"Benjamin Button" screenwriter talks about telling a great life story — backward

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," opening in movie theaters Thursday, is about one man's long and eventful life, with a twist: He is born in his 80s, and ages backward. Likewise, the movie project itself has had a long life: Based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it's been bouncing around Hollywood for decades.

"I know [producer] Kathleen Kennedy has been on it for 18 years," said the film's Academy Award-winning screenwriter Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump," "The Insider"), on the phone earlier this month. Before that, the rights were owned for some years by Ray Stark, producer of many Hollywood films including "Funny Girl"and "This Property Is Condemned." Various versions of the screenplay were written; none found their way to the screen until Roth's, for which he began work in 2002, "starting over from the beginning."

Fitzgerald's story, published in the 1922 collection "Tales of the Jazz Age," bears little resemblance to the finished film, other than the overall idea and structure. "The story's pretty great," said Roth, noting that Fitzgerald's biographers have said that the author wrote the story quickly — "maybe in two days" — and saw it as something of a whimsy. "I'm not sure the piece would translate into a completely literal adaptation," he said. "It's somewhat farcical, much more comedic, and at some points even more absurd."

Roth's ideas brought the story's gentle melancholy to the forefront, adding Benjamin Button's African-American foster mother, Queenie, who raises him in the New Orleans boardinghouse for the elderly where she works, as well various other original characters and a railroad-station clock that, hauntingly, only moves backward. His longtime love, named Hildegarde in the story, was renamed Daisy (as a nod to Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby") and transformed into a ballerina who comes of age in 1940s New York. And he added a contemporary framing device: Daisy, now an old woman, is dying in a New Orleans hospital, and tells Benjamin's story to her listening daughter.

"I think it was one of the first thing I did — try to find some kind of framing device for it," said Roth. He also moved the story from Baltimore to the Gulf Coast, because scouts for the film found the original neighborhood "totally modern, with Taco Bells." Realizing it would cost too much to transform the setting, director David Fincher sought out another location and soon sent Roth photos of New Orleans, which was eager to host the production even after Hurricane Katrina's devastation.

"I thought it was sort of magical," said Roth of the city. "A new character is born, you don't have to give any description or any explanation — it's so well known and represents so much of America. It has its own taste and touch and feel, strictly New Orleans."

And Roth brought something personal to the story: At the time he began work on the screenplay, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. "It became a very personal journey for me, writing it alongside her path," he said. "In some sense, I think it made me a better writer. There are lines in there that are exactly what my mother said to me, and some questions I asked her. For instance, early in the movie, [Daisy's daughter] asks her mother, 'Are you afraid?' She says, 'I'm curious what comes next.' That's what my mother said."

Looking back over the years of work it took to bring "Benjamin Button" to the screen, Roth finds a silver lining: If the film had been made years ago, the technology Fincher employs in the film (Brad Pitt, assisted by CGI, plays the character at all stages of his life), wouldn't have existed.

"When I began, there was even still talk of doing it with like four different actors, maybe Robert Redford in his 60s, then going down from there with younger actors, similar types. David is such a technical whiz, but also a wonderful, wise man about character. He was able to envision all of this, he believed he could make it happen."

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com