Synopsis

Born in New Orleans at the end of World War I with the body of an elderly man, Benjamin Button ages backward while everyone around him grows older. Raised in a nursing home, he experiences work, travel, friendship, war, love, and loss. His lifelong connection with Daisy becomes a poignant meditation on time, mortality, and the impossibility of holding on to any moment.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film expands substantially on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story. Fitzgerald's version is set in Baltimore and presents Benjamin's condition more satirically, while the film relocates the story to New Orleans and develops it into an expansive romantic drama.

• The project had been in development since the mid-1980s. Earlier versions were associated with Frank Oz and Martin Short, and later with Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, before the production ultimately took its modern form.

• New Orleans and the surrounding area were chosen partly because of Louisiana's film-production incentives. Principal photography was planned as a lengthy 150-day shoot, with additional work required for the visual-effects sequences.

• Benjamin's changing face was created through a combination of live-action performance, digital head replacement, facial analysis, and body doubles. This allowed the filmmakers to preserve the character's expressions while presenting him at radically different ages.

• Digital Domain and several other effects companies worked on the aging process, digital environments, crowd scenes, and period reconstruction. The film became a major showcase for photorealistic digital human effects.

• The film received 13 Academy Award nominations and won three: Art Direction, Makeup, and Visual Effects.

• The production used a tapeless digital workflow that was also documented by the Academy's Science and Technology Council as a case study in managing digital footage, visual-effects material, and post-production data.