"It was mostly about expense," Fincher said of the project's long, on-off gestation period. (The film's budget is reportedly in the $150-million range.) "Technology has gotten cheaper. We started five years ago, and you could probably do the same amount of work for $3 million or $4 million less, with what we know now."
To create the movie's primary visual trick -- Benjamin's appearance at different ages -- Fincher cast several actors, and in most cases combined their bodies with Pitt's voice and digitally manipulated face using a motion-capture technique similar to the one Robert Zemeckis used in "Beowulf."
"I call it the Botoxing of the performance," Fincher said. "As high-resolution as it is, there's something that gets kind of dulled, something not so articulate in the lips. But when a guy's 85 years old, it's OK that he's a little soft."
Benjamin may be a state-of-the-art technical marvel but at the film's heart is Pitt's performance, a delicate feat of physiognomic control. "There are so many facial tics that make people who they are, especially movie stars," Fincher said, "and one of the things we found with Brad was it's the speed at which he does things, it's when he blinks, when he moves his eyes."
He was quick to praise Pitt, who, including "Se7en" and "Fight Club," has now starred in three of Fincher's seven features. "Some of my favorite shots in this movie have absolutely nothing to do with technology and everything to do with an actor's choices, like when Brad made these decisions that were odd and childlike, that Popeye face when he's walking for the first time," Fincher said. "It's ultimately those things that win you over."
He added, "Is Benjamin absolutely 100% believable in most shots? No, but there are a couple that I look at and go, 'Wow, we got really close.' It's just enough to get you to suspend your disbelief."
Fincher is known as a craftsman and tech-head, but he puts CGI wizardry in the service of illusion more than spectacle. "Zodiac," he said, made extensive use of digitized cityscapes in part because he couldn't get permission to shoot on the streets of San Francisco. "You don't want people to go, 'Wow, that's the most beautiful street corner in history,' you don't want to make it overly flowery," he said. "When people spend a lot of money on digital effects, I think they want it to count. I just want people to be absorbed in what's going on."
