All language subtitles for 動作捕捉。視覺效果。聲音設計。誕生 - 首映.eng

MAN 1: I was gonna come and reset A and B.
MAN 2: Go ahead.

Maybe just trying to-- But, it's barely
up now so it doesn't really need to be reset.

No, A is over there.

-Oh.
-This is B.

[CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY]

MAN 3: All right.
So this is-- Jackson, play it back, please?

Yeah, we gotta hear liquid.

[CHUCKLES]

MAN 3: Just off camera right.
That's good. That's perfect.

[BURPS]

Uh, test one, two, test. Test.

Copy that. Go.

FINCHER:
We wrapped April or May of 2007.

And then we cut
for about 10 or 15 weeks...

...just to sort of get a rough shape.

BENJAMIN:
I had gone to a whorehouse.

I'd had my first drink.

I said goodbye to one friend...

...and buried another.

In 1937, when I was coming to the end
of the 17th year of my life...

...I packed my bag and said goodbye.

BAXTER:
The hardest part of the movie for me...

...was assembling it
without access to David...

...when he was in New Orleans
the whole time...

...and I was here working in his office.

Because he does do a lot of coverage
and he does do a lot of angles...

...and a lot of takes.

And it can be daunting
if there's no initial conversation...

...and there rarely is.
It's just, "Here it is, begin."

Let's say we got a five-minute scene,
I've probably got two hours of footage.

I may have 15 different angles,
there's A and B camera.

And there can be from anywhere from
five takes to 30 takes...

...on each specific one.

I'd say probably the biggest challenge...

...was dealing with
a headless character...

...for the first, you know,
quarter of the movie.

I mean,
there was the body actor's performance...

...which David didn't wanna see at all.

And he had us put a black hole
on the screen...

...wherever
the body performer's face was.

I think that's quite challenging
because you watch it and it's really flat...

...because your lead
is literally a black hole on the screen.

Kirk was assembling
while we were shooting.

Angus was doing some assembling
while we were shooting.

And we were looking at stuff.
You know, we have everything on Pix.

The only addiction I have left.

I showed you this, right?
So there'll be a matte painting...

...we'll see New York City,
the Chrysler Building, all that stuff.

Back and then
the cars will pass in front of them.

But we'll move in on:

[IMITATES TRAFFIC NOISE]

You know, like he'll get out,
pays the cabbie, goes inside.

[SOUNDTRACK MUSIC PLAYS
OVER COMPUTER]

I love that, with the music.

That's terrible, that piece.

-That piece is good.
-Definitely.

FINCHER:
There's so much underpants.

We need his face in there instead of....

That's a nice piece and that works.

That looks good.

FINCHER:
I was able to see stuff every night.

You know, little QuickTimes of scenes
that I had mauled...

...with my inability to think straight.

It's always very nerve-racking
for an editor...

...the first time you show an assembly
to a director.

With David, usually,
you post it as a QuickTime...

...and he looks at it.

Sometimes,
you'll get up in the middle of the night...

...and see if he, like,
accepted it or declined it.

There's a green--

You can have a green bar on your sequence
or a red bar on your sequence.

A red bar is really bad.

And usually if I got one of those,
I'd just go back to bed.

But if it was green I would read what--
Because there's always comments.

And it's interesting
because he's hyper-specific...

...down to a syllable of a word.

And then we had five to eight days
of facial capture.

We did a day of volumetric capture,
which was the spattered--

The green makeup on Brad...

...capturing the shape of his face
in different positions for the volume.

MAN 1: Roll, please.
MAN 2: Rolling.

Eyes a little bit further right.
There we go.

And then we did five days
of the specific performance capture...

...that was his reacting
to what was happening...

...in the scenes that we'd cut.

And that would be the material
that we would use...

...to drive the CG old-age face.

Okay, one last one.

MAN 1:
Okay, going again. Button it up, please.

And after you've looked at Queenie...

...look over more to your mark
towards the kids.

The eye line towards the kids.

Just a little bit.
Yeah, not the face, just the eyes.

-Get them over there.
-All the way over there?

Yeah, that's a little too far. A little bit more.
Yeah, over in that direction.

-After...?
-Yeah.

And I like the lip thing but I'm not sure--
I mean, the tongue can--

We have to re-create the tongue
digitally anyway.

-But I like the lip thing. Here we go.
MAN 2: And roll it.

-And speed?
MAN 3: Speed.

Super lost in your own little world
at the beginning.

Hey, boy.

Benjamin! That is dangerous.
Come back over here.

Stay put, child.

FINCHER: That was it.
MAN: Cut.

FINCHER:
Okay, play me the last three back.

MAVROMATES:
It's one of these great scenarios...

...where there's this amazing amount
of technology going on.

Yet in certain instances in the process...

...we were very low-rent about how we did
it because there was no other way to do it.

And so we would shoot Brad
just to capture his facial performances...

...hoping that it would fit in
to the performance that another actor did...

...who was wearing a blue sock
on his head.

And to Brad's credit,
it was pretty amazing.

It was one of those scenarios,
where as I was on the set...

...I’d be sitting there looking
at what he was doing thinking:

"I don't know if that's gonna work."
Then we'd take it to the edit room...

...then we would edit it and put it together
and it was pretty amazing.

-lt's a night for firsts.
MAN: How's that?

I never been to a brothel, either.

I don't mean to be rude, but...

...your hands. Is that painful?

Well, I was born
with some form of disease.

What kind of disease?

I was born old.

-I’m sorry.
-No need to be.

There's nothing wrong with old age.

MAVROMATES: It really worked incredibly
well. I just couldn't see it on the set.

And, obviously, David could.

He walked away
feeling pretty good about it.

FINCHER: Cut it.
MAN: Cut it.

WOMAN 1:
SW-83-20, version 58, final.

TI-89-130, comp version 39, final.

BT-92-30, the first face fall
when she says, "I feel sorry for you"...

...and then on the second face fall,
wait for on, "Die before you do."

Check the light on the teeth as well.

FR-47-180, comp version 25:

"A little bit more out of focus
inside the glass lenses...

...and too Harvey Dent."

[ALL LAUGH]

And so that's probably something
we could just do as a comp treatment...

...or do we need to re-render
the glasses out of focus?

WOMAN 2: It'll be comp.
MAN 1: Yeah.

WOMAN 3:
And we should Google "Harvey Dent."

WOMAN 1:
Google Ha-- Okay, I'll do that.

ST-49-40, version 9, final.

The head was already final
but we finaled the cable-car stuff.

BARBA:
The human performance has always been...

...considered the holy grail
of the CG world.

It's very daunting for many reasons...

...because it's-- Well, one, everyone is
afraid of it because it's such a challenge.

It's like, well, where do you start?

How old are you?

I'm seven, but I look a lot older.

Seven, but I look a lot older.

PREACHER: He's gonna see that you walk
from faith and divine inspiration alone.

MAN: All right.
-Yes!

[APPLAUSE]

PREEG: No one's ever really tried to do
just a regular CG person as a character...

...because it's been so scary.

Tests and attempts, you know,
over the years...

...have not necessarily been successful...

...and I've even been
part of some of those attempts.

It is tough, you know? He had to be cute.

He always had to be cute
and he's not cute.

He's an 80-year-old guy
in a wheelchair who's 4 feet tall.

But I think that-- I think it really--

-He's a likable character.
-Yeah, he's--

It could have been so easy for him to be,
actually-- To actually be a monster.

You're gonna meet this guy
at his least recognizable.

You know, he's gonna be 4 feet tall.

And he's gotta look 80-- I mean, he's gotta
look like Einstein, you know? Or Yoda.

You know? He's gotta be--
He's gotta start at the--

He's gotta be this, like, wizened,
you know...

...wrinkled, hairless, gnome of a guy.

It occurred to me that this might be
a better place to put the audience...

...as if it was somebody that you
really knew what their face looked like...

...because they could peer into it
and kind of go:

"I know who that is. How do I know--?"

And that was the thing
that we found eventually...

...was that when you could see it was him,
there was something exciting about that.

And you're talking about somebody--
You can't walk, you know, 35 feet...

...in the civilized world
and not see a picture of him.

I mean, literally,
like every 10 seconds it's like...

...and here he is getting on his motorcycle,
here he is taking his helmet off...

...and here he is having a snow cone.
You know what I mean? It's like...

...you see him so much,
in a weird way, it kind of helped us.

BARBA: Early on,
there were sculptures done of Brad...

...at the different ages playing Ben.

LITT:
They take a cast of Brad Pitt...

...then they start sculpting it in clay
to make him look old.

And turn that clay into a mold
and cast that in silicone.

BARBA: And eventually those ages were
taken from five to three basic sculptures...

...that we would need and handed to
Rick Baker and Kazu to sculpt and create...

...the designs and likenesses that we would
then recreate for our digital models.

LITT: You end up with this incredibly lifelike
bust, and they actually made three of them.

They made an 80-year-old Brad Pitt,
a 70-year-old and 60 years old.

So, you know, we would just be sitting
at our desks with this bust...

...of 100 percent realistic-looking Brad Pitt
staring at us while we're trying to work...

...and it was invaluable,
it was a little creepy at times.

From that sculpture, we create a digital
scan that then gets put into the computer.

A very complex system is put together
to represent hair and skin...

...and also animation
of how that head will move.

FINCHER: Yeah, but I think the glasses
help him with stuff-- See, with here--

PITT: It's bifocals, right?
-Well, he's gonna have--

Whatever they are, they're fucking huge.

PITT: Okay.
-l don't know what--

So I was just thinking it's, like,
either like this so he has to use them...

-...or it's down so he sees over them.
-Okay.

FINCHER: Okay, we'll try go through it.
Okay, neutral pose. Record.

-Rolling?
MAN 1: Sound speed.

MAN 2: Speed.
-Okay. Just give me 15--

Just head down the hallway
in your wheelchair...

...and seeing over your glasses
and looking a little bit from side to side.

Blocking your eyes from sun....

BARBA:
We used the mobile contour system...

...in a way that we felt was the most
straightforward approach.

You know, we were able to grab
performance pieces...

...and nuances from Brad...

...that then we were able to
build into a rig.

Rig being, if you think of it
in marionette terms...

...the armature that you can pull on
to then control how the face moves.

PREEG: A rig is really just whatever
mechanism you're gonna use...

...to make a static mesh or a static
piece of geometry move over time.

Once you started putting in
lots of muscle re-creations...

...and heavy deformers
to move the face around...

...your interaction
for the animator goes down...

...and so my goal was to make an
interactive, pretty much real-time rig...

...that mimicked
what Brad's face would do.

Maybe the one side--

The muscles on his left side
pull harder than the right side...

...or whatever happens to be Brad.

When the project started,
I sort of watched a lot of Brad...

...or re-watched a lot of his films.

And the most recent one that had come out
was Babel or "Babel."

I don't know how people
actually say that anymore...

...but he--

Throughout that film, he had this look
that was kind of brows pinched--

Inner brows pinched
and up and, like, worried.

And, you know, it was just
so many shots of him had this look.

When were looking at
how we were distilling out...

...the different aspects of the face
and saying:

"This is inner brow up,
this is outer brow up...

...this is lip corner pull left,
whatever, blah, blah, blah."

I was like, you know, he was
always doing this in this other film...

...so let's put in a control,
let's get that data in there...

...and just call it "The Brad."

And that was a huge mistake...

...because the very first thing
that people wanted to do was go:

"Well, we gotta turn Brad on."
You know?

And so we had to go back
and take Brad out of all of Brad.

BARBA: So that rig then
allows us to build all of Brad's...

...the way he moves his face,
the way he emotes...

...you know, his expressions.

Even taking a look at some of his timings
and how things move together.

There was talk like,
"Hey, can we CAT scan Brad?"

And they're like,
"Yeah, sure you can. No."

We ended up building a system
that was based off of Brad's face...

...that moved exactly like
Brad's face moves.

That was kind of the directive from the
beginning which was why I almost quit...

...because that's insane,
we can't do that.

This is the only project
I think I've worked on...

...where I seriously considered quitting
many, many times over...

...especially when we're sitting
in a conference room with David Fincher...

...and, you know, the people that are more
important at the company than me...

...are promising David things
that I'm going, "Don't promise that.

Like, we have no evidence that supports
that we can do this at all."

I leave zoo, go here, go there.
Wandered most of the time.

You were all alone?

You will see, little man.

Plenty of time you'll be alone.

When you're different like us,
it's gonna be that way.

MALDONADO: There were some scenes
where I was thinking:

"Oh, my God,
how are we gonna do this?"

And David Fincher
would come up and ask:

"So, what do you think?
Is it gonna work?"

And my resp-- You know, my reply was,
"Yes, we'll have to make it work."

But deep inside, there was always
that moment where you're like:

"Is this really gonna work?
How painful is this gonna be?"

I knew that we were gonna get there
or a lot of people were gonna die trying.

BARBA: Our software program, ironically,
it's called TRACK was--

Got an Academy Award for technical
achievement many, many years ago.

So it's pretty robust,
but we had to take it to the next level...

...because we're--

You know, it was never designed to track
a head directly onto someone else's spine.

MAN: You make the call.
-We are going to play shot one.

Very decisive. I'm impressed.

FINCHER: As soon as these
witness cams are set, we can do this.

-And the sun is moving.
-The sun's moving.

Did you know the sun is moving?

I can't believe his brain.

FINCHER: The right distance?
-There.

-It's too late.
-Break it up.

-You ready?
-We're ready.

Okay, here we go.

MALDONADO:
We used high-definition video cameras...

...to facilitate the tracking...

...and having
the separate angle of view...

...after tracking the main camera...

...we were now able to triangulate
the performer in this case...

...and really get a good sense
of where he's at in 3-D space.

That's the big advantage
from prior ways of doing it.

In the old ways, we would
just track a single camera view.

It's the tracking and the animation that, you
know, if it's off and the head's moving...

-...different than--
-You're always gonna be fighting it.

MALDONADO: And in most cases
we would shoot the live plate...

...you would do another second pass,
a clean plate...

...and combine those two together.

CROSHAW: Our department,
it comes in the early stages...

...and Sarahjane
and her roto team go in...

-...and start rotoing the plates.
LAMBERT: Chopping off heads.

Yeah, so they start chopping off heads
and rotoing around the collar line.

I have some form of disease.

Well, I was born
with some form of disease.

LITT: The tracking team recorded
the position of every single light...

...and lighting instrument that they could
on the set, the exact physical locations.

Our lighting artist would get
these high-dynamic-range textures...

...based on photographs
with blockers and balance cards...

...and big lights and scrims,
and that kind of thing.

And you could just open your scene up
and it looks exactly like it did on set.

The bust photographs very realistically...

...so what we were able to do
is take the bust...

...and place it into what's called
the light stage.

And basically, you photograph it
from every single angle, 360 degrees.

So what we do
is we take all of this footage...

...and we use that
to calibrate our shaders.

Granted it wasn't Brad Pitt, you know,
we knew that this thing was synthetic...

...but it was a fantastic starting point.

MAN: I mean,
it's like the front three-quarter size.

I write a little program called the shader
and the biggest challenge for this project...

...was believable photorealistic skin.

To achieve that we had to, like, study
how light comes in inside of the flesh...

...and then, like, the light bounces around
then it comes out.

And then, like,
there are actually multiple layers.

And this is one of the layers
and it's actually called "dermis."

And this is where all the blood flows...

...and so that's why
it all gets tinted to red.

And that's how we get
the reddish color on the skin.

It's a phenomenon
that everyone is sort of familiar with...

...by placing a flashlight
up against their hand...

...and seeing the red glow
through their skin.

BARBA: It's incredibly difficult
to get everything working exactly right...

...because of the different thicknesses
and thinnesses of the skin.

Where there's bone, where there's
not bone, where there's cartilage...

...where there's more veins
or less veins...

...backlit, high sunlight, the way it interacts
with different colors of light.

It's a tremendous challenge
to get it to be just right.

PREEG: We never did Benjamin's body
below around the bust line.

We were just interested
in a connection point near the sternum...

...and then the head replacement.

In fact, in shots like in the bathroom
where you see no collar...

...or anything that can hide
that transition point...

...we hid the transition point back
sort of underneath the chin...

...and tried to keep as much of the neck
from the live actor as possible.

Meanwhile, the hair team--

-Yes, the hair as well.
-Is busy also taking the track--

LAMBERT: Changing styles all the time.
-Yeah, changing style.

I think they were originally told
there was gonna be three styles...

...and they ended up with 28.

LAMBERT: They were the unsung heroes.
-Something like that.

LAMBERT:
If there was one thing...

...which David was tweaking consistently,
it was the hair.

My goal wasn't necessarily to get the face
moving a hundred percent correct...

...because there is really no such thing.

But my goal was to make it move believably
enough that people focus on the eyes.

You have to get the eyes right.

When you have dialogues with people,
when you are watching people in films...

...you're looking at their eyes,
especially if they're talking or thinking...

...or something like that.

And as soon as you lose connection
with the eyes...

...and you start looking
at the rest of the face...

...it will look weird,
because people actually kind of look weird.

If you watch someone's mouth
as they're talking...

...it doesn't look like
you may think it should look.

You're not seeing
the phonemes pronounced exactly...

...you're not seeing
"Ooh's" and "Ee's" and "Ah's"...

...and it looks like sort of a Muppet mouth,
like, flapping around.

And so once you lose the eyes,
someone could go look at the mouth...

...and even if the mouth looks
completely believable really...

...they won't think it does
because it moves like it really does.

So the hard part is really keeping
the audience engaged in his eyes.

LlTT: One of our artists became
sort of the resident eye expert.

He would have, like,
three monitors on his desk.

He'd have Brad Pitt's eyes
on one monitor...

...and he'd have these in-development
CG eyes on another monitor...

...and then on his third monitor,
he had video footage he shot of himself...

...looking in every direction.

And he shot, probably,
hours of this footage.

You'd walk by his desk and there's
just all these eyes staring at you.

PREEG: It's pretty amazing how good
humans are at reading other humans...

...and knowing what
they may be feeling or thinking...

...based on very minute changes
in their face.

I mean, you can take, you know,
an eyelid that is just slightly too wide...

...and narrow it slightly and he goes from,
you know, crazed killer to, you know...

...thoughtful. Or the tiniest smirk--

I mean, we're talking about millimeters
of motion in the corner of a lip...

...and that was a real challenge.

BARBA:
This has been the holy grail of CG.

And it's kind of, well, what do you do
after you do the holy grail?

And, you know, it will be hard.

You can't just go
and do another simple show...

...because where's the challenge?
And, you know, I like--

I just really like to be challenged,
that's the only reason to do this.

You know, I tell my artists,
at the end of the day...

...the money gets spent
that time goes by...

...but you need to have something
to look back on and say you're proud of...

...and that's just the artist in me talking.

Well, I hope people leave the theater
wondering, like:

"Wow, where did they get that guy
that looks like Brad old?

I mean, that's a great makeup job.
It's like, how did they do that?"

And they don't really even think
about that till after they've left the film.

I hope they just enjoy the film
that David has crafted.

PREEG: Unfortunately for me,
I hope people go see the film...

...and have no idea
that I had ever been there.

And if that happens, I think this film
is gonna be hugely successful...

...so I hope we didn't hurt it
for David and Brad...

...and the rest of the crew
by making something...

...that pulls people out of the film
because it is pretty amazing.

MIKE:
How is it when you showed up...

...you were no bigger than a bollard
with one foot in the grave?

Now, either I drink a hell of a lot more
than I think I do...

...or you sprouted.

What's your secret?

Well, captain...

...you do drink a lot.

STRAUSE: Lola's a company
that I came up with the idea for...

...about four or five years ago.

It was something we really wanted to do...

...explore where we could take
digital, um, de-aging of talent.

Essentially, we're doing digital face-lifts.

We actually call it DCE,
digital cosmetic enhancements.

And it's just, uh-- You know, if you're
shooting late, you have some eye bags.

You know, you're a little tired. I mean,
not everyone looks perfect every day.

Even Hollywood royalty has off days.
So, you know, using these techniques...

...we can make everyone
look a little bit better.

With Benjamin Button,
it's been great working on this project...

...because we can actually
tell people what we're doing.

Most of the work we do is so secretive
that we can't tell anyone.

In this case we can because, you know...

...we're taking Brad Pitt and making him
look 20 years younger as a story point.

You are so much younger.

Only on the outside.

Originally we got involved in Benjamin
Button when they were trying to find...

...a two-and-a-half-D solution
to make Brad look younger.

By two-and-a-half-D, I mean that we'll do
3-D tracking, we'll do planar tracking.

You know, if a head is turning,
we'll track the head in 3-D space...

...but then we'll typically put 2-D patches
back on top of it in 3-D space.

Like a Band-Aid, uh, which is--
Like a two-dimensional object...

...versus, you know,
something that has depth.

We do have a scan of Brad,
but we typically didn't use that.

Most of the time we just do tracking
based off the features of his face.

We use Abuju, which is a 3-D program.
It literally creates like a cloud of points.

And as he's rotating,
the cloud of points will rotate with him.

And then that's what generates
the 3-D information.

We're not having to create CG masks
that we replace actors with.

We're using all the subtlety
and performance of the actor.

We're just using the compositing tools
to turn back the clock 20 years...

...and remove the artifacts of the lighting
and, you know, wrinkles...

...and adjust the tissue densities and
those kind of changes that happen.

As a person ages,
gravity pulls your face down.

So the first thing we'll do,
we'll take mesh warpers...

...and push the face back up
where it used to be.

Then we'll go back
and kind of remap the lighting.

So if there's harsh shadows,
we'll remove the shadows.

We'll fill in the shadows with lightness.

Where you start losing density in your--
Around your temples.

You lose fat in your cheeks. So we'll
replace fat and smooth out shadows...

...is essentially what we're doing.

We do have a plastic surgeon,
Dr. Andrew Frankel.

He's one of the top,
you know, Beverly Hills surgeons.

He's been invaluable. Because the surgeon
will come in, and he'll say specifically:

"The nostril needs to
move over one-half millimeter."

He's very, very specific and scientific
about his approach to de-aging.

So he's been a great colleague
in this whole process.

STRAUSE: There were shots of
Cate Blanchett practicing.

We need to do digital face replacements
of her...

...putting her face onto
a stand-in dancer's body.

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

WILLIAMS: As we're refining our technique,
it's allowing us to go further.

You know, a few years ago,
we could probably get...

...maybe eight, 10 years comfortably.

And now using this two-and-a-half-D
process, we can get 20 years comfortably.

So if you wanted to make Brad
look like he was 14 or 10...

...we wouldn't be able to do it.

As long as your window is from about
20 years younger to about 10 years older...

...we can do it with
the two-and-a-half-D process.

MAN: Anybody wanna make $2
for a day's work around here?

I do.

You got your sea legs about you,
old man?

Mm-hm.

I think.

Well, that's good enough for me.

Get your ass on board.
We'll sure as hell find out.

I got a phone call from David,
and I came over and met with him.

And that was basically
to cover the 10 years of Benjamin at sea...

...on the tugboat, on the Chelsea.

Scrape off all this bird shit!

Right away, sir.

MAN 1:
Here it comes.

BOY: Whoa!
MAN 2: Whoo!

WOMAN:
That is so cool.

MAN 3:
That should go a little faster.

SCHUGARDT: Probably the most complicated
part is that when they're photographed...

...they're actually photographed on a stage
that's completely independent...

...from what the real lighting would be
out on the Mississippi.

Often on other shows,
it's been really difficult...

...because the lighting is completely wrong
or there are shadows in the wrong spot.

It doesn't make sense.

If you expect to see a sun
from one direction...

...and you're getting a double shadow,
which doesn't make sense...

...it's challenging
to make those things work.

But this show worked out really well.

Our water was based
on Tessendorf's code.

There's a standard of CG water
that's out there...

...and we used that code as our basis.

Jerry Tessendorf came up
with the first algorithm...

...that simulated the closest so far
to what real ocean water does.

Today they have simulations that simulate
what water does in a small glass.

Well, when you've got an ocean...

...it's too many calculations to go on
for something that large.

Basically, the waves
are not just moving up and down...

...but they actually move
in a sort of cyclical motion.

And, you know, that code accounts for it.

Everything beyond the boat...

...and often the boat itself,
from longer shots, was actually CG.

So whenever you see the characters
up close, that's all live action...

...and anything behind them,
anything beyond the boat, is all CG.

And as Benjamin grows younger,
we move into 1934...

...and then we go up
to the Eastern Seaboard...

...towards New York.

McGUINNESS: And we needed to look
at what would be surrounding the Chelsea...

...in New York Harbor,
what would populate the harbor.

How much would you see
of the Statue of Liberty...

...versus the Manhattan skyline?

-Cut it. Okay.
MAN: Cut.

WOMAN: Cut.
-Cut.

SCHUGARDT: We had to deal with
the bodies floating in the water.

And they all match with the surface...

...so that's a simulation based
on the original ocean-surface simulation.

McGUlNNESS:
The attack in the Pacific, obviously...

...was the most complicated sequence
in the film.

Fellas!

Sub!

McGUINNESS:
I mean, we didn't have a U-boat...

...so we had to, obviously,
build a CG U-boat.

The water was very much CG-driven
in that sequence.

We sure as hell
can't outrun them fuckers.

SCHUGARDT: There were a lot of aspects
to that sequence that were challenging...

...even down to where the tracer fire
was actually traveling.

We had to keep that continuous.

So when the German sub was firing
across the boat, we spent a lot of time...

...to make sure the continuity worked...

...and the shots were still exciting,
you know...

...that there was a lot of action
going on...

...and, you know,
it looked really, really dangerous.

MAN 1: Cut it. Cut, cut.
MAN 2: Cut.

That last one was the best one
as far as matching all around, guys.

So burn that into your brain. Thank you.

McGUINNESS:
Once we actually hit the U-boat...

...the actual dynamics of the way those
two boats connected and hit each other...

...was very difficult to pull off
using the gimbal tug...

...so we went to the drawing board
and we CG-built the tug.

We took the assets of the gimbal
and we built upon that...

...and we built a much more dynamic feel
for the collision.

SCHUGARDT:
The ocean water was challenging...

...but once we, you know,
felt pretty comfortable with that...

...it moved on to the next challenge...

...which was the giant splashes
from the sub exploding.

McGUINNESS: We had to kind of create that
explosion and that hugeness underwater...

...and really make sure the viewer
understood that we were underwater...

...and what would it look like
if a tug hit a sub?

It's got hundreds of effects,
and it's the perfect type of effects.

The effects I love is that--
They're the ones you never see.

And if you've done your job well...

...nobody ever knows
there was an effect there.

So it's kind of this....

You know, you wanna show your work,
but then, if they don't see it, then perfect.

BARRON:
I think this film is just so rich...

...and it's complex
in the way it tells a story.

It tells it through many different eras.

And of course, the visual effects
need to make that all plausible.

We can't go find that perfect location
from the '20s anymore...

...because there's, you know,
apartment complexes or parking garages...

...or everything that's not gonna say
classic, old-style location.

They just don't exist anymore.
It's too modern.

So we go back and we learn
about the history of something...

...and what it should look like.

What are the elements that aren't there...

...that really communicate
the idea of being in the past...

...and then put those into the shots.

What we do comes out of
what was traditionally called matte painting.

And now we've taken it further,
in the computer-graphics age...

...to create simulations of environments...

...because now we're moving dimensionally
through these scenes.

And in order to do that...

...you need to mimic all the phenomena
that you would expect to see...

...if you were really photographing
that scene.

One is a aerial scene of Paris,
and this is a complete simulation.

There's no live action in it.
It's not anything that was photographed.

Again, the idea of,
"Well, why don't you just go to Paris...

...and shoot something from a helicopter
and, you know, change it?"

The reason why is that by the time
you get some piece of film that works...

...considering you got the right lighting,
the right time of day, and the nice clouds...

...which you probably didn't
if you went there to shoot it...

...those are all things we can put in.

And we also need to make it look correct
to the right time period.

We have to take out any of the modern
buildings that wouldn't be there.

So it is a simulation of reality,
and whether the shot is successful or not...

...depends on how well
we're able to mimic that reality...

...and make it a credible illusion.

So we study the phenomena
that you would expect to see...

...in a scene like that or a shot like that.

We wanna see highlights
off of windows...

...the glints of the sun
reflecting off of the windows of the cars...

...as they drive down streets.

We have to have traffic, people,
steam coming off of buildings...

...moving clouds, flags, you know.

All the things that you would expect to see
need to be there...

...as objects and phenomena
that's telling you it's real.

The exterior of the train-station set
was shot on a location in New Orleans...

...of the courthouse building.

[CHATTERING]

MAN 1:
Ten cars, three horse and carriage.

Fifty-foot Techno. Fifty-foot Technocrane.

Start leaving all of the doors.

It could be in here, it could be up there,
it could be up in here.

-We'll have control of the street, right?
MAN 2: Yeah, this street, we own.

So somewhere in here, a crane shot,
you see, or a platform.

MAN 3: Okay.
-You know, up on a parallel.

See, the sunrise is over there,
so we wanted to do this kind of first thing.

First thing, okay.

MAN 2:
So it's either-or?

And I want clouds just like that
but a little deeper.

Going left to right or right to left?

-Right to left.
MAN 2: Okay.

BARRON: The courthouse building
architecture wanted to be changed...

...to look like a train station...

...as well as, we had to establish it
in a period of time before EPA...

...and, you know,
proper emissions standards.

So it had to have smoke and grime...

...and, um, it needed to look really industrial
and uncomfortable.

We added all these additional elements
to what was shot in New Orleans:

smoke, haze.

Then we went way over the top
and Dave said:

"Okay, you can back off a little bit.
It doesn't have to be that horrible."

Which was great, because you literally
couldn't see five feet in front of you.

The train-station-interior sequence...

...was creating this old-style-interior,
union-type train station...

...which was built as a virtual set...

...meaning that they built some columns
and a wall, some scaffolding...

...and then blue screens
were surrounding the set.

So David was free to shoot in any angle,
as if it was a real place...

...and then it's our job
to track in the rest of our world...

...our computer-generated world,
to fit the real world that he photographed...

...and make that transition from real world
to virtual world seamless.

We, of course, also added people to it
because we needed to fill out the crowds...

...and that was fun because we shot
our own employees on blue screen...

...and added them into the scenes.

So we had the people
who worked on the shot...

...the animators, the compositors...

...in their own train-station shot,
so that's kind of fun.

It's sort of a way we can author the shot
and make it our own.

Another thing that's really great
about that sequence...

...is that that starts from the Armistice Day
to the '20s...

...and we cut back to it
during different periods of time...

...where we see it in the '40s and the '60s
and then eventually present day.

So we get to show that train station
remodeled...

...and what choices were made
from a design standpoint...

...of what those different shots look like
was a lot of fun to figure out.

One of the set pieces that we're creating
is the clock.

It's in so many sequences
that keeping it as a computer graphic...

...allows you, of course,
to decide what time you want it to be.

And it ends up being extremely important
as you're cutting a sequence together...

...and you have people standing
in front of the clock...

...to decide that in a more comfortable,
postproduction environment...

...about where the hands are
and where the seconds are...

...and just so that you maximize every shot
of the clock.

If you had this on the set,
you'd always be backing it up...

...and it would be in the wrong place.

You'd probably have to futz with it
in postproduction anyway.

So it was just very easy to create this clock
and then control it...

...and decide what it should read
on a shot-by-shot basis.

It has a glass front...

...and that glass then, of course,
will reflect the interior of the train station.

Also, since a blind clockmaker
made the clock, we also thought about:

"Well, what kind of clock
would this blind clockmaker make?"

And David had the idea
of wanting the numbers to be raised...

...sort of like Braille.

And so we made a little gold rim
around it...

...so that as the sweep-second hand
would go across...

...it would interrupt a light reflection
off of the numbers.

You know, clearly, this is very subtle.
I mean, I don't expect the audience to go:

"Oh, you know,
it's raised because he's blind."

But those are the details
that you think about...

...to give you a direction
on how to do your work.

We had some stock fireworks...

...from a previous David Fincher movie,
Zodiac, actually...

...and we used the same fireworks
in this whole sequence.

There were crowds shot on location
at night in New Orleans.

We had to add more people.

There are a hundred extras
that go back a block.

We needed to take Block Number 2, 3, 4,
all off into the distance.

We have people up on balconies
that weren't there...

...so those were shot
as separate elements.

MAN:
Action.

[PEOPLE CHEERING AND WHOOPIG]

BARRON:
Fortunately, it was near the 4th of July...

...so we were able to take advantage
of buying sparklers...

...that we used to good effect.

We put that into the distance
over and over again.

Another full CG shot that we're doing
is of the Flatiron Building.

It's an establishing shot of New York.
It's a beautiful building.

Of course,
it's built as a triangle on a corner...

...and it allowed us
to create that as a period shot...

...with smoke elements
coming off all the buildings.

We have to put traffic
running down the streets.

And even though we're way far away,
as sort of a God's-eye view of this...

...you would still see people.

So we have very small people
walking on the streets...

...crossing the street, dodging the traffic,
and then signage.

We did research
to see what kind of advertisements...

...would be in the environment.

Anything that would be appropriate
for the time period on billboards...

...creating the sort of environment
that would be New York.

As Benjamin Button goes around the world
in different time periods...

...he actually goes also into Russia...

...during his sequence
with the Merchant Marines.

And so we created a Murmansk harbor
and had the crew walking up.

And we added the background
with the ships...

...and the frozen ice
and the snow on the buildings.

And, you know, again...

...that was like learning
about what Murmansk would look like.

There was this unusual crane
that they have there...

...that we put into the shot
to make it look like that location.

For the Majestic Theater in New York,
we wanted to see down a street...

...and see everything that you would see
on Broadway.

So we're gonna have animation
of lights...

...for different theater marquees
going off into the distance.

The sense
that you're in that New York canyon...

...of being able to look off to infinity...

...in sort of a man-made canyon of buildings
going back to the horizon.

We also put in the Chrysler Building...

...and then the marquee of the theater
has to be created.

There is a Majestic Theater
in New York still today...

...and it doesn't have that beautiful sign.

That big marquee is gone now...

...so we created it from reference
of how it looked back in the '40s.

How the lights would chase around...

...was all something we're copying
from stock footage...

...that we have as reference
from the actual theater.

Since everything is in the digital realm,
a lot of our work tends to blur...

...into just the production process
of making the movie.

Whereas there'll be something on location
that wasn't quite right...

...that needed to be fixed.

But rather than wait and stop shooting,
they went ahead and shot anyway...

...knowing that we could correct
the problem in postproduction.

It just frees up the production process
so much.

You know,
if the clouds weren't quite right...

...they don't match from shot to shot...

...well, you're not gonna wait
for a cloudy day to continue your sequence.

So we'll go in and we'll strip those out...

...and we'll make it feel more consecutive,
like it was shot all at the same time.

And these little nuances
just make the difference.

It's all part of that process
of telling a story.

It's a more effective way of telling a story
because it all makes sense visually.

[PEOPLE SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY
AND FIREWORKS BOOMING]

That's okay. Can you solo the effects?

[PEOPLE SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY
ON SCREEN]

MAN [ON SCREEN]:
Where are you going?!

Oh, I see, so it's sort of a big crowd.
I hear. So he's--

-Too big?
-Yeah, but this stuff is good.

KLYCE: This has been
probably the most difficult project yet.

Just sort of the restraint
of the soundtrack.

You can hide in sound.

In other words,
if you have bad dialogue...

...or if you have things
that are kind of sloppy...

...from a technical standpoint...

...oftentimes in sound, you can
kind of spackle over it with Bondo...

...and kind of hide the imperfections
in more noise.

On a gritty movie like Se7en...

...it's okay to kind of have this, you know,
grungy, crappy track.

But in this film, it's all about
just the loneliness of the space...

...and nothing to do but just sit there
and hear children down the street...

...and the clip-clop of horses...

...and so all the imperfection
is right up there in front...

...and it has to be just presented
as this period piece.

And so that's been very challenging
for all of us...

...in terms of the dialogue editorial...

...and in terms of the sound
and in the mix.

And it's also a lengthy film.
It's 10 reels long, so it's--

In a way, it feels almost like it's two films,
in terms of workload.

MAN [ON SCREEN]:
Damnable affliction!

So, what about right there?

[BABY CRYlNG ON SCREEN]

When I was writing down the note,
it was....

We kind of played in
the first few words here.

KLYCE: To kind of get warmed up
to the environment...

...and just to start absorbing as much
of the culture...

...of that period in which Benjamin
grew up in New Orleans...

...David kept saying things like,
you know:

"The French Quarter,
it's live and it's bustling.

There's music coming
from all these different windows."

And that's acoustic music, performed...

...and people in different restaurants
or bars or pubs or brothels...

...would all be vying
for the passers-by's ear, you know...

...so there would be this noise
coming at you.

[BAND PLAYING JAZZ MUSIC]

And so Aaron Zeller,
he was working on location, and I thought:

"This guy's from New Orleans.
He knows it like the back of his hand.

We should hire him
to collect background sounds."

So he did, and, you know, he'd go into bars
and just set up these little--

He brought in
these little hidden microphones...

...and put them on his sunglasses
and went and recorded.

A lot these sounds,
we didn't have vintage vehicles...

...these Model Ts and vintage trains...

...and all these sounds of yesteryear
that we no longer can have access to.

[CHATTERING]

[BIRD COOING]

Even just the sound of the swamp...

...or the birds or the crickets or the cicadas
are very unique.

And if you listen in the track, there's that
sort of pulsating, shh, cicada texture...

...that happens often in the summertime.

[BIRD TWITTERING]

So we were lucky
to have fresh new sounds.

And then he comes up-- Stand up.

--and he's up into this, like that...

...and we see her come in
in the background...like that.

MAN 1: Quiet, please.
MAN 2: All set.

-Sound speed-away.
MAN 3: To speeding.

MAN 4:
Playback.

On the day that David's filming,
all the people that are in the background...

...they actually don't say anything.

They're just extras that are mouthing.

MAN 4:
Background.

And action.

MIKE:
Absolutely! Damn right!

So you know what my father says to me?

He says,
"Who the hell do you think you are?"

KLYCE:
And so they have to be replaced.

MIKE:
All right.

So you know what my father says to me?

He says,
"Who the hell do you think you are?"

KLYCE: Then oftentimes,
when their voices are replaced...

...they're replaced with actors
who might be from Los Angeles, you know.

And so there's always a faction
of dedicated New Orleans people...

...that will be listening, going,
"Those aren't real accents."

So we wanted to make sure
they were true.

Same old crap every day.

KLYCE: If you watch the film,
a lot of it takes place in the Nolan House...

...which is a retirement home
with lots of old folks.

So capturing the sound of...

[IN HOARSE VOICE]...old people
talking about stuff, you know, and--

[IN NORMAL VOICE] But with the
right accent, you know, you can't--

Again, you can't hire people to do it as well
as if you could just sneak in someplace...

...and collect all these sounds.

So Aaron went into the **** House
and a couple other retirement homes...

...and poor old people were freaked out...

...because they didn't know
who this guy was.

He's in there and he's, you know,
kind of got these headphones on...

...and he's sitting there, looking there.

If you listen through all the takes,
it's funny because some people go:

"We didn't know who you were, sugar.

We thought you were some stranger
looking to case the joint or something."

And it was just hilarious.

But some of the recordings
that he got were great.

They just-- They're priceless.

WOMAN: Get those big bowls
and chop that up right there.

Chop that up, come on.
And chop up them onions real good.

KLYCE: You'll hear a great clip
where Brad Pitt comes home after the war.

He comes home to see his mom, and he,
of course, has gotten a lot younger...

...and he's sort of wanting to know
if she'll even recognize who he is...

...and he comes back home.

And we had all this space to fill.

At one point, we had nothing, silence.
David was like:

"Can't we put some sound in there?
It's so flat."

And so we had this great clip
that Aaron recorded of this old lady...

[LAUGHS]

...who's trying to, like, get out of her bed,
and she's going:

"I'm ready. I'm ready."

And finally
the African American nurse goes:

"Okay, Miss Alfalina, I'm coming.
I'm coming for you, honey."

And it's just this great thing
that you could never write.

You could never come up with it,
you know?

WOMAN:
I'm ready. I'm ready.

NURSE:
I'm coming.

WOMAN: I'm ready.
NURSE: All right, I'm coming, Miss Alfalina.

A lot of the job was just listening
to these recordings and cherry-picking:

"Oh, that's great. Where--?
We gotta put it in the movie somewhere."

You know, that kind of stuff.

When he stands up, look at his face,
then at his feet.

-Then look back at him like, "What?"
-Okay.

KLYCE: We had a lot working against us,
you know, just in terms of noise...

...and so cleaning up the dialogue
was very difficult.

Now in New Orleans, it's a metropolitan city
with freeways and rumble.

And what David wanted
was just quiet dialogue...

...with just chickens, you know,
in the background, and wind.

And so that was very challenging...

...because our production sound recordist,
Mark Weingarten...

...had a real hard time with these locations
because they were noisy.

I mean, the Nolan House,
you go in the backyard...

...and it's just:

[GRUNTS]

You've got all this dialogue happening,
and so a lot of it--

In fact, one of the first rules, uh,
that David came up with was:

Any time an actor is outside,
they shall be looped.

Which is really hard on many levels,
most notably just performance...

...because the actor gives so much
on the day...

...and then to have them come back in...

...and try and redo it again
is very difficult for them...

...because, you know,
it's hard to come all the way back up...

...to that level of performance.

Well, he got another thing coming,
that's for sure.

God be my witness,
he got another thing coming.

He left us $18 that night you was found.

Eighteen ratty dollars and a--

Good night, baby.

In the film, the dialogue that you hear,
for example, if it is production...

...oftentimes it's not even when
they were actually saying their dialogue.

It's a culmination of many different cuts
within that.

And David's very involved
with every little nuance...

...and finding just the right pitch and tone
for every little word.

So it's a really long, drawn-out process...

...but it's a lot of fun
just to kind of hone in on the characters.

Y'all listen. Y'all listen up here.

We gonna have us a visitor that's gonna
be staying with us for a little while.

My sister had a child,
and she couldn't see right by it, so....

You know what?
Maybe I need to watch this again because--

I gotta look-- I gotta--
I can't look at the paper and look up there.

FINCHER:
Let me hear that one back...

...just for "Dr. Rose says
he ain't got much more time."

Oh, God in heaven.
He looks just like my ex-husband.

Look, he's prematurely old.

Dr. Rose said he ain't got much
more time on this earth.

Well, join the club.

Just the last line,
"Dr. Rose says he ain't got much time."

QUEENIE: Dr. Rose says he ain't
got much more time left on this earth.

Yeah, really feel sorry for him.

Let's pick that up. "Dr. Rose says
he ain't got much more time."

He looks so silly.

BENJAMIN:
Mama.

Mama.

Some days I feel different
than the day before.

KLYCE: Part of the challenge
with Benjamin Button's voice...

...when he's 7 years old
yet he looks like a 75-year-old man...

...was to make him sound,
on one hand, childlike...

...but on another hand, elderly.

Molasses.

I don't think I have worms.

KLYCE: So it was that quandary of,
"How do you do the sound?"

And I thought, "Well, he would sound
kind of like a little baby."

[IN HIGH HOARSE VOICE]
Like, he would sound like this:

"Mama, how much longer
do I have to live?"

Mama? How much longer I got?

[IN NORMAL VOICE] A lot of the
original recording of Brad was like that.

And we had it cut in for a while,
but then when the animation came in...

...l think David realized
it wasn't really quite the right sound...

...and was dissatisfied with that
as a texture.

Mama? How much longer I got?

KLYCE:
David Fincher kept saying:

"Well, let's just pitch it
and run it through the throat program.

And it's gonna come out great,"
you know?

We did due diligence
on the original recordings...

...and tried as best as we could...

...to make technology create this texture
and create this effect...

...but ultimately, what we found out...

...was that it sounded
science fiction-esque.

BENJAMIN [ON RECORDING]:
Molasses.

KLYCE: These tools, you know,
maybe there'll be a new technology...

...which will allow for this...

...but right now, currently,
we don't have technology...

...that doesn't end up sounding
like you're in a sci-fi film.

It would be great
if it was a science-fiction film.

Then you would hear all the digital artifacts,
and it would be acceptable.

BENJAMIN:
"Molasses."

Molasses.

BENJAMIN [IN HIGH VOICE]:
"Molasses."

Molasses.

He had a conversation
with Brad Pitt himself...

...and apparently, Brad said,
"Well, wouldn't it be more gravelly?"

And I think it was Brad
who kind of came up with this sort of--

[IN GRAVELLY VOICE]
"Hey, Mama? How much longer I got?"

[IN GRAVELLY VOICE]
Mama? How much longer I got?

[IN NORMAL VOICE] So then he
kind of did this-- Forced his throat.

Forced this sort of gravelly sound
all the way up here...

...kind of like Froggy from Little Rascals.

Mama? How much longer I got?

KLYCE:
And then we just pitch it slightly.

How old are you?

[IN NORMAL VOICE]
Seven. But I look a lot older.

[IN GRAVELLY VOICE]
Seven. But I look a lot older.

[IN HIGH GRAVELLY VOICE]
Seven. But I look a lot older.

KLYCE: Believe it or not, it's mostly
Brad Pitt just making that sound.

Again, in this setting,
it's so natural and real...

...that we had to ask the actors
to create it.

And you know what?
It was the best thing to do.

Come on over here, you.

Now, this is my granddaughter, Daisy.

KLYCE:
David wanted to have Cate Blanchett...

...revoice her young,
10-year-old version of herself.

And Elle Fanning, who was the actor
who plays the young Daisy...

...was recorded on set,
and we have her voice.

It was fine. It's a little girl's voice.
She sounds great. She's a great actor.

And then David goes:

"Hmm. Let's revoice her."

And, you know, fear, doubt...

...you know, all these things come in.

"Okay, great. Well, what--?
You wanna have another kid do her voice?"

"No, let's have Cate do it."

Oh. You know, "It's never gonna work.
It's not gonna work.

This is a disastrous idea."

And it works.

Did you know turkeys aren't really birds?

Why do you say that?

They're in the pheasant family.
They can't hardly fly.

It's sad, don't you think?
Bird that can't fly?

MAN:
That looks good.

Did you know turkeys aren't really birds?

Why do you say that?

DAISY: They are in the pheasant family,
can't hardly fly.

It's sad, don't you think?
Birds that can't fly?

KLYCE:
She went into a female falsetto...

...and created, you know,
the young-Daisy vocal.

And despite the fact
that she's talking up here...

...you can still get a sense
of her chest cavity.

So Dave Parker, our dialogue mixer...

...spent a lot of time sculpting,
in terms of equalization...

...all the low frequency components
of her voice and getting rid of those...

...and filtering it
so that we just had the high end...

...of her vocal texture.

And then, again, we took that
and pitched it up a few steps.

Probably not that much, though. It's--

Again, with that sound,
it's 95 percent the actor.

-Read it again.
-Oh, read it again.

KLYCE: What's really interesting
is that when you watch the scene...

...where Benjamin Button and Daisy
sneak underneath the table...

...and have their first encounter
and their first conversation...

...that's where
you'll be able to hear, uh...

...Cate's voice over Elle Fanning's face.

And it's actually brilliant now,
in retrospect.

It's taken me a long time
to get to this point.

But if you think about it,
what's interesting is that Brad Pitt...

...he's not even there, right?

Because it's a CG character.

Yet it's his voice.

And Elle Fanning's there,
but she's not really there.

It's this other voice.

Your turn.

I'm younger than I look.

I thought so.

You don't seem like an old person.

Like my grandma.

So there's this weird dichotomy...

...and weird kind of checks-and-balances
thing that happens in the scene.

And it works, in a very peculiar way.

It kind of creates a global oddness
to the track.

Your turn.

Uh...

I'm not as old as I look.

I thought so.

You don't--
You don't seem like an old person.

-Like my grandma.
-I’m not.

KLYCE: Many times when you work
in your pigeonhole...

...of whatever you're doing...

...you think that
that work is what's important.

And here's the film over here,
and here's your contribution to it...

...and this is important.

But really it's not, it's this. And....

And I think that it takes a while
to kind of get to the point...

...where you can appreciate
that this can be thrown away...

...and it's not important.

What's important is David's film
and how to make that speak.

And that's been
the best learning experience for me.

Sometimes you have this striking idea
that comes to you...and you get it.

Sometimes you just have to dig
a bit deeper...

...unfortunately, for many hours.

[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING ON RECORDING]

THOMAS [ON RECORDING]: When I was a
boy, I'd love to wake up before anyone else...

...run down to that lake
and watch the day begin.

[WHISTLING]

It was as if I was the only one alive.

[PIANO PLAYING]

I fell in love the first time I saw her.

Your mother's name
was Caroline Murphy.

Might be nice with two pianos
also doing that, actually.

-Can you hear it? It's--
FINCHER: Yeah.

It's not-- It can't be perfectly in synch.

THOMAS: I'd find excuses
to go down to that kitchen...

...just so I could look at her.

Watch, there's the harp. Just the piano.

THOMAS: And this cab driver,
who dropped off the earlier fare...

...and had stopped
to get the cup of coffee...

...he picked up the lady
who was going shopping--

Saxophone.

DESPLAT:
It's very important that the director...

...who's been living with
the picture for years...

...gives you the right path
so that you don't miss something.

Could it be the connection...

...between one character's reaction
in a scene 10 minutes before...

...than the one you're scoring?

Or 10 minutes after
the one you're scoring?

So it's all this very complex
and delicate puzzle.

DAISY:
Good night, Daisy.

Wasn't there his voice overlapping
with hers at one point?

Never. Ah, you did, huh?

CAROLINE:
Life wasn't all that complicated.

DESPLAT: A great Japanese architect
called Tadao Ando...

...that says that you can't have
a good architecture...

...if it doesn't have
both function and fiction.

And, uh, it's perfect
for a movie soundtrack.

When the movie soundtrack
is just functioning...

...okay, does a good job.

But, so what?

But fiction...

...that's good.

And I'd rather have a score...

...which is only fiction
and maybe has a bad function...

...than the opposite.

So when a movie like Benjamin Button
is getting towards you...

...in a way both these elements
are offered to you...

...you go,
"Oh, that's what I want to do."

That's why I have wanted
to do movie scores.

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

[ORCHESTRA PLAYING MUSIC]

When you write a score for a movie
where you want not too much music...

...you know that
the most important moments...

...are where you start and where you end.

And it's crucial.

[PLAYING MUSIC]

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

Okay.

-Happy, Fincher?
FINCHER: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

DESPLAT: Questions?
FINCHER: No, no, no.

DESPLAT: Requests?
-You were just saying that weren't--

The last one, I was not very happy
with the last one.

-But you have tuning keys?
-Yeah, we have other things.

And if, you know, it's a cue you can fix.

DESPLAT:
There were two dangers:

Making it too much of a fable...

...and something too dark, um,
too heavy...

...or something too schmaltzy, uh...

...playing too much for the emotion
and pushing the emotions.

-Here Andy played really softly.
-Okay.

It's just because it's a solo instrument,
you hear it:

-Yeah.
-lf it was--

Well, is it gonna feel natural
if I duck a little bit for that?

-You can't really duck it. It's okay.
-Okay, okay.

-Okay, play it again?
-Yes.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS]

DESPLAT: You can be simple and emotional.
You don't have to be pushy.

I remember once in Prague...

...hearing a little girl in the street
singing in the morning...

...as the sun was rising,
and she was going to school.

And just a single voice
could give you the chill...

...and almost, you know,
tears to your eyes...

...because of the beauty of it.

The rule that I've chosen,
it was less is more.

I don't think there were many other ways.

Because the music shouldn't show off.

It can shine. It can, uh, be intricate.

It can increase the intimacy
that you have...

...with the characters
or with the situations.

But it shouldn't be overwhelming you.

I think it can be simple
and still very moving.

It can be subdued
and played with almost no vibrato...

...and still be very strong.

I write very simple music...

...which makes all the lines
very transparent.

You hear everything very clearly.

There's many soloists.

You can have sometimes just one trumpet
playing one note...

...in the high register,
bar 56 for two bars.

It hasn't played before,
just play these two bars.

It's difficult because you haven't played
but then you go bam.

And it's got to be on the right note,
on the right dynamic, in tune.

So it's simple, but very difficult to play.

Once more, 29. One, two.

Yeah.

Yes, exactly. Perfect.

Even though the orchestra is big,
you know, from 60- to 90-piece...

...l make it a very chamber-like
kind of feel.

It was a hard job here
to bring, you know...

...this huge amount of energy
that are in Hollywood scores...

...you know, which are always
bombastic and big...

...and everybody is playing loud
and a lot and vibrato and--

No. This has to be different.

DESPLAT: Yeah, but softer, the three of you.
-On the trills, sure.

DESPLAT:
On the high ones, especially.

Yes. Piano, 29.

You-- No vibrato, you play soft,
you put your mutes...

...and you listen to your neighbor,
which is very important.

You listen to each other because you--

Otherwise you can't play.
And that's the key of chamber music.

[ORCHESTRA CHATTERING]

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

Okay.

MAN 1: Bravo, Andrew.
MAN 2: Thank you. Thanks.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS]

When we play the melody,
when you're doubling Randy...

...the celeste and the harp
should be definitely not--

The celeste is doing dee, dum, dum.

Now, here too much dee, dum, dum.

Always the downbeat of the bar.

We should not hear
so much of the downbeat.

So you could just invert the dynamics
so it starts softly on top and end--

DESPLAT: Exactly. Yeah.
-Cool.

-Yeah, you know:
MAN: That stays constant.

[HUMMING]

-Mid-bar, more--
WOMAN: Ba-bum.

-Yeah.
MAN: Yeah.

That's a piano thing, but we can--
I don't know. We can try.

DESPLAT: I like very much to hide
as much as possible...

...when the music is coming in.

I remember the first time
we spoke with David...

...that I mentioned the idea
that the music should be a flow...

...that would come and go,
vanish and come back.

And I like when the music sneaks in,
you don't realize.

And then suddenly, when it blossoms,
it's there, you feel the emotion...

...but you didn't feel that
it was like a tape player playing.

The element of time is very important.

He's going backwards in time...

...and we thought what could be fun
is to have--

Benjamin's theme is first--

The first section is in one direction,
and the second section is reversed.

And, uh, second time:

The opposite.

You can't really tell
because it doesn't show off.

But if you listen to it and write it down,
you just notice that it's the opposite.

[HUMMING]

The music I write generally
has this, uh, childlike thing...

...of simplicity and of spacy sounds and--

You know, I often use harps and pianos
and celeste and Fender pianos...

...and light electric guitars and little bells.

It's part of my instrumentarium.

I like that. I like to use these sounds.

Yeah. What would be next?

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING
OVER SPEAKERS]

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

DESPLAT: You know, some music
they get colored by the picture...

...and some pictures get colored
with the music.

There's an interaction.

It's hard for me because when I've
finished recording, I hate everything.

I'm really disgusted by the score.
I don't want to hear it anymore.

But this morning,
I watched the screening...

...and there were moments where I thought,
"Oh, that's okay. That's not too bad."

When he takes his father to the lake
in his arms...

...which is a very moving scene to me...

...you know, having a man,
who haven't known his father...

...who finally knows who he is...

...and takes him in his arms
to see the sunrise...

...l think that's a beautiful visual
and strong human idea.

BENJAMIN: You can be mad as a mad dog
at the way things went.

You can swear and curse the Fates...

...but when it comes to the end...

...you have to let go.

WAGNER:
Usually you read a script and you say:

"Okay, this is in my mind.
This is how I envision it."

And you're always disappointed.

And it was like, "Oh, my gosh.
This is better than I envisioned it."

At the very beginning,
I think Ceán said...

...that David's really gonna reach
for the rafters on this one.

Which isn't to say
he doesn't on every movie.

But I think this movie has a lot of things
that are incredibly difficult.

I always say it's probably the biggest thing
I'll ever work on.

It felt special, like I said,
from the time I read it, for sure.

And even see--
When we were filming, funny enough too--

It just had a feeling on the set...

...that's kind of hard to put into words...

...but you were like,
"Okay. Something's happening here."

You know, like, "This is something."

Everyone treated this project
as if it was their own child.

The film is Benjamin Button.

You know,
that baby that's on the doorstep.

And that's what makes it so special.

One of the best experiences of my life
as far as moviemaking.

One of the most stressful experiences
in my life of moviemaking, also.

I absolutely loved it. One of the happiest
times I've ever had working on a film.

I got on fantastic with all the guys
on the crew. We had a great fun together.

We all bonded really well.

We all had these terrible scatological
nicknames for each other.

If you're gonna do a film, that's what it
should be about, the people you work with.

I can't say just that.

But it's very important to me as
I get older that-- The company I keep.

And I enjoy so much
spending time with these guys.

I figured it wasn't a bad way
to burn a year or so. Or two.

Thank you very much.

[AUDIENCE CHEERING]

Um, we need to do this quickly,
because you've got a long movie to watch.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

I wanna thank all of you for your hard work
and your beautiful faces...

...and especially your city.

We couldn't have done it without you.

[CHEERING]

The film owes so much to New Orleans
and the people of New Orleans...

...and we cannot thank you enough.

It's, uh--

It's a-- I see it as a love letter.

I think you'll recognize
a few of the places.

And, you know, I hope you enjoy it
as much as I do.

And go to the bathroom now.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

You don't wanna be going in, you know,
in about an hour and 45.

You don't wanna miss a thing. Go now.

Go.

He's not kidding.

All right, thank you.
We hope you enjoy it.

[AUDIENCE CHEERING]

FLEMYNG: I think this picture was
the landmark in my life where I just went:

"After this, it's all a bonus."

It was definitely something...

...that was something to tick off in my life,
which was to make a great film.

You know, it's done.

DONEN: You know, it's the kind of movies
people don't make an awful lot...

...in the studio system right now.

It's not a movie around
a central conflict that is resolved.

It's a movie about a life.

It's about a life lived and
the emotional journey that one takes...

...when you live your life. It's just great.

Everybody sits here, does these things
for every movie and says:

"What a great--"
But I think this is unique.

I mean, I could tell you
other movies I've had...

...which people just didn't give a shit.

And maybe part of that was that the--

There was not the same kind
of feeling about...

...that this is something worth doing that
might last for more than a year, you know?

Or 10 minutes, you know?