Fincher on the button

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt plays a man who is born in his 80s and ages backwards. This digital masterpiece leads the Oscars field with 13 nominations. Donald Clarkemeets director David Fincher

THE NICE people from Warner Brothers have to do a spot of housekeeping before interviews with David Fincher can commence. Firstly, everybody is asked if they have met the director before. He likes to know these things, apparently."I'm Lars from Denmark and I met him in 1998." "Helmut from Munich. We encountered one another for Fight Club." "Donald from Ireland. First-time caller."

So, even before we have got through the door, we have encountered evidence of the director's notorious obsession with forward-planning. With films such as Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiacand, now, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher has spawned one of the most fanatical of cult followings. There is a particular type of serious young man – often an enthusiast for the novels of Chuck Palahniuk and the music of Nine Inch Nails — whose life is divided, not by years or seasons, but by the intervals between the films of Mr Fincher.

One could think of less worthy godheads. Zodiac, his examination of the chase for San Francisco's Zodiackiller, was, to this writer's mind, one the most underrated films of the past five years. For good or ill, Se7en, his gruesome 1995 thriller, has been staggeringly influential. Yet there is a coolness to Fincher's work that many critics attribute to his need to plan every shot meticulously.

A year or so ago, I encountered the thirsty Australian cinematographer Chris Doyle. Over a few beverages, he told me of his meetings with David Finchler (sic) and the equally fastidious Michael Mann.

"Michael Mann and David Fincher have both asked me to work with them," Doyle said. "But what's the point? I was talking to Harris Savides, who worked with Finchler on Zodiac. He said to me: 'He knows exactly what he wants. Why does he even need a cinematographer?' What's the point of that?"

Fincher smiles good-naturedly as he fiddles with his goatee.

“I think that’s easier said by somebody who hasn’t worked with me,” he says. “Chris is right in that I do like to understand how everything works. But that doesn’t mean you want to do it all yourself. I can go to a grocery store, but I don’t go there if I can avoid it. The notion of having total control is ridiculous. Film-making is a circus and you can’t have total control over a circus.”

Yet The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttondoesn't look like a film that was at home to happy accidents or creative serendipity. The recipient of an eye-watering 13 Oscar nominations – only Titanicand All About Evehave secured more – this ambitious romance stars Brad Pitt as a man who lives life backwards.

Born a wrinkled, liver-spotted baby in 1918, Benjamin is adopted by an African-American woman who runs a home for the elderly in New Orleans. Over the subsequent eight decades, as he ages into a grizzled oldie, a good-looking middle-aged chap, a dashing young fellow and, finally, a doomed, senile infant, Pitt falls in and out of love with Cate Blanchett and observes wars, revolutions and social upheavals with an icy dispassion.

As you might imagine, Benjamin Button employs a great deal of digital trickery. Pitt’s head is plucked from his torso, aged and stuck on the body of shorter actors.

“All technology offers problems,” Fincher says. “My ideas still have to be interpreted through several layers of experts. We film Brad’s head on a soundstage with five cameras. That way we can cancel out all his body movements. This technique still offers the same frustrations that working with a Muppet would.”

Maybe so. But looking at this beautiful, spectacular – though oddly unmoving – film one can’t help but think that cinema’s great control freak has finally secured near-complete domination of the movie-making process. Why worry about tumbling sets or unpredictable weather when the backgrounds can be created in the computer? Almost nothing has been left to chance.

“I wouldn’t say that,” he says. “It is still a circus and the computer is just another one of the animals. When we started this process five years ago, we had to guess what the computers would be able to do for us and it turned out we were right.”

Already very quietly spoken, David Fincher often renders himself indecipherable by placing his hand over his mouth while talking. His answers reveal an endless curiosity about the possibilities of technology and the processes of film-making, but, away from those spheres, he seems peculiarly detached. Noticing my recording equipment, he talks for a good two minutes about a much-loved tape recorder that he mislaid a few years back.

But, bizarrely, he admits that it was not until three or four years after signing on to Benjamin Buttonthat he read the F Scott Fitzgerald story on which Eric Roth's script is (very, very loosely) based. How weird. The thing is only a few pages long, for Pete's sake.

“I don’t know for sure what Eric Roth saw in the story that was cinematic,” he says. “I don’t know what makes something cinematic. But we were never short of ideas for this film. That’s why we ended up with boats and amputees and drunkards.”

What sort of man is the puzzling Mr Fincher? The son of Jack Fincher, a distinguished journalist, he was born in Denver and raised in the famously liberal Marin County, just north of San Francisco. He began, as a kid, by shooting his own 8mm films and eventually found work with Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas's effects company, before – like so many of his contemporaries – moving into the lucrative worlds of advertising and pop videos. (That absurdly baroque promo for Madonna's Voguewas his.)

After taking a misstep with the interesting, but compromised Alien 3, Fincher hit gold with 1995's Se7en. That blend of horror and detective story is now such an established genre that one can hardly believe that Fincher invented it less than 15 years ago.

From then on, he established a reputation as the master of populist nihilism. His version of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club– emasculated chaps turn to punch-ups as a way of reasserting their atavistic masculinity – defied mixed reviews to establish a truly fervent following. One might view Tyler Durden, the film's hero, as a sort of Godless John Waters (this newspaper's pundit, not Baltimore's naughty film-maker).

“I don’t see my films as being nihilistic,” he says. “If you are being sarcastic about nihilism or about anger over the state of masculinity then that film is useful. So many people get confused about that movie. It doesn’t exist to perpetuate Tyler Durden’s views.”

But he must recognise the bleakness in his pictures. Fight Club, Zodiac, Se7en: it's not a happy bunch, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttonis not much jollier. From the beginning we know – what with the aging backwards and so forth – that the romance between the hero and Cate Blanchett's pale dancer is going to end in misery.

“I don’t really have a notion of this nihilistic sense,” he repeats. “I think when you are forced to talk about your movies every four or five years it’s tricky. How do you pigeonhole this or that? I don’t have any sense of responsibility towards people’s preconceived ideas of me.”

So where does the sadness in Benjamin Buttoncome from?

The characters are all adrift in a beautifully composed universe of endless loss. The film is constantly reminding us that happiness is fragile and temporary.

“We are, in this film, saying that loss is inevitable,” he agrees. “You lose your parents. Now that is not okay. It just is. Behind every relationship is the inevitability of time. Don’t look at life as a land-grab or a positional game. When you finally give out, it’s not that you were weak or stupid. That’s just the way that it goes.”

Yikes. Well, that sounds fairly nihilistic to me. Where is all that sunny optimism that is supposed to characterise the American psyche?

“It’s a very American thing to hide away from death,” he says. “When my dad died it happened six months before we thought it would. We put his clothes into the closet and that was that. You have five minutes in the room alone and then he is taken away.”

It is only reasonable to ask if that experience influenced the making of Benjamin Button.

“Oh, I had been trying to make this movie for ages when that happened,” he says. “I always felt the material was universal rather than specific. I loved the idea of this character as an Everyman. He’s not Forrest Gump or Mr Smith, but he is an Everyman.”

For all the traumas and obstacles strewn before Benjamin Button, it must be regarded as a success. Reasonably popular at the box-office and respectfully reviewed, it now staggers towards the Oscars beneath its mountain of nominations.

“I’m with Quentin Tarantino on this,” he says. “If you look at the list of people who haven’t gotten an Oscar and it’s just a stellar list. So that’s just the icing on the cake.”

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button opens next Friday

The 13 club: the wrong number of nominations?

Titanic(boo!) and All About Eve(yay!) retain their dominance in the Oscar-nomination derby with a daunting 14 nods. The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttondoes, however, become the ninth member of an imaginary organisation – let's call it The 13 Club – whose composition tells us much about the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences functions.

Five members are archetypical Oscar-friendly, middle-brow historical dramas: Gone With the Wind, From Here to Eternity, Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Loveand Benjamin Buttonitself. Two – Mary Poppinsand Chicago– are musicals and one – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring– is a fantasy film.

Perhaps the most surprising entry is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?How did such an intimate drama manage to accumulate so many awards? Well, for a start, it saw its entire cast of four nominated for acting gongs. By way of contrast, The Fellowship of the Ringsecured just the one acting nod (for Ian McKellen).

Millions of movie fans adore Gone With the Wind– indeed, when takings are adjusted for inflation, it remains the most successful film of all time – and only somebody with a heart of custard could resist Mary Poppins. But The 13 Club does not come close to offering a selection of Hollywood's (not to mention the world's) greatest films. No Wizard of Oz, no Casablanca, no Godfather, no Sunset Blvd: this is a depressingly mediocre list.

Still, membership of the club does tend to lead to the biggest gongs. Of the nine films, a full five took best picture award. (Only Mary Poppins, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?and the Fellowship of the Ringfailed.) Mind you, those winning pictures weren't up against a galloping Slumdog Millionaire.