New age Fincher

It's a lesson he learned early in his career, when he worked at Industrial Light & Magic in the early '80s and was struck by the difference between Spielberg movies and most other effects-heavy films of the period: "It wasn't just the degree of execution that made those effects, it was the way they supported the story around them. The setup is almost as important as the execution."

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," with its blank-slate hero and life-sized timeline, is among other things a curious experiment in viewer identification. "I like to think of the movie as truly experiential," Fincher said. "There's no back story. You live his back story; you're there for everything. For me it really is about living a life. He's an extraordinary man in extremely mundane circumstances. We all know the first kiss, the first hangover, the first love, the first time you get dumped. And you're intensely aware of every moment as the inverse of what you're seeing. He's not 70, he's 10; he's not 60, he just turned 20. And I hope people can chart that from an empathetic standpoint."

While "Benjamin Button" might be the only Fincher film to count as a weepie (though "Fight Club" is not without its poignant undercurrents), it shares an obsessive, control-freak quality with his other intricate entertainments.

Fincher's single-mindedness has earned him a reputation as a perfectionist taskmaster. "I've become obsessive because I think it's professional," he said. "If I'm going to take tens of millions of dollars from somebody, I'm going to try to make the best movie I can. And for the actors, I think the duty of the director is to make playing dress-up as effortless as you can. We're asking someone with a blue stretchy cap on their head to act like an 85-year-old man. So you help out as much as you can. The attention to detail, the obsessiveness that I'm saddled with -- it's me just doing my job."

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