BD: There is a move away from specialization going on...

DF: Look, I'm all for specialization. It's led to some great and wonderful movies. And I know that the movie business is about specialization, but I don't believe in it anymore. I've done commercials where Angus [Wall], the editor, did color correction. And I believe in that: You have to be multi-disciplined, especially in a world where the process is moving more and more toward desktop publishing as a model. It doesn't make any sense to have the colorist as this extra layer of creativity. No, he has to be ingested and part of what we're doing.

BD: It's a whole new digital paradigm.

DF: I think digital filmmaking is all about picks, about what Eric's up to with picture information exchange: the idea of being able to write either long-hand or type on a QuickTime and send it somebody with the frames that you're talking about. All marked up, where the head seems to move or turns in an odd way, you circle the head and put an arrow on the chin and say, "Why does the chin seem like it's popping here?" And it goes right on the QuickTime and gets sent right back down to Venice and people look at it and know what I'm talking about.

There were no ticking clocks or plot devices in Button, but there was a clock running backwards to signify Button's time left. 

BD: So it can get fixed instantly.

DF: It's about fewer people having more communication and being able to draw or write or manipulate on the actual media, so you can all be speaking the exact same language. The same thing is true with shooting digitally. The thing for me -- I love film: I think it looks beautiful. And in the right hands, to me, there are maybe 10 guys in the world that make a difference. But when it comes to that gnawing, horrible, 24-hour period between having shot something and seeing it in dailies, and going, "What the f... You don't have one take that's in sharp focus?" I will trade four or five stops of high-end shoulder exposure for the ability to have a 23" HD monitor that allows me to go: "See this thing right here? You can see his ears end and his eyes are out." I can't stand it when movies are out of focus -- it just bugs.

BD: And the impact on the vfx?

DF: Certainly with the amount of effects work that we had in this movie -- and I've never done a movie that had this many shots -- shooting digitally made that a much more complete [experience]. We had it all in-house, we had the ability to just go: "Grab a firewire drive, get that plate down to Lola and get them started on that shot." Or, "Add 19 frames to that and get it off asap." It's the most streamlined finishing process I've ever seen. And part of the reason we went to MPI to do the film outs was not only because of Jan [Yarbrough's] eye [as senior colorist] but also because the system there is set up with three people. And I love that our three people are talking to their three people -- and that's the movie. I always felt that the more a director knew about what we were capable of, there'd be more shots. As soon as they knew that this was fairly effortless and we could fix that, they would go, "Oh, my god! I can get three more setups a day! If I don't have to worry about painting that out being an $85,000 thing and is a $15,000 thing, that's 40 minutes.

BD: And more and more vfx people are becoming directors now.

DF: Yeah, but I think of it more as more and more people are growing up with computers and Photoshop and QuickTime... You look at Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham and Mark Romanick and Spike Jonze, and you see people who can speak eloquently and technologically about the effect that they want to render and what they want to achieve. And before 1995, that was a rare thing. And now it's everywhere.

BD: Getting back to Benjamin, do you think Digital Domain has crossed the Uncanny Valley? They certainly think so.

DF: Have you seen the movie?

BD: Yes.

DF: What do you think?

BD: It's very close.

DF: They've set up camp in it. My feeling is that there are shots that just kill: that looks like a living thing to me. There are others that are simply getting you from A to B. But given that they had 350 shots to do, that's probably [fine]. But I think the next time we do it, they'll be much further along. I think that the greatest lesson to be learned from this was that it wasn't about making a real human; it was about making a character. And I think the great news about Benjamin is that he is a fully realized character in a movie, and that there are all these little moments that allow you to understand and empathize with what's going on in his little noggin, even if he's not saying a lot and even if he can't move a lot. You get who he is. And I attribute that to technology in service of an actor: very specific and very interesting and very varied ideas about who this character was and what he was going through.