Brad Pitt owes a debt to Benjamin Button

"I had a whole other life and I got to experience a lot. And I probably got away with more than I should," he says. "And it kind of ran its course, you know, it kind of hit a dead end." Fatherhood, he notes, is "the direction I always thought I would go in. But not until, with Angie and it felt like a natural evolution, a natural direction."

Colleagues and friends who've witnessed it confirm Pitt's gradual metamorphosis. Even though he has known the actor for 15 years and directed him in two previous movies, the gruesome crime-thriller "Se7en" and the darkly satirical "Fight Club," Fincher says he was unprepared "for the degree to which he [Pitt] has become comfortable with who he is," both on set and off.

"I think a lot of it has to do with his family," Fincher says. "It's like he wants to cut to the chase and go at the thing, and get it and work it and play with it and then be done with it and live to act another day."

Pitt agrees that, as he has matured professionally, "I don't have to grope as much for the character."

"I can get there quicker, so it's not as much trial and error," he says. "Also, as I get older, more experiences, I'm more fine-tuned in what I'm after, what I think speaks in the piece. And lastly I want to hurry and get home to my kids."

Decked out in a subdued, gray three-piece suit, Pitt comes across as a contemplative and polite professional, engaging and intellectually curious. His substance is more than just style: He recently moved his family to New Orleans, the better to help facilitate his foundation's ambitious project to provide the city's flood-ravaged Lower 9th Ward with dozens, if not hundreds, of affordable new housing units.

In some ways, "Benjamin Button" plays as an elegy for New Orleans and for a lost (or rapidly vanishing) part of what culture critic Greil Marcus called "the Old, Weird America." Personally, Pitt says, he won't be sorry to see the current White House administration exiting stage left. But he thinks it would be premature to start writing a national obit.

"America's known for our ingenuity," he says. "We put a man on the moon, for Christ's sake. And it'd be a shame to lose that definition because of some kind of fear of losing what we were, or what we had. That's the quickest way, I think, to end it all. We're going to be all right."