Original subtitles

MAN 1: I was gonna come and reset A and B. MAN 2: Go ahead.

Maybe just trying to-- But, it's barely up now so it doesn't really need to be reset.

No, A is over there.

-Oh. -This is B.

[CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY]

MAN 3: All right. So this is-- Jackson, play it back, please?

Yeah, we gotta hear liquid.

[CHUCKLES]

MAN 3: Just off camera right. That's good. That's perfect.

[BURPS]

Uh, test one, two, test. Test.

Copy that. Go.

FINCHER: We wrapped April or May of 2007.

And then we cut for about 10 or 15 weeks...

...just to sort of get a rough shape.

BENJAMIN: I had gone to a whorehouse.

I'd had my first drink.

I said goodbye to one friend...

...and buried another.

In 1937, when I was coming to the end of the 17th year of my life...

...I packed my bag and said goodbye.

BAXTER: The hardest part of the movie for me...

...was assembling it without access to David...

...when he was in New Orleans the whole time...

...and I was here working in his office.

Because he does do a lot of coverage and he does do a lot of angles...

...and a lot of takes.

And it can be daunting if there's no initial conversation...

...and there rarely is. It's just, "Here it is, begin."

Let's say we got a five-minute scene, I've probably got two hours of footage.

I may have 15 different angles, there's A and B camera.

And there can be from anywhere from five takes to 30 takes...

...on each specific one.

I'd say probably the biggest challenge...

...was dealing with a headless character...

...for the first, you know, quarter of the movie.

I mean, there was the body actor's performance...

...which David didn't wanna see at all.

And he had us put a black hole on the screen...

...wherever the body performer's face was.

I think that's quite challenging because you watch it and it's really flat...

...because your lead is literally a black hole on the screen.

Kirk was assembling while we were shooting.

Angus was doing some assembling while we were shooting.

And we were looking at stuff. You know, we have everything on Pix.

The only addiction I have left.

I showed you this, right? So there'll be a matte painting...

...we'll see New York City, the Chrysler Building, all that stuff.

Back and then the cars will pass in front of them.

But we'll move in on:

[IMITATES TRAFFIC NOISE]

You know, like he'll get out, pays the cabbie, goes inside.

[SOUNDTRACK MUSIC PLAYS OVER COMPUTER]

I love that, with the music.

That's terrible, that piece.

-That piece is good. -Definitely.

FINCHER: There's so much underpants.

We need his face in there instead of....

That's a nice piece and that works.

That looks good.

FINCHER: I was able to see stuff every night.

You know, little QuickTimes of scenes that I had mauled...

...with my inability to think straight.

It's always very nerve-racking for an editor...

...the first time you show an assembly to a director.

With David, usually, you post it as a QuickTime...

...and he looks at it.

Sometimes, you'll get up in the middle of the night...

...and see if he, like, accepted it or declined it.

There's a green--

You can have a green bar on your sequence or a red bar on your sequence.

A red bar is really bad.

And usually if I got one of those, I'd just go back to bed.

But if it was green I would read what-- Because there's always comments.

And it's interesting because he's hyper-specific...

...down to a syllable of a word.

And then we had five to eight days of facial capture.

We did a day of volumetric capture, which was the spattered--

The green makeup on Brad...

...capturing the shape of his face in different positions for the volume.

MAN 1: Roll, please. MAN 2: Rolling.

Eyes a little bit further right. There we go.

And then we did five days of the specific performance capture...

...that was his reacting to what was happening...

...in the scenes that we'd cut.

And that would be the material that we would use...

...to drive the CG old-age face.

Okay, one last one.

MAN 1: Okay, going again. Button it up, please.

And after you've looked at Queenie...

...look over more to your mark towards the kids.

The eye line towards the kids.

Just a little bit. Yeah, not the face, just the eyes.

-Get them over there. -All the way over there?

Yeah, that's a little too far. A little bit more. Yeah, over in that direction.

-After...? -Yeah.

And I like the lip thing but I'm not sure-- I mean, the tongue can--

We have to re-create the tongue digitally anyway.

-But I like the lip thing. Here we go. MAN 2: And roll it.

-And speed? MAN 3: Speed.

Super lost in your own little world at the beginning.

Hey, boy.

Benjamin! That is dangerous. Come back over here.

Stay put, child.

FINCHER: That was it. MAN: Cut.

FINCHER: Okay, play me the last three back.

MAVROMATES: It's one of these great scenarios...

...where there's this amazing amount of technology going on.

Yet in certain instances in the process...

...we were very low-rent about how we did it because there was no other way to do it.

And so we would shoot Brad just to capture his facial performances...

...hoping that it would fit in to the performance that another actor did...

...who was wearing a blue sock on his head.

And to Brad's credit, it was pretty amazing.

It was one of those scenarios, where as I was on the set...

...I’d be sitting there looking at what he was doing thinking:

"I don't know if that's gonna work." Then we'd take it to the edit room...

...then we would edit it and put it together and it was pretty amazing.

-lt's a night for firsts. MAN: How's that?

I never been to a brothel, either.

I don't mean to be rude, but...

...your hands. Is that painful?

Well, I was born with some form of disease.

What kind of disease?

I was born old.

-I’m sorry. -No need to be.

There's nothing wrong with old age.

MAVROMATES: It really worked incredibly well. I just couldn't see it on the set.

And, obviously, David could.

He walked away feeling pretty good about it.

FINCHER: Cut it. MAN: Cut it.

WOMAN 1: SW-83-20, version 58, final.

TI-89-130, comp version 39, final.

BT-92-30, the first face fall when she says, "I feel sorry for you"...

...and then on the second face fall, wait for on, "Die before you do."

Check the light on the teeth as well.

FR-47-180, comp version 25:

"A little bit more out of focus inside the glass lenses...

...and too Harvey Dent."

[ALL LAUGH]

And so that's probably something we could just do as a comp treatment...

...or do we need to re-render the glasses out of focus?

WOMAN 2: It'll be comp. MAN 1: Yeah.

WOMAN 3: And we should Google "Harvey Dent."

WOMAN 1: Google Ha-- Okay, I'll do that.

ST-49-40, version 9, final.

The head was already final but we finaled the cable-car stuff.

BARBA: The human performance has always been...

...considered the holy grail of the CG world.

It's very daunting for many reasons...

...because it's-- Well, one, everyone is afraid of it because it's such a challenge.

It's like, well, where do you start?

How old are you?

I'm seven, but I look a lot older.

Seven, but I look a lot older.

PREACHER: He's gonna see that you walk from faith and divine inspiration alone.

MAN: All right. -Yes!

[APPLAUSE]

PREEG: No one's ever really tried to do just a regular CG person as a character...

...because it's been so scary.

Tests and attempts, you know, over the years...

...have not necessarily been successful...

...and I've even been part of some of those attempts.

It is tough, you know? He had to be cute.

He always had to be cute and he's not cute.

He's an 80-year-old guy in a wheelchair who's 4 feet tall.

But I think that-- I think it really--

-He's a likable character. -Yeah, he's--

It could have been so easy for him to be, actually-- To actually be a monster.

You're gonna meet this guy at his least recognizable.

You know, he's gonna be 4 feet tall.

And he's gotta look 80-- I mean, he's gotta look like Einstein, you know? Or Yoda.

You know? He's gotta be-- He's gotta start at the--

He's gotta be this, like, wizened, you know...

...wrinkled, hairless, gnome of a guy.

It occurred to me that this might be a better place to put the audience...

...as if it was somebody that you really knew what their face looked like...

...because they could peer into it and kind of go:

"I know who that is. How do I know--?"

And that was the thing that we found eventually...

...was that when you could see it was him, there was something exciting about that.

And you're talking about somebody-- You can't walk, you know, 35 feet...

...in the civilized world and not see a picture of him.

I mean, literally, like every 10 seconds it's like...

...and here he is getting on his motorcycle, here he is taking his helmet off...

...and here he is having a snow cone. You know what I mean? It's like...

...you see him so much, in a weird way, it kind of helped us.

BARBA: Early on, there were sculptures done of Brad...

...at the different ages playing Ben.

LITT: They take a cast of Brad Pitt...

...then they start sculpting it in clay to make him look old.

And turn that clay into a mold and cast that in silicone.

BARBA: And eventually those ages were taken from five to three basic sculptures...

...that we would need and handed to Rick Baker and Kazu to sculpt and create...

...the designs and likenesses that we would then recreate for our digital models.

LITT: You end up with this incredibly lifelike bust, and they actually made three of them.

They made an 80-year-old Brad Pitt, a 70-year-old and 60 years old.

So, you know, we would just be sitting at our desks with this bust...

...of 100 percent realistic-looking Brad Pitt staring at us while we're trying to work...

...and it was invaluable, it was a little creepy at times.

From that sculpture, we create a digital scan that then gets put into the computer.

A very complex system is put together to represent hair and skin...

...and also animation of how that head will move.

FINCHER: Yeah, but I think the glasses help him with stuff-- See, with here--

PITT: It's bifocals, right? -Well, he's gonna have--

Whatever they are, they're fucking huge.

PITT: Okay. -l don't know what--

So I was just thinking it's, like, either like this so he has to use them...

-...or it's down so he sees over them. -Okay.

FINCHER: Okay, we'll try go through it. Okay, neutral pose. Record.

-Rolling? MAN 1: Sound speed.

MAN 2: Speed. -Okay. Just give me 15--

Just head down the hallway in your wheelchair...

...and seeing over your glasses and looking a little bit from side to side.

Blocking your eyes from sun....

BARBA: We used the mobile contour system...

...in a way that we felt was the most straightforward approach.

You know, we were able to grab performance pieces...

...and nuances from Brad...

...that then we were able to build into a rig.

Rig being, if you think of it in marionette terms...

...the armature that you can pull on to then control how the face moves.

PREEG: A rig is really just whatever mechanism you're gonna use...

...to make a static mesh or a static piece of geometry move over time.

Once you started putting in lots of muscle re-creations...

...and heavy deformers to move the face around...

...your interaction for the animator goes down...

...and so my goal was to make an interactive, pretty much real-time rig...

...that mimicked what Brad's face would do.

Maybe the one side--

The muscles on his left side pull harder than the right side...

...or whatever happens to be Brad.

When the project started, I sort of watched a lot of Brad...

...or re-watched a lot of his films.

And the most recent one that had come out was Babel or "Babel."

I don't know how people actually say that anymore...

...but he--

Throughout that film, he had this look that was kind of brows pinched--

Inner brows pinched and up and, like, worried.

And, you know, it was just so many shots of him had this look.

When were looking at how we were distilling out...

...the different aspects of the face and saying:

"This is inner brow up, this is outer brow up...

...this is lip corner pull left, whatever, blah, blah, blah."

I was like, you know, he was always doing this in this other film...

...so let's put in a control, let's get that data in there...

...and just call it "The Brad."

And that was a huge mistake...

...because the very first thing that people wanted to do was go:

"Well, we gotta turn Brad on." You know?

And so we had to go back and take Brad out of all of Brad.

BARBA: So that rig then allows us to build all of Brad's...

...the way he moves his face, the way he emotes...

...you know, his expressions.

Even taking a look at some of his timings and how things move together.

There was talk like, "Hey, can we CAT scan Brad?"

And they're like, "Yeah, sure you can. No."

We ended up building a system that was based off of Brad's face...

...that moved exactly like Brad's face moves.

That was kind of the directive from the beginning which was why I almost quit...

...because that's insane, we can't do that.

This is the only project I think I've worked on...

...where I seriously considered quitting many, many times over...

...especially when we're sitting in a conference room with David Fincher...

...and, you know, the people that are more important at the company than me...

...are promising David things that I'm going, "Don't promise that.

Like, we have no evidence that supports that we can do this at all."

I leave zoo, go here, go there. Wandered most of the time.

You were all alone?

You will see, little man.

Plenty of time you'll be alone.

When you're different like us, it's gonna be that way.

MALDONADO: There were some scenes where I was thinking:

"Oh, my God, how are we gonna do this?"

And David Fincher would come up and ask:

"So, what do you think? Is it gonna work?"

And my resp-- You know, my reply was, "Yes, we'll have to make it work."

But deep inside, there was always that moment where you're like:

"Is this really gonna work? How painful is this gonna be?"

I knew that we were gonna get there or a lot of people were gonna die trying.

BARBA: Our software program, ironically, it's called TRACK was--

Got an Academy Award for technical achievement many, many years ago.

So it's pretty robust, but we had to take it to the next level...

...because we're--

You know, it was never designed to track a head directly onto someone else's spine.

MAN: You make the call. -We are going to play shot one.

Very decisive. I'm impressed.

FINCHER: As soon as these witness cams are set, we can do this.

-And the sun is moving. -The sun's moving.

Did you know the sun is moving?

I can't believe his brain.

FINCHER: The right distance? -There.

-It's too late. -Break it up.

-You ready? -We're ready.

Okay, here we go.

MALDONADO: We used high-definition video cameras...

...to facilitate the tracking...

...and having the separate angle of view...

...after tracking the main camera...

...we were now able to triangulate the performer in this case...

...and really get a good sense of where he's at in 3-D space.

That's the big advantage from prior ways of doing it.

In the old ways, we would just track a single camera view.

It's the tracking and the animation that, you know, if it's off and the head's moving...

-...different than-- -You're always gonna be fighting it.

MALDONADO: And in most cases we would shoot the live plate...

...you would do another second pass, a clean plate...

...and combine those two together.

CROSHAW: Our department, it comes in the early stages...

...and Sarahjane and her roto team go in...

-...and start rotoing the plates. LAMBERT: Chopping off heads.

Yeah, so they start chopping off heads and rotoing around the collar line.

I have some form of disease.

Well, I was born with some form of disease.

LITT: The tracking team recorded the position of every single light...

...and lighting instrument that they could on the set, the exact physical locations.

Our lighting artist would get these high-dynamic-range textures...

...based on photographs with blockers and balance cards...

...and big lights and scrims, and that kind of thing.

And you could just open your scene up and it looks exactly like it did on set.

The bust photographs very realistically...

...so what we were able to do is take the bust...

...and place it into what's called the light stage.

And basically, you photograph it from every single angle, 360 degrees.

So what we do is we take all of this footage...

...and we use that to calibrate our shaders.

Granted it wasn't Brad Pitt, you know, we knew that this thing was synthetic...

...but it was a fantastic starting point.

MAN: I mean, it's like the front three-quarter size.

I write a little program called the shader and the biggest challenge for this project...

...was believable photorealistic skin.

To achieve that we had to, like, study how light comes in inside of the flesh...

...and then, like, the light bounces around then it comes out.

And then, like, there are actually multiple layers.

And this is one of the layers and it's actually called "dermis."

And this is where all the blood flows...

...and so that's why it all gets tinted to red.

And that's how we get the reddish color on the skin.

It's a phenomenon that everyone is sort of familiar with...

...by placing a flashlight up against their hand...

...and seeing the red glow through their skin.

BARBA: It's incredibly difficult to get everything working exactly right...

...because of the different thicknesses and thinnesses of the skin.

Where there's bone, where there's not bone, where there's cartilage...

...where there's more veins or less veins...

...backlit, high sunlight, the way it interacts with different colors of light.

It's a tremendous challenge to get it to be just right.

PREEG: We never did Benjamin's body below around the bust line.

We were just interested in a connection point near the sternum...

...and then the head replacement.

In fact, in shots like in the bathroom where you see no collar...

...or anything that can hide that transition point...

...we hid the transition point back sort of underneath the chin...

...and tried to keep as much of the neck from the live actor as possible.

Meanwhile, the hair team--

-Yes, the hair as well. -Is busy also taking the track--

LAMBERT: Changing styles all the time. -Yeah, changing style.

I think they were originally told there was gonna be three styles...

...and they ended up with 28.

LAMBERT: They were the unsung heroes. -Something like that.

LAMBERT: If there was one thing...

...which David was tweaking consistently, it was the hair.

My goal wasn't necessarily to get the face moving a hundred percent correct...

...because there is really no such thing.

But my goal was to make it move believably enough that people focus on the eyes.

You have to get the eyes right.

When you have dialogues with people, when you are watching people in films...

...you're looking at their eyes, especially if they're talking or thinking...

...or something like that.

And as soon as you lose connection with the eyes...

...and you start looking at the rest of the face...

...it will look weird, because people actually kind of look weird.

If you watch someone's mouth as they're talking...

...it doesn't look like you may think it should look.

You're not seeing the phonemes pronounced exactly...

...you're not seeing "Ooh's" and "Ee's" and "Ah's"...

...and it looks like sort of a Muppet mouth, like, flapping around.

And so once you lose the eyes, someone could go look at the mouth...

...and even if the mouth looks completely believable really...

...they won't think it does because it moves like it really does.

So the hard part is really keeping the audience engaged in his eyes.

LlTT: One of our artists became sort of the resident eye expert.

He would have, like, three monitors on his desk.

He'd have Brad Pitt's eyes on one monitor...

...and he'd have these in-development CG eyes on another monitor...

...and then on his third monitor, he had video footage he shot of himself...

...looking in every direction.

And he shot, probably, hours of this footage.

You'd walk by his desk and there's just all these eyes staring at you.

PREEG: It's pretty amazing how good humans are at reading other humans...

...and knowing what they may be feeling or thinking...

...based on very minute changes in their face.

I mean, you can take, you know, an eyelid that is just slightly too wide...

...and narrow it slightly and he goes from, you know, crazed killer to, you know...

...thoughtful. Or the tiniest smirk--

I mean, we're talking about millimeters of motion in the corner of a lip...

...and that was a real challenge.

BARBA: This has been the holy grail of CG.

And it's kind of, well, what do you do after you do the holy grail?

And, you know, it will be hard.

You can't just go and do another simple show...

...because where's the challenge? And, you know, I like--

I just really like to be challenged, that's the only reason to do this.

You know, I tell my artists, at the end of the day...

...the money gets spent that time goes by...

...but you need to have something to look back on and say you're proud of...

...and that's just the artist in me talking.

Well, I hope people leave the theater wondering, like:

"Wow, where did they get that guy that looks like Brad old?

I mean, that's a great makeup job. It's like, how did they do that?"

And they don't really even think about that till after they've left the film.

I hope they just enjoy the film that David has crafted.

PREEG: Unfortunately for me, I hope people go see the film...

...and have no idea that I had ever been there.

And if that happens, I think this film is gonna be hugely successful...

...so I hope we didn't hurt it for David and Brad...

...and the rest of the crew by making something...

...that pulls people out of the film because it is pretty amazing.

MIKE: How is it when you showed up...

...you were no bigger than a bollard with one foot in the grave?

Now, either I drink a hell of a lot more than I think I do...

...or you sprouted.

What's your secret?

Well, captain...

...you do drink a lot.

STRAUSE: Lola's a company that I came up with the idea for...

...about four or five years ago.

It was something we really wanted to do...

...explore where we could take digital, um, de-aging of talent.

Essentially, we're doing digital face-lifts.

We actually call it DCE, digital cosmetic enhancements.

And it's just, uh-- You know, if you're shooting late, you have some eye bags.

You know, you're a little tired. I mean, not everyone looks perfect every day.

Even Hollywood royalty has off days. So, you know, using these techniques...

...we can make everyone look a little bit better.

With Benjamin Button, it's been great working on this project...

...because we can actually tell people what we're doing.

Most of the work we do is so secretive that we can't tell anyone.

In this case we can because, you know...

...we're taking Brad Pitt and making him look 20 years younger as a story point.

You are so much younger.

Only on the outside.

Originally we got involved in Benjamin Button when they were trying to find...

...a two-and-a-half-D solution to make Brad look younger.

By two-and-a-half-D, I mean that we'll do 3-D tracking, we'll do planar tracking.

You know, if a head is turning, we'll track the head in 3-D space...

...but then we'll typically put 2-D patches back on top of it in 3-D space.

Like a Band-Aid, uh, which is-- Like a two-dimensional object...

...versus, you know, something that has depth.

We do have a scan of Brad, but we typically didn't use that.

Most of the time we just do tracking based off the features of his face.

We use Abuju, which is a 3-D program. It literally creates like a cloud of points.

And as he's rotating, the cloud of points will rotate with him.

And then that's what generates the 3-D information.

We're not having to create CG masks that we replace actors with.

We're using all the subtlety and performance of the actor.

We're just using the compositing tools to turn back the clock 20 years...

...and remove the artifacts of the lighting and, you know, wrinkles...

...and adjust the tissue densities and those kind of changes that happen.

As a person ages, gravity pulls your face down.

So the first thing we'll do, we'll take mesh warpers...

...and push the face back up where it used to be.

Then we'll go back and kind of remap the lighting.

So if there's harsh shadows, we'll remove the shadows.

We'll fill in the shadows with lightness.

Where you start losing density in your-- Around your temples.

You lose fat in your cheeks. So we'll replace fat and smooth out shadows...

...is essentially what we're doing.

We do have a plastic surgeon, Dr. Andrew Frankel.

He's one of the top, you know, Beverly Hills surgeons.

He's been invaluable. Because the surgeon will come in, and he'll say specifically:

"The nostril needs to move over one-half millimeter."

He's very, very specific and scientific about his approach to de-aging.

So he's been a great colleague in this whole process.

STRAUSE: There were shots of Cate Blanchett practicing.

We need to do digital face replacements of her...

...putting her face onto a stand-in dancer's body.

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

WILLIAMS: As we're refining our technique, it's allowing us to go further.

You know, a few years ago, we could probably get...

...maybe eight, 10 years comfortably.

And now using this two-and-a-half-D process, we can get 20 years comfortably.

So if you wanted to make Brad look like he was 14 or 10...

...we wouldn't be able to do it.

As long as your window is from about 20 years younger to about 10 years older...

...we can do it with the two-and-a-half-D process.

MAN: Anybody wanna make $2 for a day's work around here?

I do.

You got your sea legs about you, old man?

Mm-hm.

I think.

Well, that's good enough for me.

Get your ass on board. We'll sure as hell find out.

I got a phone call from David, and I came over and met with him.

And that was basically to cover the 10 years of Benjamin at sea...

...on the tugboat, on the Chelsea.

Scrape off all this bird shit!

Right away, sir.

MAN 1: Here it comes.

BOY: Whoa! MAN 2: Whoo!

WOMAN: That is so cool.

MAN 3: That should go a little faster.

SCHUGARDT: Probably the most complicated part is that when they're photographed...

...they're actually photographed on a stage that's completely independent...

...from what the real lighting would be out on the Mississippi.

Often on other shows, it's been really difficult...

...because the lighting is completely wrong or there are shadows in the wrong spot.

It doesn't make sense.

If you expect to see a sun from one direction...

...and you're getting a double shadow, which doesn't make sense...

...it's challenging to make those things work.

But this show worked out really well.

Our water was based on Tessendorf's code.

There's a standard of CG water that's out there...

...and we used that code as our basis.

Jerry Tessendorf came up with the first algorithm...

...that simulated the closest so far to what real ocean water does.

Today they have simulations that simulate what water does in a small glass.

Well, when you've got an ocean...

...it's too many calculations to go on for something that large.

Basically, the waves are not just moving up and down...

...but they actually move in a sort of cyclical motion.

And, you know, that code accounts for it.

Everything beyond the boat...

...and often the boat itself, from longer shots, was actually CG.

So whenever you see the characters up close, that's all live action...

...and anything behind them, anything beyond the boat, is all CG.

And as Benjamin grows younger, we move into 1934...

...and then we go up to the Eastern Seaboard...

...towards New York.

McGUINNESS: And we needed to look at what would be surrounding the Chelsea...

...in New York Harbor, what would populate the harbor.

How much would you see of the Statue of Liberty...

...versus the Manhattan skyline?

-Cut it. Okay. MAN: Cut.

WOMAN: Cut. -Cut.

SCHUGARDT: We had to deal with the bodies floating in the water.

And they all match with the surface...

...so that's a simulation based on the original ocean-surface simulation.

McGUlNNESS: The attack in the Pacific, obviously...

...was the most complicated sequence in the film.

Fellas!

Sub!

McGUINNESS: I mean, we didn't have a U-boat...

...so we had to, obviously, build a CG U-boat.

The water was very much CG-driven in that sequence.

We sure as hell can't outrun them fuckers.

SCHUGARDT: There were a lot of aspects to that sequence that were challenging...

...even down to where the tracer fire was actually traveling.

We had to keep that continuous.

So when the German sub was firing across the boat, we spent a lot of time...

...to make sure the continuity worked...

...and the shots were still exciting, you know...

...that there was a lot of action going on...

...and, you know, it looked really, really dangerous.

MAN 1: Cut it. Cut, cut. MAN 2: Cut.

That last one was the best one as far as matching all around, guys.

So burn that into your brain. Thank you.

McGUINNESS: Once we actually hit the U-boat...

...the actual dynamics of the way those two boats connected and hit each other...

...was very difficult to pull off using the gimbal tug...

...so we went to the drawing board and we CG-built the tug.

We took the assets of the gimbal and we built upon that...

...and we built a much more dynamic feel for the collision.

SCHUGARDT: The ocean water was challenging...

...but once we, you know, felt pretty comfortable with that...

...it moved on to the next challenge...

...which was the giant splashes from the sub exploding.

McGUINNESS: We had to kind of create that explosion and that hugeness underwater...

...and really make sure the viewer understood that we were underwater...

...and what would it look like if a tug hit a sub?

It's got hundreds of effects, and it's the perfect type of effects.

The effects I love is that-- They're the ones you never see.

And if you've done your job well...

...nobody ever knows there was an effect there.

So it's kind of this....

You know, you wanna show your work, but then, if they don't see it, then perfect.

BARRON: I think this film is just so rich...

...and it's complex in the way it tells a story.

It tells it through many different eras.

And of course, the visual effects need to make that all plausible.

We can't go find that perfect location from the '20s anymore...

...because there's, you know, apartment complexes or parking garages...

...or everything that's not gonna say classic, old-style location.

They just don't exist anymore. It's too modern.

So we go back and we learn about the history of something...

...and what it should look like.

What are the elements that aren't there...

...that really communicate the idea of being in the past...

...and then put those into the shots.

What we do comes out of what was traditionally called matte painting.

And now we've taken it further, in the computer-graphics age...

...to create simulations of environments...

...because now we're moving dimensionally through these scenes.

And in order to do that...

...you need to mimic all the phenomena that you would expect to see...

...if you were really photographing that scene.

One is a aerial scene of Paris, and this is a complete simulation.

There's no live action in it. It's not anything that was photographed.

Again, the idea of, "Well, why don't you just go to Paris...

...and shoot something from a helicopter and, you know, change it?"

The reason why is that by the time you get some piece of film that works...

...considering you got the right lighting, the right time of day, and the nice clouds...

...which you probably didn't if you went there to shoot it...

...those are all things we can put in.

And we also need to make it look correct to the right time period.

We have to take out any of the modern buildings that wouldn't be there.

So it is a simulation of reality, and whether the shot is successful or not...

...depends on how well we're able to mimic that reality...

...and make it a credible illusion.

So we study the phenomena that you would expect to see...

...in a scene like that or a shot like that.

We wanna see highlights off of windows...

...the glints of the sun reflecting off of the windows of the cars...

...as they drive down streets.

We have to have traffic, people, steam coming off of buildings...

...moving clouds, flags, you know.

All the things that you would expect to see need to be there...

...as objects and phenomena that's telling you it's real.

The exterior of the train-station set was shot on a location in New Orleans...

...of the courthouse building.

[CHATTERING]

MAN 1: Ten cars, three horse and carriage.

Fifty-foot Techno. Fifty-foot Technocrane.

Start leaving all of the doors.

It could be in here, it could be up there, it could be up in here.

-We'll have control of the street, right? MAN 2: Yeah, this street, we own.

So somewhere in here, a crane shot, you see, or a platform.

MAN 3: Okay. -You know, up on a parallel.

See, the sunrise is over there, so we wanted to do this kind of first thing.

First thing, okay.

MAN 2: So it's either-or?

And I want clouds just like that but a little deeper.

Going left to right or right to left?

-Right to left. MAN 2: Okay.

BARRON: The courthouse building architecture wanted to be changed...

...to look like a train station...

...as well as, we had to establish it in a period of time before EPA...

...and, you know, proper emissions standards.

So it had to have smoke and grime...

...and, um, it needed to look really industrial and uncomfortable.

We added all these additional elements to what was shot in New Orleans:

smoke, haze.

Then we went way over the top and Dave said:

"Okay, you can back off a little bit. It doesn't have to be that horrible."

Which was great, because you literally couldn't see five feet in front of you.

The train-station-interior sequence...

...was creating this old-style-interior, union-type train station...

...which was built as a virtual set...

...meaning that they built some columns and a wall, some scaffolding...

...and then blue screens were surrounding the set.

So David was free to shoot in any angle, as if it was a real place...

...and then it's our job to track in the rest of our world...

...our computer-generated world, to fit the real world that he photographed...

...and make that transition from real world to virtual world seamless.

We, of course, also added people to it because we needed to fill out the crowds...

...and that was fun because we shot our own employees on blue screen...

...and added them into the scenes.

So we had the people who worked on the shot...

...the animators, the compositors...

...in their own train-station shot, so that's kind of fun.

It's sort of a way we can author the shot and make it our own.

Another thing that's really great about that sequence...

...is that that starts from the Armistice Day to the '20s...

...and we cut back to it during different periods of time...

...where we see it in the '40s and the '60s and then eventually present day.

So we get to show that train station remodeled...

...and what choices were made from a design standpoint...

...of what those different shots look like was a lot of fun to figure out.

One of the set pieces that we're creating is the clock.

It's in so many sequences that keeping it as a computer graphic...

...allows you, of course, to decide what time you want it to be.

And it ends up being extremely important as you're cutting a sequence together...

...and you have people standing in front of the clock...

...to decide that in a more comfortable, postproduction environment...

...about where the hands are and where the seconds are...

...and just so that you maximize every shot of the clock.

If you had this on the set, you'd always be backing it up...

...and it would be in the wrong place.

You'd probably have to futz with it in postproduction anyway.

So it was just very easy to create this clock and then control it...

...and decide what it should read on a shot-by-shot basis.

It has a glass front...

...and that glass then, of course, will reflect the interior of the train station.

Also, since a blind clockmaker made the clock, we also thought about:

"Well, what kind of clock would this blind clockmaker make?"

And David had the idea of wanting the numbers to be raised...

...sort of like Braille.

And so we made a little gold rim around it...

...so that as the sweep-second hand would go across...

...it would interrupt a light reflection off of the numbers.

You know, clearly, this is very subtle. I mean, I don't expect the audience to go:

"Oh, you know, it's raised because he's blind."

But those are the details that you think about...

...to give you a direction on how to do your work.

We had some stock fireworks...

...from a previous David Fincher movie, Zodiac, actually...

...and we used the same fireworks in this whole sequence.

There were crowds shot on location at night in New Orleans.

We had to add more people.

There are a hundred extras that go back a block.

We needed to take Block Number 2, 3, 4, all off into the distance.

We have people up on balconies that weren't there...

...so those were shot as separate elements.

MAN: Action.

[PEOPLE CHEERING AND WHOOPIG]

BARRON: Fortunately, it was near the 4th of July...

...so we were able to take advantage of buying sparklers...

...that we used to good effect.

We put that into the distance over and over again.

Another full CG shot that we're doing is of the Flatiron Building.

It's an establishing shot of New York. It's a beautiful building.

Of course, it's built as a triangle on a corner...

...and it allowed us to create that as a period shot...

...with smoke elements coming off all the buildings.

We have to put traffic running down the streets.

And even though we're way far away, as sort of a God's-eye view of this...

...you would still see people.

So we have very small people walking on the streets...

...crossing the street, dodging the traffic, and then signage.

We did research to see what kind of advertisements...

...would be in the environment.

Anything that would be appropriate for the time period on billboards...

...creating the sort of environment that would be New York.

As Benjamin Button goes around the world in different time periods...

...he actually goes also into Russia...

...during his sequence with the Merchant Marines.

And so we created a Murmansk harbor and had the crew walking up.

And we added the background with the ships...

...and the frozen ice and the snow on the buildings.

And, you know, again...

...that was like learning about what Murmansk would look like.

There was this unusual crane that they have there...

...that we put into the shot to make it look like that location.

For the Majestic Theater in New York, we wanted to see down a street...

...and see everything that you would see on Broadway.

So we're gonna have animation of lights...

...for different theater marquees going off into the distance.

The sense that you're in that New York canyon...

...of being able to look off to infinity...

...in sort of a man-made canyon of buildings going back to the horizon.

We also put in the Chrysler Building...

...and then the marquee of the theater has to be created.

There is a Majestic Theater in New York still today...

...and it doesn't have that beautiful sign.

That big marquee is gone now...

...so we created it from reference of how it looked back in the '40s.

How the lights would chase around...

...was all something we're copying from stock footage...

...that we have as reference from the actual theater.

Since everything is in the digital realm, a lot of our work tends to blur...

...into just the production process of making the movie.

Whereas there'll be something on location that wasn't quite right...

...that needed to be fixed.

But rather than wait and stop shooting, they went ahead and shot anyway...

...knowing that we could correct the problem in postproduction.

It just frees up the production process so much.

You know, if the clouds weren't quite right...

...they don't match from shot to shot...

...well, you're not gonna wait for a cloudy day to continue your sequence.

So we'll go in and we'll strip those out...

...and we'll make it feel more consecutive, like it was shot all at the same time.

And these little nuances just make the difference.

It's all part of that process of telling a story.

It's a more effective way of telling a story because it all makes sense visually.

[PEOPLE SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY AND FIREWORKS BOOMING]

That's okay. Can you solo the effects?

[PEOPLE SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY ON SCREEN]

MAN [ON SCREEN]: Where are you going?!

Oh, I see, so it's sort of a big crowd. I hear. So he's--

-Too big? -Yeah, but this stuff is good.

KLYCE: This has been probably the most difficult project yet.

Just sort of the restraint of the soundtrack.

You can hide in sound.

In other words, if you have bad dialogue...

...or if you have things that are kind of sloppy...

...from a technical standpoint...

...oftentimes in sound, you can kind of spackle over it with Bondo...

...and kind of hide the imperfections in more noise.

On a gritty movie like Se7en...

...it's okay to kind of have this, you know, grungy, crappy track.

But in this film, it's all about just the loneliness of the space...

...and nothing to do but just sit there and hear children down the street...

...and the clip-clop of horses...

...and so all the imperfection is right up there in front...

...and it has to be just presented as this period piece.

And so that's been very challenging for all of us...

...in terms of the dialogue editorial...

...and in terms of the sound and in the mix.

And it's also a lengthy film. It's 10 reels long, so it's--

In a way, it feels almost like it's two films, in terms of workload.

MAN [ON SCREEN]: Damnable affliction!

So, what about right there?

[BABY CRYlNG ON SCREEN]

When I was writing down the note, it was....

We kind of played in the first few words here.

KLYCE: To kind of get warmed up to the environment...

...and just to start absorbing as much of the culture...

...of that period in which Benjamin grew up in New Orleans...

...David kept saying things like, you know:

"The French Quarter, it's live and it's bustling.

There's music coming from all these different windows."

And that's acoustic music, performed...

...and people in different restaurants or bars or pubs or brothels...

...would all be vying for the passers-by's ear, you know...

...so there would be this noise coming at you.

[BAND PLAYING JAZZ MUSIC]

And so Aaron Zeller, he was working on location, and I thought:

"This guy's from New Orleans. He knows it like the back of his hand.

We should hire him to collect background sounds."

So he did, and, you know, he'd go into bars and just set up these little--

He brought in these little hidden microphones...

...and put them on his sunglasses and went and recorded.

A lot these sounds, we didn't have vintage vehicles...

...these Model Ts and vintage trains...

...and all these sounds of yesteryear that we no longer can have access to.

[CHATTERING]

[BIRD COOING]

Even just the sound of the swamp...

...or the birds or the crickets or the cicadas are very unique.

And if you listen in the track, there's that sort of pulsating, shh, cicada texture...

...that happens often in the summertime.

[BIRD TWITTERING]

So we were lucky to have fresh new sounds.

And then he comes up-- Stand up.

--and he's up into this, like that...

...and we see her come in in the background...like that.

MAN 1: Quiet, please. MAN 2: All set.

-Sound speed-away. MAN 3: To speeding.

MAN 4: Playback.

On the day that David's filming, all the people that are in the background...

...they actually don't say anything.

They're just extras that are mouthing.

MAN 4: Background.

And action.

MIKE: Absolutely! Damn right!

So you know what my father says to me?

He says, "Who the hell do you think you are?"

KLYCE: And so they have to be replaced.

MIKE: All right.

So you know what my father says to me?

He says, "Who the hell do you think you are?"

KLYCE: Then oftentimes, when their voices are replaced...

...they're replaced with actors who might be from Los Angeles, you know.

And so there's always a faction of dedicated New Orleans people...

...that will be listening, going, "Those aren't real accents."

So we wanted to make sure they were true.

Same old crap every day.

KLYCE: If you watch the film, a lot of it takes place in the Nolan House...

...which is a retirement home with lots of old folks.

So capturing the sound of...

[IN HOARSE VOICE]...old people talking about stuff, you know, and--

[IN NORMAL VOICE] But with the right accent, you know, you can't--

Again, you can't hire people to do it as well as if you could just sneak in someplace...

...and collect all these sounds.

So Aaron went into the **** House and a couple other retirement homes...

...and poor old people were freaked out...

...because they didn't know who this guy was.

He's in there and he's, you know, kind of got these headphones on...

...and he's sitting there, looking there.

If you listen through all the takes, it's funny because some people go:

"We didn't know who you were, sugar.

We thought you were some stranger looking to case the joint or something."

And it was just hilarious.

But some of the recordings that he got were great.

They just-- They're priceless.

WOMAN: Get those big bowls and chop that up right there.

Chop that up, come on. And chop up them onions real good.

KLYCE: You'll hear a great clip where Brad Pitt comes home after the war.

He comes home to see his mom, and he, of course, has gotten a lot younger...

...and he's sort of wanting to know if she'll even recognize who he is...

...and he comes back home.

And we had all this space to fill.

At one point, we had nothing, silence. David was like:

"Can't we put some sound in there? It's so flat."

And so we had this great clip that Aaron recorded of this old lady...

[LAUGHS]

...who's trying to, like, get out of her bed, and she's going:

"I'm ready. I'm ready."

And finally the African American nurse goes:

"Okay, Miss Alfalina, I'm coming. I'm coming for you, honey."

And it's just this great thing that you could never write.

You could never come up with it, you know?

WOMAN: I'm ready. I'm ready.

NURSE: I'm coming.

WOMAN: I'm ready. NURSE: All right, I'm coming, Miss Alfalina.

A lot of the job was just listening to these recordings and cherry-picking:

"Oh, that's great. Where--? We gotta put it in the movie somewhere."

You know, that kind of stuff.

When he stands up, look at his face, then at his feet.

-Then look back at him like, "What?" -Okay.

KLYCE: We had a lot working against us, you know, just in terms of noise...

...and so cleaning up the dialogue was very difficult.

Now in New Orleans, it's a metropolitan city with freeways and rumble.

And what David wanted was just quiet dialogue...

...with just chickens, you know, in the background, and wind.

And so that was very challenging...

...because our production sound recordist, Mark Weingarten...

...had a real hard time with these locations because they were noisy.

I mean, the Nolan House, you go in the backyard...

...and it's just:

[GRUNTS]

You've got all this dialogue happening, and so a lot of it--

In fact, one of the first rules, uh, that David came up with was:

Any time an actor is outside, they shall be looped.

Which is really hard on many levels, most notably just performance...

...because the actor gives so much on the day...

...and then to have them come back in...

...and try and redo it again is very difficult for them...

...because, you know, it's hard to come all the way back up...

...to that level of performance.

Well, he got another thing coming, that's for sure.

God be my witness, he got another thing coming.

He left us $18 that night you was found.

Eighteen ratty dollars and a--

Good night, baby.

In the film, the dialogue that you hear, for example, if it is production...

...oftentimes it's not even when they were actually saying their dialogue.

It's a culmination of many different cuts within that.

And David's very involved with every little nuance...

...and finding just the right pitch and tone for every little word.

So it's a really long, drawn-out process...

...but it's a lot of fun just to kind of hone in on the characters.

Y'all listen. Y'all listen up here.

We gonna have us a visitor that's gonna be staying with us for a little while.

My sister had a child, and she couldn't see right by it, so....

You know what? Maybe I need to watch this again because--

I gotta look-- I gotta-- I can't look at the paper and look up there.

FINCHER: Let me hear that one back...

...just for "Dr. Rose says he ain't got much more time."

Oh, God in heaven. He looks just like my ex-husband.

Look, he's prematurely old.

Dr. Rose said he ain't got much more time on this earth.

Well, join the club.

Just the last line, "Dr. Rose says he ain't got much time."

QUEENIE: Dr. Rose says he ain't got much more time left on this earth.

Yeah, really feel sorry for him.

Let's pick that up. "Dr. Rose says he ain't got much more time."

He looks so silly.

BENJAMIN: Mama.

Mama.

Some days I feel different than the day before.

KLYCE: Part of the challenge with Benjamin Button's voice...

...when he's 7 years old yet he looks like a 75-year-old man...

...was to make him sound, on one hand, childlike...

...but on another hand, elderly.

Molasses.

I don't think I have worms.

KLYCE: So it was that quandary of, "How do you do the sound?"

And I thought, "Well, he would sound kind of like a little baby."

[IN HIGH HOARSE VOICE] Like, he would sound like this:

"Mama, how much longer do I have to live?"

Mama? How much longer I got?

[IN NORMAL VOICE] A lot of the original recording of Brad was like that.

And we had it cut in for a while, but then when the animation came in...

...l think David realized it wasn't really quite the right sound...

...and was dissatisfied with that as a texture.

Mama? How much longer I got?

KLYCE: David Fincher kept saying:

"Well, let's just pitch it and run it through the throat program.

And it's gonna come out great," you know?

We did due diligence on the original recordings...

...and tried as best as we could...

...to make technology create this texture and create this effect...

...but ultimately, what we found out...

...was that it sounded science fiction-esque.

BENJAMIN [ON RECORDING]: Molasses.

KLYCE: These tools, you know, maybe there'll be a new technology...

...which will allow for this...

...but right now, currently, we don't have technology...

...that doesn't end up sounding like you're in a sci-fi film.

It would be great if it was a science-fiction film.

Then you would hear all the digital artifacts, and it would be acceptable.

BENJAMIN: "Molasses."

Molasses.

BENJAMIN [IN HIGH VOICE]: "Molasses."

Molasses.

He had a conversation with Brad Pitt himself...

...and apparently, Brad said, "Well, wouldn't it be more gravelly?"

And I think it was Brad who kind of came up with this sort of--

[IN GRAVELLY VOICE] "Hey, Mama? How much longer I got?"

[IN GRAVELLY VOICE] Mama? How much longer I got?

[IN NORMAL VOICE] So then he kind of did this-- Forced his throat.

Forced this sort of gravelly sound all the way up here...

...kind of like Froggy from Little Rascals.

Mama? How much longer I got?

KLYCE: And then we just pitch it slightly.

How old are you?

[IN NORMAL VOICE] Seven. But I look a lot older.

[IN GRAVELLY VOICE] Seven. But I look a lot older.

[IN HIGH GRAVELLY VOICE] Seven. But I look a lot older.

KLYCE: Believe it or not, it's mostly Brad Pitt just making that sound.

Again, in this setting, it's so natural and real...

...that we had to ask the actors to create it.

And you know what? It was the best thing to do.

Come on over here, you.

Now, this is my granddaughter, Daisy.

KLYCE: David wanted to have Cate Blanchett...

...revoice her young, 10-year-old version of herself.

And Elle Fanning, who was the actor who plays the young Daisy...

...was recorded on set, and we have her voice.

It was fine. It's a little girl's voice. She sounds great. She's a great actor.

And then David goes:

"Hmm. Let's revoice her."

And, you know, fear, doubt...

...you know, all these things come in.

"Okay, great. Well, what--? You wanna have another kid do her voice?"

"No, let's have Cate do it."

Oh. You know, "It's never gonna work. It's not gonna work.

This is a disastrous idea."

And it works.

Did you know turkeys aren't really birds?

Why do you say that?

They're in the pheasant family. They can't hardly fly.

It's sad, don't you think? Bird that can't fly?

MAN: That looks good.

Did you know turkeys aren't really birds?

Why do you say that?

DAISY: They are in the pheasant family, can't hardly fly.

It's sad, don't you think? Birds that can't fly?

KLYCE: She went into a female falsetto...

...and created, you know, the young-Daisy vocal.

And despite the fact that she's talking up here...

...you can still get a sense of her chest cavity.

So Dave Parker, our dialogue mixer...

...spent a lot of time sculpting, in terms of equalization...

...all the low frequency components of her voice and getting rid of those...

...and filtering it so that we just had the high end...

...of her vocal texture.

And then, again, we took that and pitched it up a few steps.

Probably not that much, though. It's--

Again, with that sound, it's 95 percent the actor.

-Read it again. -Oh, read it again.

KLYCE: What's really interesting is that when you watch the scene...

...where Benjamin Button and Daisy sneak underneath the table...

...and have their first encounter and their first conversation...

...that's where you'll be able to hear, uh...

...Cate's voice over Elle Fanning's face.

And it's actually brilliant now, in retrospect.

It's taken me a long time to get to this point.

But if you think about it, what's interesting is that Brad Pitt...

...he's not even there, right?

Because it's a CG character.

Yet it's his voice.

And Elle Fanning's there, but she's not really there.

It's this other voice.

Your turn.

I'm younger than I look.

I thought so.

You don't seem like an old person.

Like my grandma.

So there's this weird dichotomy...

...and weird kind of checks-and-balances thing that happens in the scene.

And it works, in a very peculiar way.

It kind of creates a global oddness to the track.

Your turn.

Uh...

I'm not as old as I look.

I thought so.

You don't-- You don't seem like an old person.

-Like my grandma. -I’m not.

KLYCE: Many times when you work in your pigeonhole...

...of whatever you're doing...

...you think that that work is what's important.

And here's the film over here, and here's your contribution to it...

...and this is important.

But really it's not, it's this. And....

And I think that it takes a while to kind of get to the point...

...where you can appreciate that this can be thrown away...

...and it's not important.

What's important is David's film and how to make that speak.

And that's been the best learning experience for me.

Sometimes you have this striking idea that comes to you...and you get it.

Sometimes you just have to dig a bit deeper...

...unfortunately, for many hours.

[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING ON RECORDING]

THOMAS [ON RECORDING]: When I was a boy, I'd love to wake up before anyone else...

...run down to that lake and watch the day begin.

[WHISTLING]

It was as if I was the only one alive.

[PIANO PLAYING]

I fell in love the first time I saw her.

Your mother's name was Caroline Murphy.

Might be nice with two pianos also doing that, actually.

-Can you hear it? It's-- FINCHER: Yeah.

It's not-- It can't be perfectly in synch.

THOMAS: I'd find excuses to go down to that kitchen...

...just so I could look at her.

Watch, there's the harp. Just the piano.

THOMAS: And this cab driver, who dropped off the earlier fare...

...and had stopped to get the cup of coffee...

...he picked up the lady who was going shopping--

Saxophone.

DESPLAT: It's very important that the director...

...who's been living with the picture for years...

...gives you the right path so that you don't miss something.

Could it be the connection...

...between one character's reaction in a scene 10 minutes before...

...than the one you're scoring?

Or 10 minutes after the one you're scoring?

So it's all this very complex and delicate puzzle.

DAISY: Good night, Daisy.

Wasn't there his voice overlapping with hers at one point?

Never. Ah, you did, huh?

CAROLINE: Life wasn't all that complicated.

DESPLAT: A great Japanese architect called Tadao Ando...

...that says that you can't have a good architecture...

...if it doesn't have both function and fiction.

And, uh, it's perfect for a movie soundtrack.

When the movie soundtrack is just functioning...

...okay, does a good job.

But, so what?

But fiction...

...that's good.

And I'd rather have a score...

...which is only fiction and maybe has a bad function...

...than the opposite.

So when a movie like Benjamin Button is getting towards you...

...in a way both these elements are offered to you...

...you go, "Oh, that's what I want to do."

That's why I have wanted to do movie scores.

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

[ORCHESTRA PLAYING MUSIC]

When you write a score for a movie where you want not too much music...

...you know that the most important moments...

...are where you start and where you end.

And it's crucial.

[PLAYING MUSIC]

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

Okay.

-Happy, Fincher? FINCHER: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

DESPLAT: Questions? FINCHER: No, no, no.

DESPLAT: Requests? -You were just saying that weren't--

The last one, I was not very happy with the last one.

-But you have tuning keys? -Yeah, we have other things.

And if, you know, it's a cue you can fix.

DESPLAT: There were two dangers:

Making it too much of a fable...

...and something too dark, um, too heavy...

...or something too schmaltzy, uh...

...playing too much for the emotion and pushing the emotions.

-Here Andy played really softly. -Okay.

It's just because it's a solo instrument, you hear it:

-Yeah. -lf it was--

Well, is it gonna feel natural if I duck a little bit for that?

-You can't really duck it. It's okay. -Okay, okay.

-Okay, play it again? -Yes.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS]

DESPLAT: You can be simple and emotional. You don't have to be pushy.

I remember once in Prague...

...hearing a little girl in the street singing in the morning...

...as the sun was rising, and she was going to school.

And just a single voice could give you the chill...

...and almost, you know, tears to your eyes...

...because of the beauty of it.

The rule that I've chosen, it was less is more.

I don't think there were many other ways.

Because the music shouldn't show off.

It can shine. It can, uh, be intricate.

It can increase the intimacy that you have...

...with the characters or with the situations.

But it shouldn't be overwhelming you.

I think it can be simple and still very moving.

It can be subdued and played with almost no vibrato...

...and still be very strong.

I write very simple music...

...which makes all the lines very transparent.

You hear everything very clearly.

There's many soloists.

You can have sometimes just one trumpet playing one note...

...in the high register, bar 56 for two bars.

It hasn't played before, just play these two bars.

It's difficult because you haven't played but then you go bam.

And it's got to be on the right note, on the right dynamic, in tune.

So it's simple, but very difficult to play.

Once more, 29. One, two.

Yeah.

Yes, exactly. Perfect.

Even though the orchestra is big, you know, from 60- to 90-piece...

...l make it a very chamber-like kind of feel.

It was a hard job here to bring, you know...

...this huge amount of energy that are in Hollywood scores...

...you know, which are always bombastic and big...

...and everybody is playing loud and a lot and vibrato and--

No. This has to be different.

DESPLAT: Yeah, but softer, the three of you. -On the trills, sure.

DESPLAT: On the high ones, especially.

Yes. Piano, 29.

You-- No vibrato, you play soft, you put your mutes...

...and you listen to your neighbor, which is very important.

You listen to each other because you--

Otherwise you can't play. And that's the key of chamber music.

[ORCHESTRA CHATTERING]

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

Okay.

MAN 1: Bravo, Andrew. MAN 2: Thank you. Thanks.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS]

When we play the melody, when you're doubling Randy...

...the celeste and the harp should be definitely not--

The celeste is doing dee, dum, dum.

Now, here too much dee, dum, dum.

Always the downbeat of the bar.

We should not hear so much of the downbeat.

So you could just invert the dynamics so it starts softly on top and end--

DESPLAT: Exactly. Yeah. -Cool.

-Yeah, you know: MAN: That stays constant.

[HUMMING]

-Mid-bar, more-- WOMAN: Ba-bum.

-Yeah. MAN: Yeah.

That's a piano thing, but we can-- I don't know. We can try.

DESPLAT: I like very much to hide as much as possible...

...when the music is coming in.

I remember the first time we spoke with David...

...that I mentioned the idea that the music should be a flow...

...that would come and go, vanish and come back.

And I like when the music sneaks in, you don't realize.

And then suddenly, when it blossoms, it's there, you feel the emotion...

...but you didn't feel that it was like a tape player playing.

The element of time is very important.

He's going backwards in time...

...and we thought what could be fun is to have--

Benjamin's theme is first--

The first section is in one direction, and the second section is reversed.

And, uh, second time:

The opposite.

You can't really tell because it doesn't show off.

But if you listen to it and write it down, you just notice that it's the opposite.

[HUMMING]

The music I write generally has this, uh, childlike thing...

...of simplicity and of spacy sounds and--

You know, I often use harps and pianos and celeste and Fender pianos...

...and light electric guitars and little bells.

It's part of my instrumentarium.

I like that. I like to use these sounds.

Yeah. What would be next?

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS]

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

DESPLAT: You know, some music they get colored by the picture...

...and some pictures get colored with the music.

There's an interaction.

It's hard for me because when I've finished recording, I hate everything.

I'm really disgusted by the score. I don't want to hear it anymore.

But this morning, I watched the screening...

...and there were moments where I thought, "Oh, that's okay. That's not too bad."

When he takes his father to the lake in his arms...

...which is a very moving scene to me...

...you know, having a man, who haven't known his father...

...who finally knows who he is...

...and takes him in his arms to see the sunrise...

...l think that's a beautiful visual and strong human idea.

BENJAMIN: You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went.

You can swear and curse the Fates...

...but when it comes to the end...

...you have to let go.

WAGNER: Usually you read a script and you say:

"Okay, this is in my mind. This is how I envision it."

And you're always disappointed.

And it was like, "Oh, my gosh. This is better than I envisioned it."

At the very beginning, I think Ceán said...

...that David's really gonna reach for the rafters on this one.

Which isn't to say he doesn't on every movie.

But I think this movie has a lot of things that are incredibly difficult.

I always say it's probably the biggest thing I'll ever work on.

It felt special, like I said, from the time I read it, for sure.

And even see-- When we were filming, funny enough too--

It just had a feeling on the set...

...that's kind of hard to put into words...

...but you were like, "Okay. Something's happening here."

You know, like, "This is something."

Everyone treated this project as if it was their own child.

The film is Benjamin Button.

You know, that baby that's on the doorstep.

And that's what makes it so special.

One of the best experiences of my life as far as moviemaking.

One of the most stressful experiences in my life of moviemaking, also.

I absolutely loved it. One of the happiest times I've ever had working on a film.

I got on fantastic with all the guys on the crew. We had a great fun together.

We all bonded really well.

We all had these terrible scatological nicknames for each other.

If you're gonna do a film, that's what it should be about, the people you work with.

I can't say just that.

But it's very important to me as I get older that-- The company I keep.

And I enjoy so much spending time with these guys.

I figured it wasn't a bad way to burn a year or so. Or two.

Thank you very much.

[AUDIENCE CHEERING]

Um, we need to do this quickly, because you've got a long movie to watch.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

I wanna thank all of you for your hard work and your beautiful faces...

...and especially your city.

We couldn't have done it without you.

[CHEERING]

The film owes so much to New Orleans and the people of New Orleans...

...and we cannot thank you enough.

It's, uh--

It's a-- I see it as a love letter.

I think you'll recognize a few of the places.

And, you know, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

And go to the bathroom now.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

You don't wanna be going in, you know, in about an hour and 45.

You don't wanna miss a thing. Go now.

Go.

He's not kidding.

All right, thank you. We hope you enjoy it.

[AUDIENCE CHEERING]

FLEMYNG: I think this picture was the landmark in my life where I just went:

"After this, it's all a bonus."

It was definitely something...

...that was something to tick off in my life, which was to make a great film.

You know, it's done.

DONEN: You know, it's the kind of movies people don't make an awful lot...

...in the studio system right now.

It's not a movie around a central conflict that is resolved.

It's a movie about a life.

It's about a life lived and the emotional journey that one takes...

...when you live your life. It's just great.

Everybody sits here, does these things for every movie and says:

"What a great--" But I think this is unique.

I mean, I could tell you other movies I've had...

...which people just didn't give a shit.

And maybe part of that was that the--

There was not the same kind of feeling about...

...that this is something worth doing that might last for more than a year, you know?

Or 10 minutes, you know?