David Fincher on the set of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

David Fincher can do many things well. He can glide cameras around digitally rendered kitchens like hungry sharks. He can change the weather with the twist of a computer knob. He can navigate tricky projects (a skill he learned the hard way after being kicked off Alien3). And he can make cynical, bloody thrillers that simultaneously delight critics and torture girlfriends. In fact, two of Hollywood’s most subversive movies are his: the rain-and-blood-soaked Seven, and 1999’s anarchic Fight Club.

But Fincher can’t talk about winning awards. Not to save his life. Even the possibility seems to stump him. “I’ve never won any,” the 46-year-old director says sheepishly by phone from Los Angeles, pausing for a long moment. “So awards haven’t been that important to me.” The awkwardness hangs heavy. “It’s the icing, right? Not the cake? Or something.”

Clearly, he’s going to have to work on his acceptance speech. Two days before we spoke, Fincher was recognized by the National Board of Review, often a harbinger of the Oscars, for directing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In his latest film—an arrestingly strange epic to be released Christmas Day—an infant is born with the wrinkled visage of an 80-year-old man. Abandoned and adopted, Benjamin grows younger over the years, saying goodbye to his caregivers, his lovers and his daughter in an inversion of the life cycle. Eventually, he becomes a boy. Fincher, through his miraculous facility with technology, found a way for his leading man, Brad Pitt, to play Benjamin at all ages, via scrupulous digital superimposition. But apart from this flourish, the picture seems like a departure for the filmmaker: a fearsome perfectionist’s attempt to let loose and feel.

“I don’t think he wants to make another movie about a head in a box,” says Benjamin Button screenwriter Eric Roth, referring to one of Seven’s grisly demises. “He may or he may not. Who knows? David’s not immune to any of the things we are: getting older, having kids, the passage of time. Loneliness.”

People sometimes talk about Fincher as if he’s a machine. But after last year’s Zodiac, a magnificently bleak procedural that hid its real subject, obsession, under a maze of gruesome data, an artistic maturation was evident.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett costar.

“I have a script about a celebrity chef I’d like to make,” the director offers sardonically, but he’s being serious. “Obviously, I don’t want to disappear down the rabbit hole of making serial-killer movies the rest of my life. Nor will I avoid any possibilities. It doesn’t seem to be beneficial to a career in the movie business.”

In that commercial sense, Benjamin Button is both Fincher’s biggest risk (the budget is reported at $150 million) and his most conventional effort, bearing the picaresque, slightly gauzy stamp of Roth’s Oscar-wining adaptation of Forrest Gump. Indeed, there are homilies in it, the wisdom of benevolent elders, even a hummingbird flitting around periodically like Gump’s free-floating feather. Suffice it to say, Gump is a dirty word to the vast majority of Seven fans.

Fincher is calm but firm. “I didn’t say to my agent, ‘Find me something that’s quasi-Dickensian and takes place in the South and has a lot of boat work in it,' " he says. “We never looked at the script and thought, Now we’re building up to the big cry. It’s actually the opposite of Gump. We spend so much time making movies about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. But here, you have somebody who’s totally unrelatable, like Benjamin, and you put him into situations that are often mundane. That’s affecting to me.”

Roth, who modernized F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender 1922 short story into an adventure that spans the globe from Russian shipyards to a Parisian ballet studio, has his own take on the Gump issue. “The writing of Button was defined by the passing of my parents,” he explains. (Fincher’s father also died during the film’s long preproduction.) “I felt the need to say something about my relationship to my mother’s life, and her take on mine. There’s so much more maturity in there than when I was writing Gump.”

The influence of family ghosts wasn’t the only way Roth warmed up Fincher’s normally cool tone. He also pushed the director to accommodate Hurricane Katrina into Button’s New Orleans–set framing story: an extended hospital-room confession pitched during the maelstrom itself. It’s a risky inclusion that runs counter to Forrest Gump’s sunny optimism. “When we screened the movie in New Orleans last week, the response was, ‘Thank you for doing that,' " the director recalls. “We weren’t using Katrina to be predatory. It’s a moment that defines the city.”

As with Stanley Kubrick (a control freak to whom Fincher is often compared) and his 1975 Barry Lyndon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button finds the director feeling out other unexpected territories: the deathbed, the dance floor, the lonely road of the wanderer.

The transition is a fascinating one, and if a little Oscar gold should ease the way for America’s most ambitious studio director to get another out-there project greenlit, then he seems prepared to make that step toward the heart. “So be it,” Fincher says, guardedly. “To me, it’s not about the opening weekend. It’s about how you can crawl into somebody’s unconscious and rearrange the furniture and leave them going, ‘Wait a minute—why did that affect me?' " With that, Fincher excuses himself and returns to one of many things he does well: working.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button opens Thu 25. “Under the Sign of Fincher,” a selective retrospective of the director’s work and personal favorites, plays Walter Reade Theater Jan 1–4.

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