Interview: Eric Roth on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Several interviews out this week with screenwriter Eric Roth about his work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, including here, but the one I want to focus on in this post is this interview in Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s the central plot conceit of Benjamin Button per IMDB:
“I was born under unusual circumstances.” And so begins ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ adapted from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who is born in his eighties and ages backwards: a man, like any of us, who is unable to stop time. We follow his story, set in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918 to the 21st century, following his journey that is as unusual as any man’s life can be. Directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett with Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, Jason Flemyng, Elias Koteas and Julia Ormond, Benjamin Button is a grand tale of a not-so-ordinary man and the people and places he discovers along the way, the loves he finds, the joys of life and the sadness of death, and what lasts beyond time.
Zero in on that phrase: “the joys of life and the sadness of death.” As it turns out, Roth had some events in his personal life that brought deeper meaning to the very ideas of life and death. As revealed in the interview:
Q: I was at one of the first screenings where, in the Q&A;, you shared with us you lost your parents when you were writing this, which is a deeply personal thing to share with strangers. Can you talk about how much that affected your writing?
Eric Roth: Completely. Without them having passed away I couldn’t have written this. It gave me insights into me, into them…
Q: Had you already begun writing when you lost them?
ER: My mother was diagnosed with cancer just approximately the same time I started writing [the script] and she died not long afterwards. And then my dad died a couple years after that, but I was still working on it. In other words, it probably made me — unfortunately — a better writer. You have to deal with your feelings while you’re doing things but I think you do that anyway, whether or not there are tragedies. I think good writing comes out of it even if you’re not writing about [the tragedy], per se.
My father died in September, 2003. The next original screenplay I wrote featured a young woman who had terminal cancer. I related to that material with a different level of awareness after that direct experience with a loved one’s death.
Once I asked my writer friend Kurt Brown if he could recommend a poem which had death as a central theme. Kurt replied, “Scott, all poems are about death.”
Can’t we say that about all stories? It’s the both the great truth and the great irony: All life ends in death. Humanity has concocted religions, philosophies, psychologies, superstitions, every sort of rationale possible to enable us to go about our business day-to-day, minute by minute, all the while living with the ever looming presence of our own demise.
Whenever a character dies in a story, the viewer is able to consider their own mortality within the ‘safe’ confines of that story’s narrative.
In the interview, Eric Roth also provides this insight:
Q: Did that lead directly to the scenes between the present-day, hospitalized Daisy and her daughter, Caroline?
ER: One hundred percent, yes. Exactly, as a matter of fact. When [the dialogues] become personal — these were things my parents said to me when they were in hospitals. I remember, I asked my mom, “Are you afraid?” and she said, “I’m curious.” And I think that’s almost the first line of the movie.
“I’m curious.” What a fascinating thing to say when confronting one’s own death. Easy to see where Roth got his writer’s DNA from.