Fincher on New Orleans!

New Orleans is still in a state of recovery.

Let's take a look beyond the glitzy showbiz side of movie making and find out what the filming of the Curious Case of Benjamin Button means to the people of New Orleans. After four months of intensive shooting the movie is set to wrap in the flood ravaged city. The following extracts are from an excellent interview with director David Fincher:

On Brad Pitt:

"There's something amazing about him," Fincher said. "He can say horrible (things) and if he smiles at you, you say, 'Oh, OK.' "I trust him. When he says I've got to do this this way, you go, 'OK.' "

On what Benjamin Button is about:

"I think it's a story about death," he said, "to love somebody enough to be there when they breathe their last breath." Fincher said his father died two years ago at about the same time some of his friends were having their first child. "It's easy to have babies; it's hard to be there when somebody dies," he said.

On why New Orleans was picked as the location:

Fincher said he considered shooting the Victorian-era period piece in Baltimore, where the short story was set, but decided on the Crescent City instead. "We looked at Baltimore," he said. "It lacked a certain warmth. It lacked the sense of history and patina of New Orleans." Fincher praised New Orleans as a location, noting that both rural and urban sets were easily available. To realize the city's "enormous potential," as a movie-making magnet, Fincher said, "you need four or five large, workable sound stages, an influx of cash to make a real workable physical plant." Asked to discuss the complications of filmmaking in the post-Katrina environment, Fincher minimized the hardship. "The challenges of shooting after Katrina," he said, "were the same as for anybody moving back: getting labor, getting plywood."

Well done to the production crew for sticking with the location after th floods - the least this movie can do is restort some lost pride in the disaster stricken city.