David Fincher, Danny Boyle accomplish their missions

TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Directors David Fincher and Danny Boyle came to the Telluride Film Festival with very different motivations for their fundamentally dissimilar films. But both will leave the festival having accomplished pretty much exactly what they needed to do.

Fincher, the director of "Fight Club," "The Game" and "Se7en," appeared at the 35th annual film festival to receive an opening-night career tribute award. In addition to his 167-minute director's cut of last year's "Zodiac," the filmmaker brought with him about 20 minutes of footage from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the decades-in-development reworking of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story about the reverse aging of a boy born as an old man.

The brief glimpses of Fincher's Christmas Day release established a couple of critical facts about “Benjamin Button.”

First, the collection of scenes made clear that the director and screenwriter Eric Roth have used Fitzgerald's story as more foundation than blueprint; the many departures from the original story are apparent in the period movie's opening scenes, when Button is born as an infant with a senior's face, not as a fully grown old man from tip to toe. Second, Fincher was able to show that the technology used to insert "Benjamin Button" star Brad Pitt's face onto the torsos of the stand-ins who play the title character at widely different ages is both invisible and effective: Although the body may not be Pitt's, every small facial expression is.

Finally, audiences saw in several overtly emotional clips a side of Fincher that hasn't been clearly obvious in his early work: heart.

"It's probably the most romantic movie I've ever been offered," the director said during a rare Telluride downpour. "So, yes, it's the most romantic movie I've ever made."

Fincher also wants moviegoers to realize that he does not see Fitzgerald's story as an endorsement of the line attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw that "youth is wasted on the young," that it's a tragedy to have so little life experience when your body is willing, your attitude hopeful.

"A lot of people come away thinking that," the 46-year-old Fincher said. "But I see it the opposite way -- that youth is never wasted on the young."

A year ago, the award-season impetus for Daniel Day-Lewis began at Telluride, when in a similar tribute audiences saw early footage from the actor's Oscar-winning "There Will Be Blood." Fincher said there's no such intention behind screening the footage of "Benjamin Button."