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Hitting the Button: an Interview with Kathleen Kennedy & Frank Marshall

Veteran producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall discuss The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and 35 years in Hollywood

Brad Pitt stars in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

If Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall aren’t the most financially successful producers in Hollywood history, I can’t imagine who is. Much of this comes from their association with Steven Spielberg, for whom they produced such films as Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, E.T., and the Indiana Jones movies. But among the nearly 90 other movies they also helped bring to the screen are the Back to the Future and Jason Bourne series, The Sixth Sense, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Bridges of Madison County, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Their newest, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is a collaboration with director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider). Inspired by an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, the film stars Brad Pitt as a man who lives his life backward. Born in 1918 with the physical ailments of an old man, he grows younger through his life and eventually dies as an infant. From his home in New Orleans, he travels around the world, catching up at the middle point of his life with a woman (Cate Blanchett) with whom he fell in love when she was a girl.

Fincher doesn’t do press junkets like the one for Benjamin Button in Los Angeles, so Kennedy and Marshall are shouldering some of the load about talking about the movie, as well as their own Hollywood history. (As befits a couple who have been together for three decades and married for two, they occasionally finish each other sentences.) I started out by asking them if the length of a movie like this (a hair under two hours and 40 minutes) still poses a problem for distributors:

Frank Marshall: If you have a good movie they want it. If the movies works and it plays, they want people to come see it.

Kathleen Kennedy: We knew it was going to be long before we ever started shooting. The last few movies David has done, have been relatively long. I was really influenced early in my career with David Lean movies, and the epic journey to me was always about two and one half to three hours. So I don’t know why the issue of length has become such an overriding issue, other than that theaters would like to move people in and out as quickly as possible.

Marshall: I remind them of Titanic. That was over three hours long, and they were very happy with that. Sold a lot of popcorn.

AV: What about this story appealed to you?

Kennedy: We came into the process almost 18 years ago, so it’s been a long journey. What was so appealing initially is the idea that a story could be told about a man’s life going forward or backward. It was looking at what were the moments in everybody’s lives that you can relate to, that cumulatively make you what you are. Once Eric Roth came on board, he was uniquely suited to write it because he put together a structure that is episodic but builds to a whole. It’s a difficult screenplay for people to read because it doesn’t follow the lines of what we’re used to. That was part of the struggle over the years to get it made. But everyone responded to it emotionally.

We’d go off and work on other movies and come back and think, gee, why aren’t we making Benjamin Button? David had actually read [an earlier version of] the script 12 years ago, and he had been taken with the central premise as well, and we had no idea. It’s interesting that we were all poking around with this material and trying to figure it out for a long long time.

AV: How much did new advances in special effects have to do with getting it made?

Kennedy: It was really important. The biggest obstacle was how to do this with one actor and not have to have multiple actors playing both Brad and Cate’s parts. [Pitt’s face is digitally molded onto the bodies of shorter actors who play him as a child]. We have that conversation every time we do a major special effects movie: Is there technology there that will help us do this?

Marshall: It really took someone like David, who started his career at Industrial Light and Magic—he invented the process with a couple of off-the–shelf products he got to work together. We said, “Are you sure?” And he said, “Hey, I can do this!”

Kennedy: He didn’t really know…

Marshall: That’s how ILM is. “Oh, sure, we can do that—give us the job!”

AV: You’ve had so many big successes. What’s the “aha” moment when someone brings you a screenplay or a pitch and you know it’s going to work?

Marshall: I think it’s really simple—we like the story. This was an interesting story, a man aging backward. If you ask yourself questions about how a life like that would be led, we wanted to see that movie

Kennedy: I’m always looking for things that have some complexity to the subtext. I know it sounds trite, but we always ask, “What is it about?” And if it’s not really about anything, then we’re probably not going to get very interested. And we also do life-affirming, humanist stories. I don’t see us making—

Marshall: Saw VI.

Kennedy: With this movie, it had to do with why David, unbeknownst to us, was staying interested just as we were staying interested [over the years the project was in development]. At the same time you’re living your life: We got married, had kids, I lost a parent, David lost his dad, Eric lost both his parents. And those kind of life experiences enter into every discussion you’re having. So certainly the aging perspective of that was a big factor in this movie.

AV: Frank, you started your career as a line producer in 1972 on Orson Welles’ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. What did you learn there that still applies to filmmaking today?

Marshall: That was a time I wouldn’t trade anything for, working with Mr. Welles, as we used to call him. Every day was exciting. We would never know what we were going to do. The phone would ring, we’d jump up, he says, “It looks like a good sunrise—let’s shoot!” So we’d rush there and ask, “What are we shooting, Orson?” and he’d say, “I don’t know, let’s just get out there!” It was an adventure everyday.

[Because Welles was working with miniscule budget] he would improvise shots using minimal materials, and they would come out looking great. I thought I was in film school, he was so enthusiastic it was inspiring. And I’ve tried to take that along the way with all the movies that we’ve made. It’s a hard business, so you have to be passionate about the stories you tell.

AV: What has changed about movies in the years you’ve been in the business?

Marshall: I think the story is getting short shrift. Nowadays, it’s all about how big the action scene is or how fantastic the stunts are. And I think that the technique and craft of filmmaking is getting lost. Up and coming filmmakers really need to look back at the masters to learn something about film language. Look at John Ford movies, and Howard Hawks movies, and David Lean movies. Not that you have to make a sweeping epic, but there’s a language in how you go from A to B to C to tell that story—you can’t just wing it all the time.

Kennedy: You don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon complaining about “these days,” and certainly there are wonderful movies out there getting made. The audience is getting used to really fast cutting and lots of special effects. For some stories that works great. But it’s not for everything.

There’s much more of a committee approach in Hollywood today. That’s what’s changed more than anything. The creative process is completely dictated by point of view. [You need] somebody at the helm with a very strong opinion that they’re following through on, and everybody else is in service to that. It’s true that [a movie set] is a benign dictatorship. It’s not a democracy, and it shouldn’t be. Otherwise it loses its focus and becomes more generic.

There’s still an auteur capability [in independent filmmaking], where the director still is in charge. But if you’re relegated to the independent world, you’re never going to get to do a big epic tale [that requires a hefty Hollywood budget]. And that’s what’s frustrating. Because you want Hollywood, and you want audiences to support movies like this, because it diversifies what’s out there.



Watch the movie trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button


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