FIGHT CLUB
YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB? TRY TELLING DAVID FINCHER THAT. TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FILM SMASHED INTO CINEMAS, THE DIRECTOR SHARES TALES AND UNSEEN PHOTOS FROM HIS ARCHIVES
As David Fincher’s most incendiary film turns 20 (no, you feel old), he opens up his archives to reveal never-before-seen images. We are Jack’s barely contained excitement.
DDavid Fincher didn’t think Fight Club was violent enough. At least, not until he started showing it to people. “They were alternately horrified and titillated,” he tells Empire.
“Depending on which side of the hallway you stopped after the screening, you were either getting, ‘I was really not expecting this and I was taken with it,’ or, ‘Oh my God, what have you done?’”
A lot of critics took the latter view. The gleefully acerbic story of an office drone (Edward Norton’s Narrator) inspired by Arctic-cool anarchist Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) to feel
through fighting, it smacked eminent noses out of joint. Legendary US critic Roger Ebert called it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish”. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker labelled it as “anti-capitalist, anti-society, and, indeed, anti-god”. It went down like death at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. Taking their cue from the poor notices, audiences stayed home.
And yet… word spread.
The film became like a secret to be shared — perhaps because it told us not to talk about it, perhaps because it simmered with premillennial tension, perhaps because, beating up others and himself and grinning out sly, nihilistic aphorisms, Brad Pitt just looked really fucking cool. And it still distils the zeitgeist today.
“I don’t know why we’re still talking about it,” admits Fincher. “If Chuck [Palahniuk, who wrote the novel] had been angry and not questioning, if he had a thesis that he was ready to expound upon about how unfair shit is, had he truly been the proto-fascist that people misinterpret — the guy who coined the term ‘snowflake’ — I don’t know that we would still be talking about it.” And yet, here we are, in Fincher’s Hollywood office, looking through his archive of Fight Club
photographs and artwork, breaking the first two rules once again. A blown-up version of Walker’s damning review hangs on the wall — a reminder of how a consumerist satire and critique of toxic masculinity was taken, by some, as a celebration of it. And, well, a reminder that Fincher quite enjoys provoking people. “I remember fondly going to work to make something we knew people were gonna take issue with,” he says, with smile. “It was a fun act of sedition…”
TALKING BEDS
“Edward asks a lot of questions. And it’s his right to. And you better be able to answer them. I think there were definitely some moments where I probably would’ve liked to have had the trust then that I have from Edward now. It would’ve helped if I’d had it during the 105 days or so we shot the movie. But — you can see in that sequence of him catching air [after punching himself in the face] — he showed up. He showed up. I remember fondly going to work to make something that we knew people were gonna take issue with. It was kind of a fun act of sedition.”
WACKING OFF
“I had thought about casting Steven Soderbergh as the Narrator because of Schizopolis [the self-reflexive, uncomfortable cult comedy that reinvigorated Soderbergh’s career in 1996)]. Weirdly enough, originally, there was a lot of at-work masturbation that the Narrator did. And then, because that was such a moment in Schizopolis [Soderbergh, playing a listless office worker, ignores a depressed colleague in order to go and masturbate in the office toilet], I was like, ‘If I ask Steven to do this, is he gonna be, “Oh great, I’m the chronic masturbator! Is that what you think?”’ So I didn’t go there.”
ANTI-HERO WORSHIP
“There are people who look at the movie and criticise it for being too enamoured of Tyler Durden. And my attitude is: we’re making a movie about a guy who falls under the influence of a charismatic leader. It’s your job to make that leader charismatic, right? Otherwise, I mean, is this a ‘cautionary tale’? This is the thing that’s always terrible about movies about drug addicts: they start off with people doing stuff that’s entirely self-destructive — drug addiction starts off with people doing things that are entirely fucking enjoyable and fun — and then it becomes a slippery slope. The secret society in the basement is really a metaphor for drug culture or a certain kind of self-destruction. So it’s always strange to me when people say, ‘Well, you went too far, because the malleable minds that might see this might be taken with Tyler and his position on things.’ And you go, ‘Yeah, that’s the whole point.’ The point is to meet a guy who’s going, ‘I’ve done everything that was asked of me and I still feel empty.’ And then here comes this guy that goes, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe you wanna try X.’ And he does. And these other things make him not feel empty. They make him feel alive. And then he’s willing to move his moral and ethical line for this other person. But there are those people who look at this movie and say, ‘No, no, no, you need to be, from the very get-go, telling people that Tyler’s way is not the way.’ That, for me, was just ridiculous.”