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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

FILM · 2008 · USA

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Directed by
David Fincher
Runtime
166 min
Studio
Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, The Kennedy/Marshall Company

30 archived facts 6 topics 1 source Last reviewed Nov 2026

Born under unusual circumstances, Benjamin Button springs into being as an elderly man in a New Orleans nursing home and ages in reverse. Twelve years after his birth, he meets Daisy, a child who flits in and out of his life as she grows up to be a dancer. Though he has all sorts of unusual adventures over the course of his life, it is his relationship with Daisy, and the hope that they will come together at the…

  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — production image

30 Interesting Facts About The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Interesting Facts (19)

  1. #001

    Roy Cleveland Sullivan (1912-1983) holds the Guinness World Record for being struck by lightning seven times. Mr. Daws remembers being hit in his car, just as Sullivan was in 1969: "Did I ever tell you I've been struck by lightning seven times? Once when I was just sitting in my truck, minding my own business."

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  2. #002

    Director Tarsem Singh was brought in to shoot the short montage of Benjamin backpacking through India and Cambodia after David Fincher found out that Tarsem and Brad Pitt were both going to be in Southeast Asia at the same time.

    The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) — Benjamin Button
    The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008): Benjamin ButtonImage: Wikimedia Commons · SpreePiX from Budapest, HU, CC BY 2.0

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  3. #003

    The hotel room numbers match Benjamin's age: 57 in Murmansk, and later 25 when he meets Daisy.

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  4. #004
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    Julia Ormond shot her scenes in the last two weeks of filming. During that stretch, Cate Blanchett spent four hours a day in makeup to play the dying Daisy, and because of the intense heat from the studio lights and blankets, she could only stay in the hospital bed for short periods.

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  5. #005

    In real life, a man really was kept in a monkey house. Ota Benga was taken from the Congo in 1904 and put on display in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo; his teeth had been filed to sharp points, and he shot arrows at onlookers. Recognizing that this was "inhumane," the zoo released him in 1906, and he lived in an orphanage until 1910, when he moved to Virginia. He got a formal education, went to work in a tobacco factory and started planning his return to the Congo, but the outbreak of World War I made that impossible, and he took his own life in 1916.

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  6. #006
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    David Fincher admitted that Brad Pitt didn't keep playing Benjamin in his last scenes as a child and a baby because the effects budget had run out. Fincher argues, though, that switching to different actors from that point on worked well, since Benjamin is essentially a different character by then.

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  7. #007

    The producers worked closely with Levi's, drawing on its Levi's Vintage Clothing collection to get the look of each period in the film right.

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  8. #008

    According to director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth, studio executives insisted on moving F. Scott Fitzgerald's original story, which starts just before the Civil War and ends in the Jazz Age, forward to the 1960s to appeal to Baby Boomers, on the assumption that they would relate more to their own era.

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  9. #009

    In the United States, this was David Fincher's first PG-13-rated film (other countries rate films differently).

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  10. #010

    When Benjamin is reading a novel at "The Chelsea," an illustration from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Winter Dreams" is clearly visible.

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  11. #011

    When the grown-up Daisy meets Benjamin for the second time, she mentions "Kismet," an English word of Turkish origin meaning "predestined fate" or "fortune/destiny, as foretold by Providence." The word also has roots in Hindi and Urdu, where it's pronounced 'Kismat'.

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  12. #012

    Shot in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it was the second Hollywood feature filmed there, after Denzel Washington's Deja Vu (2006).

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  13. #013

    The silver-blue motorcycle Benjamin rides is a 650cc 1956 Triumph T110.

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  14. #014

    Benjamin's sailboat is called Button Up.

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  15. #015

    Of the seven "struck by lightning" stories, six are shown in sepia.

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  16. #016
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    The warning sirens during the Hurricane Katrina sequence are the same ones used in The Time Machine (2002) when the Moon is destroyed.

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  17. #017

    Brad Pitt had already worked with Cate Blanchett in Babel (2006), Julia Ormond in Legends of the Fall (1994) and Tilda Swinton in Burn After Reading (2008). He had also appeared alongside Jason Flemyng in Snatch (2000).

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  18. #018

    The motorcycle Button rides in India is a 350 cc Royal Enfield Bullet, a British-designed bike built under licence in Chennai (Madras), India, since 1955.

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  19. #019

    At one stage of development, it was discussed as a project for Phil Alden Robinson.

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Production Story (5)

  1. #020

    The film was originally going to be set in Baltimore, the city of the short story it's based on. David Fincher and Eric Roth moved it to New Orleans when the studio wanted to shoot there to take advantage of the state's filming rebate.

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  2. #021

    The short story is based on a remark by the author Mark Twain. Twain's famous line was "Life's best part was at the beginning, and the worst part was at the end."

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  3. #022

    Most of the film was shot using Viper Thomson digital cameras. Close-ups and hospital scenes were shot with Sony F-23 cameras because the fan belt inside the Viper cameras created too much noise that interfered with dialogue.

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  4. #023

    The exterior of Benjamin's father's house that is sold is the same house at 547 Esplanade Ave, New Orleans, Louisiana; that is, the exterior of the Gallier House in Cat People (1982).

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  5. #024

    In one scene, Benjamin is reading "Ivanhoe," which is also the name of the Melbourne suburb where Cate Blanchett grew up.

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Behind the Scenes (1)

  1. #025

    The look that visual effects supervisor Eric Barba and special makeup effects artist Greg Cannom created for the child Benjamin resembles the later stages of Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, a rare disease that causes extremely rapid aging. Its best-known screen portrayals are Robin Williams's character in Jack (1996) and Susan Sarandon's character in The Hunger (1983).

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Easter Eggs & References (1)

  1. #026

    In F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story, Daisy was named Hildegarde Moncrief. The change is probably a nod to the heroine of Fitzgerald's best-known work, "The Great Gatsby."

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Deeper Meaning (2)

  1. #027

    The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards, and hurricanes spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern. Both tie into the film's central themes of Benjamin Button living his life in reverse, alongside the clocks and other "backward" motifs.

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  2. #028

    The rights to the story were first bought in the late '70s by Ray Stark, with Jack Nicholson lined up to play Benjamin. They were later acquired by Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall under the Amblin banner, and when Kennedy and Marshall left to set up their own company, they took the rights with them, only starting to develop the film in 1994. David Fincher admitted he never read the short story; he only read Eric Roth's 240-page screenplay, which was brought to his attention by an agent who had once been Stark's assistant. His resolve to make the film became clear after his father died in 2002.

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Career & Awards (2)

  1. #029

    On the day screenwriter Eric Roth heard about his Golden Globe nomination for this film, he also learned that Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme had wiped out his pension fund.

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  2. #030

    The musical Daisy dances in while Benjamin watches is Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "Carousel," specifically the dream ballet choreographed by Agnes de Mille, whom Daisy had talked to Benjamin about in earlier meetings.

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Sources & editorial notes

Reference databases

  • Wikipedia English Wikipedia article
  • IMDb IMDb title page (trivia)

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