Eric Roth Interview, Curious Case of Benjamin Button

MoviesOnline sat down with distinguished screenwriter, Eric Roth, to talk about his new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button! Adapted from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald it tells the story of a man who is born in his eighties and ages backwards, unable to stop time. We follow his story, set in New Orleans, from the end of World War I in 1918 into the 21st century.

Directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett with Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, Jason Flemyng, Elias Koteas and Julia Ormond, “Benjamin Button” is a grand tale of a not-so-ordinary man and the people and places he discovers along the way, the loves he finds, the joys of life and the sadness of death, and what lasts beyond time.

Bringing Fitzgerald’s story to life on screen was long perceived as too ambitious, too fantastical to accomplish. The project floated around for 40-some odd years until producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall took it up. For over a decade, the project has likewise intrigued Eric Roth, David Fincher and Brad Pitt. For Roth, the concept became an opportunity to introspectively view the broad canvas of a life through the synthesis of intimate moments experienced every day, through events that may be as large as a world war or as small as a kiss.

“Eric was the ideal person to fully realize the potential of such a large-scale but deeply personal story,” Kennedy notes. “In ‘Forrest Gump,’ he revealed intimate portraits against the backdrop of epic stories, and a gift for richly observed detail.” While Benjamin’s predicament is entirely peculiar, his journey highlights the complex emotions at the core of every life. “It touches on questions we ask ourselves over the course of a lifetime,” says Marshall. “And it’s rare that one movie will elicit so many different, personal points of view.”

Some of the movies Roth has written, or written on, include “Forrest Gump,” for which he won the Oscar and the Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; “The Horse Whisperer” directed by Robert Redford; “The Insider” directed by Michael Mann and starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and a Writers Guild Award and won the Humanitas Award. He also wrote “Ali” directed by Michael Mann and starring Will Smith; co-wrote the 2005 Academy Award-nominated screenplay for “Munich,” directed by Steven Spielberg; and the screenplay for “The Good Shepherd” with Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie and Robert De Niro, directed by De Niro. He is currently working on “Hatfields and McCoys” for Warner Bros., “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” for Warner Bros. and Paramount, and will soon be writing “The Devil in the White City” for Paramount.

Eric Roth has been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for his adaptation of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” He is an amazing writer and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us at the Los Angeles press day for his new film:

MoviesOnline: One of the things I’m sure you’ve heard and probably makes you cringe but I do want to ask you is…

ERIC ROTH: I’ll ask you, why is this like Forrest Gump?

MoviesOnline: Exactly. You know how we struggle to say, it’s like such and such in pitching the movie, and I’m sure that’s frustrating to you, but do you see…

ERIC ROTH: I don’t find it frustrating. It’s obvious. Look, I wrote the other one. It’s become a classic, it’s certainly part of the movie fabric, I guess, and there are certain ingredients that feel similar in this -- the picaresque nature of the piece, the episodic nature, you know, the journey of a man’s life per se. But I like to think at least, and I hope I’m right to some extent, that they’re just very different. This deals with much different subject matter to some extent, and also, not to disparage Forrest Gump, but I feel this is more mature in my writing. Some of it is much more personal because both my parents died while I was writing this, so there were obviously personalized things about love and life and death. Forrest Gump is sort of of a time in a way. I don’t know. They just feel different to me. If other people feel comfortable with Forrest Gump and this reminds them of it, I don’t have a problem with that, but I just think they’ll find this is a different experience.

MoviesOnline: What about adapting an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story? Did you use it more as a blueprint and how closely did you stick to it? Did it give you an appreciation to really have to dig into Fitzgerald’s writing?

ERIC ROTH: Well, it was a little daunting to see his name there because he’s 100 times the writer I could ever be. On the other hand, I did some research on sort of what the story was to him because I didn’t want in any way to mess with his legacy or anything. The best I could tell from talking to his biographers of him is that this was kind of a whimsical piece for him. He just needed some money. It wasn’t something that he took deadly serious. He took the effort to write it up in a magazine. It wasn’t even a short story, it was a magazine article really. A number of other writers had tried to do this in various ways. They had all taken different approaches within the story itself. And so, I felt the freedom to take off with my own imagination. And what was left was still the most important thing, which was his idea through actually Mark Twain. Mark Twain gave him the idea through his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor, about the idea of what it would be like to age backwards. So, that’s the centerpiece of it and then there’s a love story in it so those were the things that I left intact to some extent.

MoviesOnline: Purely from the perspective of craft and structure, when you have such a broad swath as a man’s life to carry through the themes that you’re trying to communicate, how do you identify at what points in the story we need to pass time and at what points in the story we need to come back in and where it connects with the actual history, not just of his life, but of the country and the world?

ERIC ROTH: I guess I was more interested in seeing how much I needed to. That’s one of the reasons, even though it wasn’t a device, that I framed it with her death where I could use that as a place where I could come back and forth in time so I could have the luxury to jump time. So that gave me the permission to do that, but I also was able to tell his front story. I needed to do leaps, otherwise you would never advance anything obviously.

So, I tried to do it in 5 to 7-year blocks in my head and I’m not sure I was accurate with that all the way, but once I got onto him…I think if you look at the movie, it’s like the equivalent of an infant, 4-year-old, and then it starts… maybe we pick him up at 10 which I know is that point where I wanted Daisy to be 4, 5 years younger than him, so I knew he’d meet her then basically, and then he’s 15 or 16 I guess, in that neighborhood, when he has other experiences.

Then he goes off to sea which was sort of my thing for Jack London, like an adventure story where a guy goes off to sea, and then, now dates start taking over. He’s at sea during a period that I knew the war was going to come, it’s during the war, then he comes home, and now you start getting the progression of what the dates are, and how we’re going to jump time.

MoviesOnline: Were there any unusual challenges that you faced as you were adapting it and also, while you were shooting it, were there adjustments that you made during that process?

ERIC ROTH: Oddly, to me, the biggest complication was exactly what you asked me. It was to make sure I kept his emotional age and physical age straight, along with what year it was. I mean, I keep a list on the side as to sort of where we are in time. I didn’t want to confuse things. I’m not very good at math so…. It was like, “Well, if he’s 78, oh wait, that means he’s approximately 10 years old or 9 years old.” And then, we made a structural change that was more about the drama. It wasn’t anything that I needed to rewrite per se, but we sort of just transferred some stuff as to when we were going to reveal something with these postcards toward the end which had more to do with how it would affect Julia Ormond’s character as much as anything else. There wasn’t anything else huge once we set it in New Orleans and all those things. There wasn’t really anything that impacted particularly on the script except for just trying to prove things.

MoviesOnline: Keeping that chronological mix working is I think a real testament to Brad’s skill as an actor, that he was able to give it the mental attitude of somebody who is so different from his physical appearance. What sort of leap of faith was it in the technology to be able to produce on film what you can imagine on paper?

ERIC ROTH: I don’t have to worry about it. I guess that’s one of the first things. If you, as a screenwriter, say “World War I broke out,” that’s going to happen if they like the material, and to how big or small it is, and that might take a sentence or less, just like that. It could obviously take 10 minutes, you know, so page count is funny that way too. I just believed they’d be able to figure out a way to do it. I had no clue on how to do it.

As a matter of fact, at first they were not technologically ready for it when I finished the screenplay. They were even toying with the idea of maybe having 4 or 5 different people play Benjamin – maybe like Redford and then Pitt – in other words, to go down in age. So that’s interesting. I don’t know how it would have worked. We always felt that Kathy Kennedy who certainly knows how to do these things – she did Jurassic Park and everything – we all felt that it would be better if we were able technologically to do it. The gamble is, if it doesn’t work, it will look silly. And David is really a whiz at that. He’s amazing.

Plus, what I find sort of incredible about it, and Spike Jonze said this in an interview [on aging gracefully in Vanity Fair, 11/18/08] about the movie, because he’s created not only the technological aspect of this but he’s created characters and Brad has to act that too. It’s always Brad. It’s Brad in somewhat different incarnations, but he has to play that part and also it has to be believable, so it’s this little creature that has a sense of humor, it has emotions, and it’s a pretty incredible thing that I think David did.

In other words, it’s not like doing [Jurassic Park]. Obviously it’s Herculean-like technology they used in Jurassic Park, but those are creatures that just have to look real as to movements and everything, while this has to have some kind of human emotion, you know, so it’s pretty amazing, I think.

MoviesOnline: Does writing this story make you reflect on your own feelings about aging? You know, they say youth is wasted on the young. Wouldn’t it be great to know what you know when you’re 63?

ERIC ROTH: Yeah, every day I was writing it, yeah. In other words, I found part of it very emotional because of my parents, but also my own stage of life. I have grandchildren now and my own children. That’s always been sort of part of my work I think about. That would be something maybe somewhat similar to Forrest Gump, the passage of time, something I’ve always dealt with in a lot of my movies and the idea of – I don’t know if it’s being alone or loneliness, I’m not sure about that – but it’s always been something that seems to be part of my work too.

I remember Tom Hanks said, “Gee, your movies are always about loneliness.” And I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think the movie is necessarily about loneliness. It’s more about what comforts you is what I like about this. In other words, that’s why you get these things at some point about the peacefulness of thinking about the people you love that are asleep in a hotel in the middle of the night. And then, you know, there’s the idea of going back in time. You didn’t really ask me if I wanted to.

MoviesOnline: Do you want to?

ERIC ROTH: No, I don’t. I think I’d probably like to undo some mistakes I might have made but, on the other hand, I think you’d probably make other ones so you’d end up…and probably you’d also get some good benefits to things that you might not get. So, in other words, it’s like I say, I happened to be divorced from one woman, I married another woman that I love dearly, I love the first wife dearly, but I wouldn’t have had my children that I have with my second wife, you know, so I don’t know. That’s how life goes, right?

MoviesOnline: It’s a journey.

ERIC ROTH: It’s a journey, exactly. And that’s why I did that what if kind of thing with the coat and all. But the idea is it’s just an accident where you run into things. I don’t know.

MoviesOnline: David is known for being incredibly respectful of all craftsmen, from the visual effects all the way down to the writing, but he’s also very meticulous and very demanding from everybody involved. Can you talk a little bit about what the process was like working with him and what he asked of you and what he just let you do?

ERIC ROTH: I think we basically hit it off right away. There’s always the great thing with a director who wants to talk to you seriously about something, not just to have a cup of coffee, and they’re seriously creative about it, that in other words now we can embark, and the process is great with good directors. They ask the right questions. They want to have them answered so they can understand things potentially better than you did when you wrote it. “Why did you do it this way? Can we do it this way?” There’s always good give and take. And then the next question about David always is – because he’s sort of known as a bad boy and very edgy – why this material per se?

I always answer that... I always tell one story about how John Lennon, the Beatle, was going to meet Frank Zappa, who was kind of an outrageous musician, a great musician at the time, and one of his famous albums was “Frank Zappa Sitting on a Toilet” and John Lennon said, “This is pretty ridiculous. What kind of guy is this I’m about to meet?” He had not fear of him, but he [thought] this guy must be out of his mind. Of course, he met him and he found him creative and he puts his pants on one leg at a time, has children and parents.

It’s the same thing with David. In other words, not every movie is about heads in boxes. And that’s the same thing, he had passed away at some point in his life that affected him. He has a child and he’s interested in the same sort of things. He’s also an incredibly creative man and, I find this about all the directors, most all of the directors I’ve worked with have a great curiosity about all sorts of different things. Most of them don’t want to do just the same subject matter. They get bored with it.

MoviesOnline: I think any time you’re dealing with magical realism, there is always that choice between how much do we acknowledge the strangeness of what’s going on.  In the movie, it’s actually wonderful the way very few people do that. Some of them comment on it a little bit, but it’s not a focus.

ERIC ROTH: It’s been amazing. From the first test screening that we had at a focus group, not one person mentioned Brad Pitt. What they mentioned was Benjamin Button. So I said, “Well, that’s worked.” (laughs) In other words, it felt seamless to them that they were now just like in a character, so the technology didn’t get in the way. I mean, some people might start studying it where they start getting themselves out of the movie. If you want to do that, I guess you can do that with anything, you know. You can watch Batman or something, you know.

MoviesOnline: Well I’m talking about in terms of the characters themselves. Very few of them actually acknowledge how strange this is.

ERIC ROTH: Oh, you’re talking about just the idea of why don’t they take him to a doctor?

MoviesOnline: Yes. How did you make the decision as to the level at which these characters would acknowledge or not acknowledge how indeed strange the circumstances are?

ERIC ROTH: I thought actually if we did what I just said, I actually wrote a scene. It was later on when he has a child. It was before they had the child, that he would go to a doctor to find out what the child potentially could have. And, I don’t know, we just felt that by that juncture, if you haven’t accepted this as a – I don’t like to call it a fable because with fables God comes in and solves it – but if you don’t have a belief that this is sort of not true, you know, that this is a fiction, then you’ve separated yourself from the movie and you probably won’t go with it I don’t think.

A lot of the great movies, like “E.T.,” whatever it is, in other words, you’ll accept that and then if you get involved like in a good novel or something, it becomes something that you can really take the journey with as you said. Then I don’t think it’s necessary to have the traditional kind of expository explanation that you would get probably on a TV show or something. Once I said that’s the rule, they go right up to it but they don’t go, “Oh, you really are different!” But everybody seems to accept that. They go with that.

MoviesOnline: It’s been awhile since I’ve read the original story but I do remember a couple of changes. He’s born as an adult I think.

ERIC ROTH: He is, completely.

MoviesOnline: But I think the clock was entirely your invention?

ERIC ROTH: Yeah, it was.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about that a little bit? I think that magical realism idea is really interesting.

ERIC ROTH: I think it was probably because I was afraid the audience wouldn’t get into it right away. In other words, you have to make a sort of leap of faith. I thought at least maybe if I provide this kind of metaphor, this can be kind of an interesting way of getting into it. She’s on morphine and she’s dying, so it takes you into some sort of magical [realm]. In other words, it could be true, it may not be true. So at least you just accept it as someone’s telling you a story. It may be equally as true or less true than the story of the clock going backwards which I just thought was a nice piece.

I was going to use it but we didn’t use it as much in the movie because we cut some things out. I was going to use it as sort of bookmarks. In other words, we were going to jump. We’d see the clock and someone would say whatever year [it was]. And then, we found we didn’t really need to because you were following this story and didn’t need to be reminded of what leap you were making. And then it became propinquity. In other words, we could use this horrible but great metaphor with the water flooding in at the end with the clock which is pretty great.

MoviesOnline: What’s the significance of the hummingbird that you see at sea and later at the window in the end?

ERIC ROTH: Well it came obviously from that tattoo of his. You know, that’s pure magical realism like in a Latin novel. I can’t give you any other explanation for it. There’s nothing. The only thing I would say is my window looks out on a tree and there’s a hummingbird that’s there all the time, so I’m sure it just got into my subconscious and I guess I used it. Why not? It’s sort of a nice idea. I like the idea of the infinity of the wings that I talk about.

MoviesOnline: One of the things that we’ve been reading about certainly in the last couple of weeks is how there’s going to be a shrinkage in the number of films produced and the amount of money that’s able to be spent on films, how do you think that’s going to affect not necessarily the craft of writing but the films that you might be able to get made?

ERIC ROTH: I think you have to adapt to some extent. I think they’re willing. Unfortunately, what it hurts is what I would say is the more middle range for studio movies. Independents will have their own way of getting things done. For studio movies. you’re already starting to feel it. If you want to write a love story or maybe a more political piece, something that’s in let’s say the $50 to $75-$80 million range which they’d be more willing to make just because stars are interested or it’s very interesting material, they’re way more scrupulous with that now. It’s just harder.

I don’t think that they mind if you want to write a $250 million science fiction thing. That’s what it would cost them because then they see a franchise and an opportunity to have a big, huge event, but the middle ground has kind of gone so that a couple probably two or three of my movies would have never been made and there’s a whole world of that. But everything changes. Someone will make a movie like that that will work and all of a sudden…

To me, this movie wasn’t cheap, obviously. It was more than that. But this kind of movie I really hope people go see for obviously many reasons. The movie business is kind of interesting because the executives would like to make things that I call sort of “ticket to heaven” movies. In other words, when they get to St. Peter and he says, “What did you make?,” they can give him the list of the more commercial things, but they can say, “I also made whatever.” Let’s say, Benjamin Button. I feel that way about it, right? And they would like to keep making these kind of movies, but if they’re not going to be successful and it’s hard to get the audience to come in, they obviously as good business men would be wary of doing it.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” opens in theaters on December 25th.