David Fincher's tale of the ages: 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

But for the 46-year-old Fincher -- the virtuoso auteur behind many of the most indelible serial-killer movies of the last dozen years (1995's "Se7en," last year's "Zodiac"), the fanboy favorite behind the head-banging ultraviolence of 1999's "Fight Club" and the mind-game paranoia of 1997's "The Game" and 2002's "Panic Room" -- it could reasonably be considered a departure.

"I think it was probably easy up until 'Zodiac' to say, 'That's a guy who's interested in those movies where people do horrible things to each other,' " Fincher said earlier this month, slumped on a sofa in the presidential suite of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. "But there's a much higher body count in this movie than in anything I've ever done."

Played by Brad Pitt, with the help of other actors' bodies and armies of makeup artists and CGI pros, the title character is born old and seems to grow younger as he ages. Abandoned at birth, an infant-sized octogenarian, Benjamin is raised in a New Orleans nursing home, surrounded by the frail and the dying. The specter of mortality remains even as he sheds his wrinkles and enters a robust middle age and a romance with his lifelong love, the bohemian dancer Daisy (Cate Blanchett).

Benjamin is both a remarkable special effect and an all-purpose symbol: He may grow more youthful as he ages in reverse, but can't stall the passage of time. A tale of magical realism, a picaresque journey as strange as it is sentimental, the film is also a somber exploration of the most terrifying -- and in Hollywood, arguably the most taboo -- of subjects: aging and death.

With that angle in mind, Fincher said, he has settled on a line for those who insist on calling his new film an anomaly: "Isn't time the ultimate serial killer?"

Loosely based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Benjamin Button" has taken years to come to fruition. In the late '80s, producer Ray Stark commissioned a draft by screenwriter Robin Swicord, and for a while various directors, including Steven Spielberg, circled the project. It continued to change hands, and was resurrected in earnest a few years ago by producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, this time with a revised script by Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his "Forrest Gump" screenplay.