From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear this show in all of its wintry glory at KCRW.com.

My guest, director, David Fincher, has made a number of

films from Seven Fight Club, and one of my real favorites, I think, is his newest, this

a not astonishing new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. David, thanks so much for being

back. No problem. We look at Scott Fitzgerald, who, even though he's probably the primary

fiction writer of The Jazz Age, also dealt with stories about loneliness too.

And I wonder if there's something that attracts you to it is kind of a dramatic context.

To be honest, I hadn't read the short story, so I was responding to a script.

But certainly the loneliness of the movie was kind of the riptide, the undercurrent to what was, in my estimation, kind of a repurposing of the grand Hollywood romance.

Alexandre Sblah, who did the music, you know, one of the things that he said, there's a sequence in the movie that I like to call the honeymoon,

where they're in the Caribbean, and they're at their most beautiful.

And he does this thing that's, and he sort of insisted on it, and I thought it was kind of a beautiful idea.

He reiterates a theme from earlier on in the movie that's really Benjamin's loneliness theme.

And it's the theme that plays in the house early on when he can't get out of a wheelchair

and it's trying to look out a window.

It's sort of the same melody.

And I thought it was kind of an amazing thing that you reached this point where they

look at each other and they couldn't be a happier time and yet there's this, there's

this understanding that he is, you know, he's very different than she is. And this is a, this

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