The Brad Pitt movie David Fincher loves more than any other: “His most effortless performance”
Some actors find within a given director a sense of comfort that allows them to give their best performances. Throughout the ages of cinema, there have been several frequent collaborations between actors and filmmakers like John Wayne and John Ford, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, and even Brad Pitt and David Fincher.
Sure, Fincher and Pitt have only made three movies together, but even that number goes to show the level of trust they have in one another. The American cinema duo first came together on Fincher’s 1995 crime thriller breakthrough Se7en, with Pitt featuring alongside Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow in a murder mystery narrative exploring the seven deadly sins.
Just a few years later, Pitt was on hand to deliver one of his most iconic performances in Fincher’s 1999 effort Fight Club, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same name and also starring Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. In playing the enigmatic soap salesman Tyler Durden, Pitt further cemented his position as a key Hollywood player, leading to widespread future success.
Then, in 2008, Pitt once again returned to the Fincher fold to appear in his fantasy romantic drama The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, loosely based on the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Pitt plays the titular character, a man who ages backwards, born as an elderly man and dying as a newborn baby.
Cate Blanchett plays Benjamin’s love interest throughout his life, with Fincher also bringing the likes of Tilda Swinton, Elias Koteas, Tarari P. Henson and Julia Ormond into the cast. While it’s easy to focus on Pitt’s early efforts for Fincher as being some of his best movie roles, Fincher himself thinks that the actor’s turn in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, in fact, some of his finest work.
Speaking with Film Comment, Fincher once noted, “I love him so much in this movie. His most effortless performance ever and it’s the most difficult stuff to do.” Indeed, the movie saw Pitt have to act in a way he’d never had to previously in his career, considering the metamorphosis of his character.
The special effects were handled by Digital Domain, with Fincher explaining how the process worked, noting, “The cameras were on him like from the top of his chest to the top of his head, and he had room on the sides to move around. Remember, all of the movement he makes in the facial capture is cancelled out, so the movement doesn’t have to synchronize.”
With that kind of commitment to performance in mind, Pitt was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as a whole did very well at the Oscars that year, winning ‘Best Art Direction’, ‘Best Makeup’ and ‘Best Visual Effects’, amongst several other nominations.
At the core of the film for Fincher, though, was Pitt’s stunning performance. After all, playing a man who ages backwards is an incredibly hard thing to do, but with Pitt in charge, Fincher knew that he had an actor he could trust to bring out all the required emotional nuances of the character while being able to adapt to the physical challenges, too.
Sure, the likes of Fight Club and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood are talked about the most as some of Brad Pitt’s best, but David Fincher simply loves his effort of 2008.
