes home after the war
and he comes home to see his mom,

2461
02:25:37,762 --> 02:25:40,129
and he, of course,
has gotten a lot younger

2462
02:25:40,232 --> 02:25:42,963
and he's sort of wanting to know
if she'll even recognize who he is,

2463
02:25:43,068 --> 02:25:44,593
and he comes back home.

2464
02:25:44,703 --> 02:25:46,171
And we had all this space to fill in.

2465
02:25:46,271 --> 02:25:48,467
At one point, we had just nothing,
just silence, and Dave was like,

2466
02:25:48,573 --> 02:25:50,940
"Can we put some sound in there?
It's so flat."

2467
02:25:51,042 --> 02:25:55,206
And so, we had this great clip
that Aaron recorded of this old lady

2468
02:25:56,615 --> 02:26:02,384
who is trying to get out of her bed,
and she's going, "I'm ready, I'm ready."

2469
02:26:03,021 --> 02:26:06,013
And finally,
the African-American nurse goes,

2470
02:26:06,124 --> 02:26:08,889
"Okay, Miss Alfalina, I'm coming,
I'm coming for you, honey."

2471
02:26:08,994 --> 02:26:12,055
And it's just this great thing
that you could never write,

2472
02:26:12,163 --> 02:26:14,689
you can never come up with it,
you know.

2473
02:26:14,799 --> 02:26:17,359
I'm ready! I'm ready!

2474
02:26:17,435 --> 02:26:19,733
I'm coming !

2475
02:26:19,838 --> 02:26:23,103
-I'm ready!
-All right, I'm coming, Miss Alfalina.

2476
02:26:23,208 --> 02:26:25,506
A lot of the job was just
listening to these recordings

2477
02:26:25,610 --> 02:26:27,271
and cherry-picking, "Oh, that's great.

2478
02:26:27,379 --> 02:26:30,144
"We should kind of put it in the movie
somewhere," that kind of stuff.

2479
02:26:30,248 --> 02:26:31,977
You're looking at him.
When he stands up, look at his face,

2480
02:26:32,083 --> 02:26:33,676
then look at his feet
and then look back, kind of like,

2481
02:26:33,785 --> 02:26:35,446
"You got to be like what?"

2482
02:26:35,553 --> 02:26:38,682
We had a lot working against us
just in terms of noise,

2483
02:26:38,790 --> 02:26:41,020
and so cleaning up the dialog
was very difficult.

2484
02:26:41,126 --> 02:26:45,654
Now, New Orleans, it's a metropolitan
city with freeways and rumble.

2485
02:26:45,764 --> 02:26:48,631
And what David wanted was

2486
02:26:48,733 --> 02:26:53,102
just quiet dialog with just chickens,

2487
02:26:53,204 --> 02:26:56,469
you know, in the background and wind.

2488
02:26:56,574 --> 02:26:58,372
And so, that was very challenging,

2489
02:26:58,476 --> 02:27:01,776
because our production sound
recordist, Mark Weingarten,

2490
02:27:01,880 --> 02:27:03,575
had a real hard time
with these locations,

2491
02:27:03,682 --> 02:27:04,672
because they were noisy.

2492
02:27:04,783 --> 02:27:09,949
I mean, the Nolan House,
you go in the backyard, it's just...

2493
02:27:11,222 --> 02:27:12,815
And you've got all this dialog happening.

2494
02:27:12,924 --> 02:27:17,054
In fact, one of the first rules

2495
02:27:17,162 --> 02:27:20,598
that David came up with was,

2496
02:27:20,699 --> 02:27:24,465
any time an actor is outside,
they shall be looped,

2497
02:27:24,569 --> 02:27:29,769
which was really hard on many levels,
most notably, just performance,

2498
02:27:29,874 --> 02:27:32,639
because the actor gives so much
on the day.

2499
02:27:32,744 --> 02:27:35,770
And then to have them come back in
and try to redo it again

2500
02:27:35,880 --> 02:27:37,871
is very difficult for them,

2501
02:27:37,982 --> 02:27:42,044
because it's hard to come all the way
back up to that level of performance.

2502
02:27:42,153 --> 02:27:45,054
Well, he got another thing coming,
that's for sure.

2503
02:27:45,156 --> 02:27:48,592
God be my witness,
he got another thing coming.

2504
02:27:48,693 --> 02:27:51,788
He left us $18 that night you was found.

2505
02:27:51,896 --> 02:27:53,557
Eighteen ratty dollars

2506
02:27:53,631 --> 02:27:55,190
and a...

2507
02:27:55,300 --> 02:27:57,029
Good night, baby.

2508
02:27:57,869 --> 02:28:01,703
In the film, the dialog that you hear,
for example, if it is production,

2509
02:28:01,806 --> 02:28:06,676
often times, it's not even when
they're actually saying their dialog.

2510
02:28:06,778 --> 02:28:09,440
It's a culmination
of many different cuts within that,

2511
02:28:09,547 --> 02:28:13,814
and David's very involved
with every little nuance

2512
02:28:13,918 --> 02:28:16,580
and finding just the right pitch and tone
for every little word.

2513
02:28:16,688 --> 02:28:19,783
So it's a really long, drawn-out process,

2514
02:28:19,891 --> 02:28:23,122
but it's a lot of fun just to
kind of hone in the characters.

2515
02:28:25,597 --> 02:28:27,827
Y'all listen. Y'all listen up here.

2516
02:28:28,800 --> 02:28:30,029
We're gonna have us a visitor

2517
02:28:30,135 --> 02:28:33,264
that's gonna be staying with us
for a little while.

2518
02:28:33,371 --> 02:28:36,898
My sister had a child
and she couldn't see right by it, so...

2519
02:28:37,008 --> 02:28:39,204
You know what?
Maybe I need to watch this again.

2520
02:28:39,310 --> 02:28:41,574
-Okay.
-'Cause I've got to look...

2521
02:28:41,679 --> 02:28:43,773
I can't look at the paper
and look up here.

2522
02:28:43,882 --> 02:28:45,281
Let me hear that one back,

2523
02:28:45,383 --> 02:28:48,353
just for "Dr. Rose says
he ain't got much more time left."

2524
02:28:48,453 --> 02:28:51,980
God in Heaven.
He looks just like my ex-husband.

2525
02:28:52,824 --> 02:28:55,452
Look, he's prematurely old.

2526
02:28:55,994 --> 02:28:59,589
Dr. Rose said he ain't got much more
time on this earth.

2527
02:28:59,898 --> 02:29:01,297
Join the club.

2528
02:29:01,966 --> 02:29:05,630
Just wanna read the last line, "Dr. Rose
says he ain't got much more time."

2529
02:29:06,604 --> 02:29:08,936
Yeah. really feel sorry for him.

2530
02:29:09,040 --> 02:29:10,530
Okay, let's just pick that up,
"Dr. Rose says he ain't..."

2531
02:29:10,642 --> 02:29:13,111
-1 :35, Doc.
-You are so silly.

2532
02:29:15,079 --> 02:29:16,171
Mama.

2533
02:29:17,015 --> 02:29:18,141
Mama.

2534
02:29:18,850 --> 02:29:22,809
Some days I feel different
than the day before.

2535
02:29:22,921 --> 02:29:25,856
Part of the challenge
with Benjamin Button's voice

2536
02:29:25,957 --> 02:29:29,860
when he's seven years old,
yet he looks like a 75-year-old man,

2537
02:29:29,961 --> 02:29:34,194
was to make him sound,
on one hand, childlike,

2538
02:29:34,299 --> 02:29:36,563
but on the other hand, elderly.

2539
02:29:36,935 --> 02:29:38,460
Molasses.

2540
02:29:38,970 --> 02:29:41,200
I don't think I have worms.

2541
02:29:41,306 --> 02:29:44,173
So it was that quandary of,
how do you do the sound?

2542
02:29:44,275 --> 02:29:47,870
And I thought, "Well, he would sound
kind of like a little baby."

2543
02:29:47,979 --> 02:29:49,447
Like, he would sound like this.

2544
02:29:49,547 --> 02:29:52,380
"Mama, how much longer
do I have to live?"

2545
02:29:53,485 --> 02:29:56,420
Mama? How much longer I got?

2546
02:29:56,521 --> 02:30:00,321
A lot of that original recording
of Brad was like that,

2547
02:30:00,425 --> 02:30:02,291
and we had it cut in for a while.

2548
02:30:02,393 --> 02:30:04,088
But then when the animation came in,

2549
02:30:04,195 --> 02:30:07,995
I think David realized
it wasn't really quite the right sound

2550
02:30:08,099 --> 02:30:12,366
and was dissatisfied with that
as a texture.

2551
02:30:12,470 --> 02:30:15,701
Mama? How much longer I got?

2552
02:30:15,807 --> 02:30:17,275
David Fincher kept saying,

2553
02:30:17,375 --> 02:30:19,434
"Well, let's just pitch it
and run it through the throat program,

2554
02:30:19,544 --> 02:30:21,979
"and do this and do that,
and it's gonna come out great."

2555
02:30:22,080 --> 02:30:24,947
We did due diligence
on the original recordings,

2556
02:30:25,049 --> 02:30:29,885
and tried as best as we could
to make technology create this texture,

2557
02:30:29,988 --> 02:30:31,888
and create this effect, but ultimately

2558
02:30:31,990 --> 02:30:37,690
what we found out was that
it sounded science fiction-esque.

2559
02:30:38,329 --> 02:30:40,457
Molasses.

2560
02:30:40,565 --> 02:30:43,330
These tools, you know,
maybe there'll be a new technology

2561
02:30:43,434 --> 02:30:44,799
which will allow for this,

2562
02:30:44,903 --> 02:30:47,270
but right now, currently, we don't have

2563
02:30:47,372 --> 02:30:51,400
technology that doesn't end up
sounding like you're in a sci-fi film.

2564
02:30:51,509 --> 02:30:53,273
And it would be great
if it was a science fiction film.

2565
02:30:53,378 --> 02:30:57,042
Then you could hear all the digital
artifacts and it would be acceptable.

2566
02:30:57,115 --> 02:30:59,447
Molasses.

2567
02:30:59,517 --> 02:31:00,541
Molasses.

2568
02:31:01,920 --> 02:31:03,388
Molasses.

2569
02:31:03,454 --> 02:31:05,684
Molasses.

2570
02:31:05,757 --> 02:31:06,883
Molasses.

2571
02:31:08,092 --> 02:31:09,321
Molasses.

2572
02:31:09,427 --> 02:31:11,589
He had a conversation
with Brad Pitt himself,

2573
02:31:11,696 --> 02:31:15,724
and apparently Brad said,
"Wouldn't it be more gravelly?"

2574
02:31:17,302 --> 02:31:21,535
And I think it was Brad
who kind of came up with this sort of,

2575
02:31:21,639 --> 02:31:24,131
"Hey, Mama, how much longer I got?"

2576
02:31:24,943 --> 02:31:27,742
Mama? How much longer I got?

2577
02:31:27,845 --> 02:31:30,576
And so he kind of did this sort of...
Forced his throat.

2578
02:31:30,682 --> 02:31:33,777
Forced this sort of gravelly sound
all the way up here,

2579
02:31:33,885 --> 02:31:35,717
kind of like Froggy
from little Rascals.

2580
02:31:36,421 --> 02:31:39,550
Mama? How much longer I got?

2581
02:31:39,857 --> 02:31:42,622
Mama? How much longer I got?

2582
02:31:43,127 --> 02:31:45,562
And then we just pitch it slightly.

2583
02:31:45,663 --> 02:31:47,131
How old are you?

2584
02:31:47,231 --> 02:31:49,700
Seven. But I look a lot older.

2585
02:31:49,934 --> 02:31:52,665
Seven. But I look a lot older.

2586
02:31:52,770 --> 02:31:55,171
Seven. But I look a lot older.

2587
02:31:55,506 --> 02:31:59,909
Believe it or not, it's mostly
Brad Pitt just making that sound.

2588
02:32:00,011 --> 02:32:02,844
Again, in this setting,
it's so natural and real

2589
02:32:02,947 --> 02:32:05,416
that we had to ask the actors
to create it.

2590
02:32:05,516 --> 02:32:07,917
And you know what?
It was the best thing to do.

2591
02:32:08,019 --> 02:32:09,953
Come on over here, you.

2592
02:32:10,054 --> 02:32:12,955
Now, this is my granddaughter, Daisy.

2593
02:32:13,057 --> 02:32:15,617
David wanted to have
Cate Blanchett re-voice

2594
02:32:15,727 --> 02:32:18,059
her young 10-year-old version
of herself

2595
02:32:18,162 --> 02:32:21,894
And Elle Fanning, who's the actor
who plays the young Daisy,

2596
02:32:22,000 --> 02:32:24,264
was recorded on set
and we have her voice.

2597
02:32:24,369 --> 02:32:28,169
It was fine. It's a little girl's voice.
She sounds great. She's a great actor.

2598
02:32:28,272 --> 02:32:32,334
And then David goes,
"Let's re-voice her."

2599
02:32:34,178 --> 02:32:39,776
And fear, doubt,
you know, these things come in.

2600
02:32:39,884 --> 02:32:43,218
"Okay, what? You wanna have
another kid do her voice?"

2601
02:32:43,321 --> 02:32:46,256
"No, let's have Cate do it." You know.

2602
02:32:46,357 --> 02:32:48,189
"It's never gonna work,
it's not gonna work.

2603
02:32:48,292 --> 02:32:52,058
"It's a disastrous idea." And it works.

2604
02:32:53,831 --> 02:32:55,629
Did you know turkeys aren't really birds?

2605
02:32:56,167 --> 02:32:57,134
Why do you say that?

2606
02:32:57,235 --> 02:33:00,933
They're in the pheasant family,
can't hardly fly.

2607
02:33:01,039 --> 02:33:03,770
It's sad, don't you think?
Birds that can't fly?

2608
02:33:05,243 --> 02:33:06,972
Did you know turkeys aren't really birds?

2609
02:33:07,945 --> 02:33:08,935
Why do you say that?

2610
02:33:09,047 --> 02:33:12,278
They're in the pheasant family,
can't hardly fly.

2611
02:33:12,383 --> 02:33:14,852
It's sad, don't you think?
Birds that can't fly?

2612
02:33:14,952 --> 02:33:20,789
She went into a female falsetto
and created the young Daisy vocal.

2613
02:33:20,892 --> 02:33:23,384
And despite the fact
she's talking up here,

2614
02:33:23,494 --> 02:33:25,986
you can still get
a sense of her chest cavity.

2615
02:33:26,097 --> 02:33:32,093
So Dave Parker, our dialog mixer,
spent a lot of time sculpting,

2616
02:33:32,970 --> 02:33:37,407
in terms of equalization, all the low
frequency components of her voice.

2617
02:33:37,508 --> 02:33:40,136
And getting rid of those and filtering it

2618
02:33:40,244 --> 02:33:44,841
so that we just had the high end
of her vocal texture.

2619
02:33:45,249 --> 02:33:49,811
And then again we took that
and pitched it up a few steps.

2620
02:33:49,921 --> 02:33:51,013
Probably not that much, though.

2621
02:33:51,122 --> 02:33:57,357
It's, again, with that sound,
it's 95%c the actor.

2622
02:33:58,863 --> 02:34:01,355
-Again, read it again.
-Oh, read it again, please.

2623
02:34:01,566 --> 02:34:04,035
-Again, read it again.
-Oh, read it again, please.

2624
02:34:04,402 --> 02:34:06,894
-Again, read it again.
-Oh, read it again, please.

2625
02:34:07,972 --> 02:34:11,340
What's really interesting
is that when you watch the scene

2626
02:34:11,442 --> 02:34:15,811
where Benjamin Button and Daisy
sneak underneath the table

2627
02:34:15,913 --> 02:34:18,143
and they have their first encounter
and this first conversation,

2628
02:34:18,249 --> 02:34:24,484
that's where you'll be able to hear
Cate's voice over Elle Fanning's face.

2629
02:34:25,289 --> 02:34:27,485
And it's actually brilliant.

2630
02:34:27,592 --> 02:34:31,222
Now in retrospect, it's taken me
a long time to get to this point,

2631
02:34:31,329 --> 02:34:34,959
but if you think about it,
what's interesting is that

2632
02:34:35,066 --> 02:34:38,161
Brad Pitt, he's not even there, right?

2633
02:34:38,269 --> 02:34:43,036
Because it's a CG character,
yet it's his voice.

2634
02:34:44,142 --> 02:34:46,406
And Elle Fanning's there,

2635
02:34:46,511 --> 02:34:49,503
but she's not really there,
it's this other voice.

2636
02:34:49,814 --> 02:34:51,145
Your turn.

2637
02:34:54,552 --> 02:34:56,520
I'm younger than I look.

2638
02:34:57,054 --> 02:34:58,078
I thought so.

2639
02:34:59,257 --> 02:35:01,487
You don't seem like an old person.

2640
02:35:02,593 --> 02:35:04,152
Like my grandma.

2641
02:35:04,262 --> 02:35:05,752
So there's this weird dichotomy,

2642
02:35:05,863 --> 02:35:07,524
and weird kind of
checks and balances thing

2643
02:35:07,632 --> 02:35:12,399
that happens in this scene
and it works in a very peculiar way.

2644
02:35:12,503 --> 02:35:17,031
It kind of creates
a global oddness to the track.

2645
02:35:18,075 --> 02:35:19,440
Your turn.

2646
02:35:22,880 --> 02:35:25,281
I'm not as old as I look.

2647
02:35:25,349 --> 02:35:26,817
I thought so.

2648
02:35:28,019 --> 02:35:30,954
You don't seem like an old person.

2649
02:35:31,889 --> 02:35:34,517
-Like my grandma.
-I'm not.

2650
02:35:34,859 --> 02:35:37,226
Many times when you work
in your pigeonhole

2651
02:35:37,328 --> 02:35:38,557
of whatever it is that you're doing,

2652
02:35:38,663 --> 02:35:41,530
you think that
that work is what's important,

2653
02:35:41,632 --> 02:35:45,830
and here's the film over here
and here's your contribution to it,

2654
02:35:45,937 --> 02:35:49,271
and this is important.
But really it's not, it's this.

2655
02:35:51,475 --> 02:35:54,342
And I think it takes a while
to kind of get to the point

2656
02:35:54,445 --> 02:35:56,345
where you can appreciate

2657
02:35:56,447 --> 02:35:59,712
that this can be thrown away,
and it's not important.

2658
02:35:59,817 --> 02:36:03,583
What's important is David's film
and how to make that speak.

2659
02:36:03,688 --> 02:36:07,522
And that's been
the best learning experience for me.

2660
02:36:11,562 --> 02:36:16,966
Sometimes you have this striking idea
that comes to you... And you get it.

2661
02:36:17,068 --> 02:36:20,504
Sometimes you just have
to dig a bit deeper,

2662
02:36:20,972 --> 02:36:23,703
unfortunately, for many hours.

2663
02:36:51,636 --> 02:36:55,072
When I was a boy,
I'd love to wake up before anyone else,

2664
02:36:55,172 --> 02:36:57,334
run down to that lake
and watch the day begin.

2665
02:36:59,810 --> 02:37:01,676
It was as if I was the only one alive.

2666
02:37:06,751 --> 02:37:09,618
I fell in love the first time I saw her.

2667
02:37:09,720 --> 02:37:11,711
Your mother's name was Caroline...

2668
02:37:11,822 --> 02:37:14,689
The next one is two pianos
we're choosing, actually.

2669
02:37:14,792 --> 02:37:18,956
You hear it? It can't be perfectly in sync.

2670
02:37:19,063 --> 02:37:22,431
I'd find excuses
to go down to that kitchen

2671
02:37:22,533 --> 02:37:24,297
just so I could look at her.

2672
02:37:25,469 --> 02:37:27,961
That should be just the harp,
just piano.

2673
02:37:38,916 --> 02:37:40,315
Saxophone.

2674
02:37:40,918 --> 02:37:42,647
It's very important that the director,

2675
02:37:42,753 --> 02:37:46,587
who has been living with the picture
for years, gives you the right path

2676
02:37:46,691 --> 02:37:48,659
so that you don't miss something.

2677
02:37:48,759 --> 02:37:52,627
Could it be the connection between
one character's reaction in a scene

2678
02:37:52,730 --> 02:37:55,199
ten minutes before
than the one you're scoring,

2679
02:37:55,299 --> 02:37:57,427
or ten minutes after
the one you're scoring,

2680
02:37:57,535 --> 02:38:02,405
so it's all this very complex
and delicate puzzle.

2681
02:38:03,407 --> 02:38:06,433
Wasn't that his voice
overlapping with hers at one point?

2682
02:38:06,544 --> 02:38:07,534
-Never...
-I did.

2683
02:38:07,611 --> 02:38:08,601
You did, huh?

2684
02:38:09,747 --> 02:38:13,479
Great Japanese architect
called Tadao Ando says that

2685
02:38:13,584 --> 02:38:14,949
you can't have a good architecture

2686
02:38:15,052 --> 02:38:20,081
if it doesn't have
both function and fiction.

2687
02:38:21,892 --> 02:38:24,862
And it's perfect for a movie soundtrack.

2688
02:38:26,697 --> 02:38:30,099
When the movie soundtrack
is just functional,

2689
02:38:30,201 --> 02:38:33,136
okay, does a good job, but so what?

2690
02:38:33,237 --> 02:38:36,298
But fiction, that's good.

2691
02:38:36,407 --> 02:38:39,138
And I'd rather have a score
which is only fiction

2692
02:38:39,243 --> 02:38:42,736
and maybe has a bad function
than the opposite.

2693
02:38:43,314 --> 02:38:47,842
So when a movie like Benjamin Button
is getting towards you

2694
02:38:47,952 --> 02:38:51,547
and where both these elements
are offered to you,

2695
02:38:51,655 --> 02:38:53,680
you go, "Oh, that's what I want to do.

2696
02:38:53,791 --> 02:38:57,091
"That's why I've wanted to do
movie scores."

2697
02:39:44,508 --> 02:39:49,241
When you write a score for a movie
where you want not too much music,

2698
02:39:49,346 --> 02:39:51,007
you know that
the most important moments

2699
02:39:51,115 --> 02:39:54,915
are where you start and where you end.
And it's crucial.

2700
02:40:58,449 --> 02:41:02,147
-Okay. Happy, Fincher?
-Yeah. Yeah.

2701
02:41:02,253 --> 02:41:03,778
-Questions? Requests?
-No, no, no.

2702
02:41:03,888 --> 02:41:05,447
You were just saying that you weren't.

2703
02:41:05,556 --> 02:41:07,684
The last one.
I was not very happy with the last one.

2704
02:41:07,791 --> 02:41:08,952
-But you have the other pieces?
-Tuning...

2705
02:41:09,059 --> 02:41:12,620
Yeah, we have other takes
and if, you know, it's a cue you can fix...

2706
02:41:12,730 --> 02:41:14,095
There were two dangers.

2707
02:41:14,198 --> 02:41:20,831
Making it too much of a fable
and something too dark, too heavy,

2708
02:41:20,938 --> 02:41:24,636
or something too schmaltzy,

2709
02:41:24,742 --> 02:41:28,406
playing too much for the emotion
and pushing the emotions.

2710
02:41:28,512 --> 02:41:30,810
-Here Andy played really soft.
-Okay.

2711
02:41:30,915 --> 02:41:34,442
It's just because it's a solo instrument,
you hear it.

2712
02:41:35,252 --> 02:41:37,949
Well, is it gonna feel natural
if I duck it a little bit for that?

2713
02:41:38,055 --> 02:41:39,819
You can't really duck it.

2714
02:41:39,924 --> 02:41:41,483
-Okay, play it again.
-Yes.

2715
02:41:48,699 --> 02:41:52,499
You can be simple and emotional.
You don't have to be pushy.

2716
02:41:52,603 --> 02:41:57,131
I remember once in Prague
hearing a little girl in the street singing

2717
02:41:57,241 --> 02:42:02,645
in the morning as the sun was rising,
and she was going to school.

2718
02:42:03,480 --> 02:42:06,973
Just a single voice,
it could give you the chill

2719
02:42:07,084 --> 02:42:11,954
and almost tears to your eyes
because of the beauty of it.

2720
02:42:17,394 --> 02:42:20,625
The rule that I've chosen,
it was "less is more."

2721
02:42:20,731 --> 02:42:22,790
I don't think there were
many other ways,

2722
02:42:22,900 --> 02:42:24,664
because the music shouldn't show off

2723
02:42:24,768 --> 02:42:27,965
It can shine, it can be intricate.

2724
02:42:28,072 --> 02:42:31,872
It can increase the intimacy

2725
02:42:31,976 --> 02:42:35,571
that you have with the characters
or with the situations.

2726
02:42:36,447 --> 02:42:39,348
But it shouldn't be overwhelming you.

2727
02:42:39,450 --> 02:42:42,078
I think it can be simple
and still very moving.

2728
02:42:42,186 --> 02:42:45,747
It can be subdued
and played with almost no vibrato,

2729
02:42:45,856 --> 02:42:47,847
and still be very strong.

2730
02:42:49,793 --> 02:42:52,262
I write very simple music

2731
02:42:52,363 --> 02:42:55,492
which makes all the lines
very transparent.

2732
02:42:55,599 --> 02:42:59,058
You hear everything very clearly.
There's many soloists.

2733
02:42:59,169 --> 02:43:00,159
You can have, sometimes,

2734
02:43:00,271 --> 02:43:04,799
just one trumpet playing one note
in a high register, bar 56 for two bars.

2735
02:43:04,908 --> 02:43:07,070
Hasn't played before,
just plays these two bars.

2736
02:43:07,177 --> 02:43:10,442
And it's difficult because
you haven't played, then you go...

2737
02:43:10,547 --> 02:43:14,006
And it's got to be on the right note,
on the right dynamic, in tune.

2738
02:43:14,118 --> 02:43:16,951
So it's simple but very difficult to play.

2739
02:43:30,334 --> 02:43:33,201
Once more, 29. One, two.

2740
02:43:37,474 --> 02:43:38,532
Yes.

2741
02:43:41,045 --> 02:43:42,342
Yes, exactly. Perfect.

2742
02:43:42,446 --> 02:43:46,610
Even though the orchestra is big,
you know, from 60 to 90-piece,

2743
02:43:46,717 --> 02:43:50,085
I make it a very chamber-like
kind of feel.

2744
02:43:50,187 --> 02:43:54,454
It was a hard job here to bring
this huge amount of energy

2745
02:43:54,558 --> 02:43:57,391
that are in the Hollywood scores,

2746
02:43:57,494 --> 02:44:01,294
which are always bombastic and big,

2747
02:44:01,398 --> 02:44:06,495
and everybody's playing loud
and a lot and vibrato and...

2748
02:44:06,603 --> 02:44:09,834
No. This has to be different.

2749
02:44:10,841 --> 02:44:12,935
But soft on the trill here.

2750
02:44:13,043 --> 02:44:15,876
-On the trills, sure.
-On the high ones especially.

2751
02:44:15,946 --> 02:44:18,005
Yes. Piano. 29.

2752
02:44:18,148 --> 02:44:22,016
You've no vibrato, you play soft,
you put your mutes

2753
02:44:22,119 --> 02:44:25,020
and you listen to your neighbor,
which is Very important.

2754
02:44:25,122 --> 02:44:27,955
You listen to each other
because otherwise you can't play.

2755
02:44:28,058 --> 02:44:29,423
And that's the key of chamber music.

2756
02:44:49,546 --> 02:44:51,036
Bravo, Andrew.

2757
02:45:02,559 --> 02:45:05,620
When we play the melody,
when you're doubling Randy,

2758
02:45:05,729 --> 02:45:08,391
the celeste and the harp
should be careful to not...

2759
02:45:08,499 --> 02:45:11,434
Celeste doing...
Now we hear too much...

2760
02:45:11,535 --> 02:45:13,867
Always the downbeat of the bar.

2761
02:45:14,705 --> 02:45:16,366
We should not hear
so much of the downbeat.

2762
02:45:16,473 --> 02:45:19,568
So you could just invert the dynamics
so it starts soft on top and then...

2763
02:45:19,643 --> 02:45:20,872
Exactly.

2764
02:45:22,980 --> 02:45:24,641
Yeah, you know...

2765
02:45:31,388 --> 02:45:35,950
Yeah, that's a piano thing,
but, I don't know, we can try.

2766
02:46:01,885 --> 02:46:05,185
I like, very much, to hide
as much as possible

2767
02:46:05,289 --> 02:46:06,484
when the music is coming in.

2768
02:46:06,590 --> 02:46:09,389
I remember the first time
we spoke with David,

2769
02:46:09,493 --> 02:46:12,656
I mentioned the idea that
the music should be a flow

2770
02:46:12,763 --> 02:46:15,630
that would come and go,
vanish and come back.

2771
02:46:15,732 --> 02:46:18,064
And I like when the music sneaks in,
you don't realize.

2772
02:46:18,168 --> 02:46:20,535
And then suddenly
when it blossoms, it's there.

2773
02:46:20,637 --> 02:46:25,234
You feel the emotion, but you didn't feel
that it was like a tape player playing.

2774
02:47:42,786 --> 02:47:44,720
The element of time is very important.

2775
02:47:44,821 --> 02:47:48,382
He's going backwards in time,

2776
02:47:48,492 --> 02:47:52,224
and we thought what could be fun
is to have...

2777
02:47:52,329 --> 02:47:56,061
Benjamin's theme is first...

2778
02:47:56,233 --> 02:48:00,329
The first section is in one direction
and the second section is reversed.

2779
02:48:05,609 --> 02:48:07,543
And second time,

2780
02:48:09,846 --> 02:48:11,336
the opposite.

2781
02:48:12,182 --> 02:48:14,617
You can't really tell
'cause it doesn't show off.

2782
02:48:14,718 --> 02:48:19,679
But if you listen to it and write it down,
you just notice that it's the opposite.

2783
02:48:32,603 --> 02:48:36,164
The music I write
generally has this childlike thing

2784
02:48:36,273 --> 02:48:40,176
of simplicity and of spacey sounds.

2785
02:48:40,277 --> 02:48:44,475
You know, I often use harps and pianos
and celeste and Fender pianos

2786
02:48:44,581 --> 02:48:48,882
and light electric guitars and little bells.

2787
02:48:48,986 --> 02:48:53,890
It's part of my instrumentarium.
I like that. I like to use these sounds.

2788
02:49:08,939 --> 02:49:10,532
Yeah. What would be next?

2789
02:50:01,124 --> 02:50:04,185
You know, some music,
they get colored by the picture

2790
02:50:04,294 --> 02:50:08,629
and some pictures get colored
by the music. There's an interaction.

2791
02:50:09,099 --> 02:50:12,364
It's hard for me because when
I finish recording, I hate everything.

2792
02:50:12,469 --> 02:50:14,767
I'm really disgusted by the score.

2793
02:50:14,871 --> 02:50:16,669
I don't want to hear it anymore.

2794
02:50:16,773 --> 02:50:18,400
But this morning
I watched the screening

2795
02:50:18,508 --> 02:50:20,806
and there were moments
where I thought,

2796
02:50:20,911 --> 02:50:22,640
"That's okay. That's not too bad.'

2797
02:50:22,746 --> 02:50:27,240
When he takes his father to the lake
in his arms,

2798
02:50:27,350 --> 02:50:29,216
which is a very moving scene to me.

2799
02:50:29,319 --> 02:50:32,846
You know, having a man
who's never known his father,

2800
02:50:32,956 --> 02:50:35,425
who finally knows who he is,

2801
02:50:35,525 --> 02:50:39,985
and takes him in his arms
to see the sunrise.

2802
02:50:40,097 --> 02:50:45,536
I think that's a beautiful visual
and strong human idea.

2803
02:50:46,369 --> 02:50:49,634
You can be mad as a mad dog
at the way things went.

2804
02:50:50,373 --> 02:50:52,865
You can swear and curse the Fates.

2805
02:50:54,478 --> 02:50:56,674
But when it comes to the end,

2806
02:50:57,814 --> 02:50:59,543
you have to let go.

2807
02:51:15,599 --> 02:51:16,896
Usually you read a script and you say,

2808
02:51:17,000 --> 02:51:19,799
"Okay, this is in my mind,
this is how I envision it.'

2809
02:51:19,903 --> 02:51:21,803
And you're always disappointed.

2810
02:51:21,905 --> 02:51:25,102
And it was like, "Oh, my gosh,
this is better than I envisioned it."

2811
02:51:25,208 --> 02:51:26,698
At the very beginning,

2812
02:51:26,810 --> 02:51:29,040
I think, seeing on set
that David's really gonna

2813
02:51:29,146 --> 02:51:30,671
reach for the rafters on this one,

2814
02:51:30,781 --> 02:51:32,579
which isn't to say he doesn't
on every movie,

2815
02:51:32,682 --> 02:51:36,550
but I think this movie has a lot of things
that are incredibly difficult.

2816
02:51:36,653 --> 02:51:39,554
I will say it's probably
the biggest thing I'll ever work on.

2817
02:51:39,656 --> 02:51:42,751
It felt special, like I said,
from the time I read it, for sure.

2818
02:51:42,859 --> 02:51:45,624
And even when we were filming,
funny enough, too,

2819
02:51:45,729 --> 02:51:50,257
I just had a feeling on the set
that's kind of hard to put into words,

2820
02:51:50,367 --> 02:51:53,632
but you were like,
"Okay, something's happening here."

2821
02:51:53,737 --> 02:51:55,637
You know, like, "This is something."

2822
02:51:55,739 --> 02:52:00,540
Everyone treated this project
as if it was their own child.

2823
02:52:00,644 --> 02:52:02,772
The film is Benjamin Button.

2824
02:52:02,879 --> 02:52:05,075
You know,
that baby that's on the doorstep.

2825
02:52:05,182 --> 02:52:06,946
And that's what makes it so special.

2826
02:52:07,050 --> 02:52:10,816
One of the best experiences of my life,
as far as moviemaking.

2827
02:52:10,921 --> 02:52:14,221
One of the most stressful experiences
in my life in moviemaking, also.

2828
02:52:14,324 --> 02:52:15,655
I absolutely loved it.

2829
02:52:15,759 --> 02:52:18,251
It was one of the happiest times
I've ever had working on a film.

2830
02:52:18,361 --> 02:52:20,853
I got on fantastic...
All the guys on the crew.

2831
02:52:20,964 --> 02:52:24,059
We had great fun together.
We all bonded really well.

2832
02:52:24,167 --> 02:52:28,126
We all had these terrible
scatological nicknames for each other.

2833
02:52:28,238 --> 02:52:30,172
If you're gonna do a film,
that's what it should be about,

2834
02:52:30,273 --> 02:52:33,971
the people you work with.
I can't say just that,

2835
02:52:34,077 --> 02:52:37,069
but it's very important to me
as I get older, the company I keep.

2836
02:52:37,180 --> 02:52:39,911
And I enjoy so much
spending time with these guys.

2837
02:52:40,016 --> 02:52:43,179
I figured it wasn't a bad way
to burn a year

2838
02:52:43,253 --> 02:52:44,914
or two.

2839
02:52:45,989 --> 02:52:47,684
Thank you very much.

2840
02:52:50,393 --> 02:52:53,886
We need to do this quickly because
you've got a long movie to watch.

2841
02:52:55,031 --> 02:52:58,296
I want to thank all of you
for your hard work

2842
02:52:58,401 --> 02:53:01,666
and your beautiful faces,
and especially your city.

2843
02:53:02,639 --> 02:53:04,198
We couldn't have done it without you.

2844
02:53:07,911 --> 02:53:11,279
The film owes so much to New Orleans
and the people of New Orleans,

2845
02:53:11,381 --> 02:53:13,145
and we cannot thank you enough.

2846
02:53:13,250 --> 02:53:16,948
It's... i see it as a love letter.

2847
02:53:17,053 --> 02:53:18,646
I think you'll recognize
a few of the places.

2848
02:53:18,755 --> 02:53:21,918
And, you know,
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

2849
02:53:22,025 --> 02:53:24,255
And go to the bathroom now.

2850
02:53:25,428 --> 02:53:28,125
You don't want to be going in,
you know, in about an hour and 45.

2851
02:53:28,231 --> 02:53:30,529
You don't want to miss a thing. Go now.

2852
02:53:33,236 --> 02:53:36,228
-Go.
-He's not kidding.

2853
02:53:36,406 --> 02:53:38,773
All right, thank you.
We hope you enjoy it.

2854
02:53:45,081 --> 02:53:49,575
I think this picture was the landmark
in my life where I just went...

2855
02:53:49,686 --> 02:53:51,518
"after this, it's all a bonus."

2856
02:53:51,621 --> 02:53:54,886
It was definitely something
that was something to tick off in my life,

2857
02:53:54,991 --> 02:53:58,325
which was to make a great film.
You know, it's done.

2858
02:53:59,129 --> 02:54:01,655
You know, it's the kind of movies
people don't make an awful lot

2859
02:54:01,765 --> 02:54:03,426
in the studio system right now.

2860
02:54:03,533 --> 02:54:06,628
It's not a movie around
a central conflict that is resolved,

2861
02:54:06,736 --> 02:54:09,569
it's a movie about a life,
it's about a life lived,

2862
02:54:09,673 --> 02:54:13,200
and the emotional journey that one
takes when you live your life.

2863
02:54:13,276 --> 02:54:14,675
It's just great.

2864
02:54:14,778 --> 02:54:15,939
And, you know, everybody sits here

2865
02:54:16,046 --> 02:54:18,071
and does these things for every movie
and says, "What a great..."

2866
02:54:18,181 --> 02:54:19,649
But I think this is unique, this one.

2867
02:54:19,749 --> 02:54:21,342
I mean, I can tell you
of other movies I've had

2868
02:54:21,451 --> 02:54:24,284
which... People just didn't give a shit.

2869
02:54:24,387 --> 02:54:28,221
And maybe part of that was that
there was not the same kind of feeling

2870
02:54:28,325 --> 02:54:30,692
that, "This is something worth doing."

2871
02:54:30,794 --> 02:54:33,786
It might last for more than a year,
you know, or 10 minutes, you know.