FIGHT CLUB: THE GREATEST FILM OF OUR LIFETIME - by Nev Pierce
Giggling Idiots 1.
You wake up in Hollywood, California. An unmarked building sandwiched between
garages at the grubby end of the boulevard - where the Walk Of Fame's starts
dim with dust and butts. David Fincher's office. "The first article I ever
read on Fight Club was Alexander Walker's," says Fincher (always Fincher;
rarely David). "Yours will be the last."
Total Film and Fincher are in a Spartan, corpe-green conference room, adorned
only with a wall length notice board bearing a timeline of events relating to
the 'Zodiac' serial killer - the real-life basis for the "newspaper movie"
the director hopes will be his next. The focus, however, is Fight Club, the
1999 box-office "disaster" Fincher is now "very proud and incredibly
happy" to see hailed as an anarchic masterpiece and The Greatest Movie
Of Total Film's Lifetime. "It's great. I'm flattered," he says, before
showing the wry, self-depreciating wit he'll display frequently throughout our
two meetings. "I mean, I don't think I can take the rest of the week off..."
Fincher has become inured, at least on the surface, to critical praise or damnation.
He's had to. Upon its release, Walker - the London Evening Standard's late,
infamously cantankerous critic - laid into Fight Club like a 10-pint drunk whose
drink you've just spilled. "It is an inadmissible assault on personal decency.
And on society itself... It echoes propaganda that gave licence to the brutal
activities of the SA and the SS. It resurrects the Fuhrer principle." On
and on. Any Total Film reader won't need telling why he was wrong. And over
the interviews with Fincher, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Chuck Palahniuk
and Brad Pitt, Mr Walker's coffin may as well be on a rotisserie; it's going
to do a lot of spinning. "Forget the reviews," says Fincher, of the
vitriol poured out by certain critics. "Nobody really gives a shit about
that." More of an issue for the director was the audience reaction when
the picture premiered at the Venice Film Festival. "It was a palpable disaster.
It was like people couldn't wait to get out of the theatre, they were made so
uncomfortable by the experience. I remember being a little, 'Uh-oh'. And Brad's
drunk and Edward's drunk and Helena's drunk and they're all like, 'It's great
and we love it' and I'm like, 'That's fantastic. You did notice that there were
600 other people there who walked out ready to lynch us?'"
Then there was the box office. "I was in Bali and I got the fuckin' first
weekend grosses and it was a disaster and everybody knew it was a disaster,"
he recalls. "And you're depressed for a couple of days, but then you go,
'If I knew then what I know now, would I not make it? No. I would have made
it anyway."
Giggling Idiots 2.
Summer 1997: New York, New York. A baseball capped figure sits outside a plush
apartment, clutching a script. A security guard checks who he is, "David
Fincher." A car pulls up and out steps Brad Pitt, worn out from a day of
shooting Meet Joe Black. "I'm tired, Finch," says Pitt, balking at
the prospect of spending hours discussing Fight Club. "No, no, no, no.
This is not a big, long conversation, it's a three-minute conversation,"
says Fincher. "All right," says the star. "Why should I do this
movie?" "Because this will be one of the best movies you'll ever be
in and probably one of the best movies I'll ever make." Pitt nods slowly.
"Okay, let's go get some pizza."
I Am Jack’s Inflamed Sense Of Rejection.
Sean Penn could have been Tyler Durden. “I just couldn’t get the
movie made at the scale I wanted to make it at,” explains Fincher, of
why The Game’s co-star didn’t take up the fight. “And I love
the irony of it being Pitt, ultimately.” Sean Penn could have been The
Narrator, too. “But he’s too wise, too knowing. He’s not guileless
enough to be The Narrator.” Sean Penn could have been Marla… Okay,
no. The studio wanted Winona Ryder. Fincher wanted Janeane Garofalo, but she
was “uncomfortable with the idea of all this sex”. Courtney Love
was considered and rejected, for reasons unclear. [As Chuck Palahniuk tells
it, “she was desperate to do it. Fincher said she was too obviously ‘the
type.’” According to Fincher, she was “romantically involved
with Edward and that proved to be problematic.”] Thanks to an agent’s
idiocy, Fincher even ended up pitching the role to Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
“She had no idea who I was. I’m sitting there thinking of myself,
‘My God, you are such a fucking loser.’”
Then there was Reese Witherspoon. “She’s somebody else who the
studio brought up,” says Fincher. “I think she’s amazingly
talented, I just thought she was too young. When you realize Tyler doesn’t
exist and The Narrator’s been abusing Marla himself, it needed to be somebody
who, for lack of a better explanation, was there out of choice; not somebody
who didn’t know any better. I was at Brad’s house and he goes, ‘Look
at this actress; don’t think about it, just look at this actress’
and he put on the sex scene at the end of The Wings Of The Dove, when Helena’s
just so unbelievably sad. I thought she was emotionally exquisite in that movie.”
A meeting was swiftly arranged, but Bonham Carter needed convincing. “I
think her mother had read the script and just thought it was awful and I think
that’s partly why she was ambivalent about it. Actually, ambivalent may
be giving the material the benefit of the doubt. She may have been repulsed
by it.”
You wake up in London, England. If you wake up in a different time, in a different
place, could you wake up as a different person? Helene Bonham Carter, HBC, Hells,
Judy [we’ll explain later], what is your power animal? “Tim [Burton]
thinks I’m a cat. He’s a dog.” Which historical figure would
you fight? “I’ve never had the urge to hit anyone.” Bonham
Carter is at home. And she’s laughing [she does this a lot]: “Mum
put the script outside her bedroom, because it was a pollutant! I didn’t
get it when I first read it, either. I thought, ‘This is weird. Is this
message particularly life-enhancing?’ But once Fincher explained it to
me, I just thought, ‘I want to go with this: go with him. ‘I completely
get your point-of-view now.’ I wrote him a huge fax about my misgivings,
you know? In it I just said, ‘I’ve got to play it with a big heart.’
Marla had to have a heart, otherwise she’d be just a nightmare. I was
talking myself into it. By the end of the letter I’d convinced myself
to do it.”
Was she surprised to be offered the part? “I was, but I was also really
pleased because I thought, ‘At least somebody sees beyond the corset,’
you know? That and at the same time it was just around the Oscar thing so in
my cynical way I just thought, ‘Oh, this is what happens when you’re
up for an Oscar.’”
Spring 1998. Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. Brad Pitt is a fidgety ball of energy,
bouncing off the furniture in the rehearsal room. Fincher’s laid-back
in a baseball cap, shoeless feet stretched out on the script-strewn desk. He
tosses a nerf football to Norton, who pings it along to Pitt, back to Finch,
onto Norton, back to Pitt, to Finch, to Norton, to Pitt… Who slams it
home into the basket. “Score!” To one side, sitting in a cloud of
smoke, sits Helena Bonham Carter, watching the boys “Sizing each other
up”. Eventually, she stubs out a cigarette and calls, “Hey! Can
I have a go?”
I Am Jack’s Colon. I Get Cancer, I Kill Jack.
“At the end of the shoot I gave Finch an x-ray of my lungs,” laughs
Bonham Carter. “I had to have an x-ray because I got bronchitis—surprise,
surprise—during the six months of filming. And Fincher does so many takes
ad lots of smoke shots. He got obsessed with the smoke. It had to float in a
particular way. So I was just always sitting there in a cemetery of cigarette
butts.”
“It was kinda funny,” says Fincher. “Helena was surrounded
by chintz at the Four Seasons, having this kinda civilised life, and then she
would go to work at Fox and we’d give her black eyes and put lipstick
on her teeth and make her hair all fucked up and make her chainsmoke and gargling
old coffee and stuff. It was like she was visiting and she’d have to go
down and do all these horrible sex scenes and then go back to the hotel and
be polite.”
The Sex scenes were a particular challenge for the technical team, briefed
by Fincher to make the actors look like “one of the statues at Mount Rushmore
fucking the Statue Of Liberty. It was as if you had these two giant monuments
fucking each other and you can sort of fly around them with a helicopter, that
was kind of the idea. It was kind of inspired by Francis Bacon. This idea of
the twisted perversion of flesh.”
Shooting them was resolutely unsexy, however. “It was really weird,”
says Bonham Carter. “Because me and Brad had to spend a whole day virtually
naked, which wasn’t bad I guess, with dots all over ourselves, like little
stickers. He had white dots and I had black dots and we had to assume different
positions in a very outlit studio and be surrounded by all of these still cameras.
Fincher would just say, ‘And… Have sex! Okay. And orgasm!’
It was just completely absurd, but Brad was very chivalrous.”
And then there were the off-camera sound effects. “That was just HBC
and I sitting in a room screaming our guts out,” says Pitt. “The
sad thing is we had no qualms about it, no politeness, no little hint of embarrassment—just
go!”
“One of the studio’s issues with the material was how we were going
to handle the sex between Marla and Tyler,” says Fincher, whose trade-off
for the studio shelling out on Pitt’s dentistry [they paid for the removable
cap that ensured Tyler could have a chipped tooth] was that the star would sometimes
take his shirt off. He did it twice. One of which was when he opens the door
after sex with Marla—wearing a rubber glove. “We had that take starred
and sent over to Fox under the guise of, ‘Look! Look how good he looks,
he has his shirt off!’” laughs Fincher. “I’ve learned
that one way to control people is to give them other things to worry about.
If you’re worried that somebody is too fearful you can either try to empower
them or you can give them so much to fear that they just don’t want to
be around you. Either way you’ve sort of neutralized them!”
The biggest concern of the studio, though, was not the sex, or the violence,
but one line: when Marla lies back in bed with Tyler and says—and this
makes Tyler shudder—“I want to have your abortion.”
“I always thought it was a good line and it made people uncomfortable,”
recalls Fincher. “But they didn’t want to get into the whole Religious
Right thing. I mean, this movie is the poster child for movies that should be
picketed. And Laura [Ziskin, president of Fox 2000] begged me, ‘Please
come up with something else.’” Fincher agreed, but only on condition
he wouldn’t have to change it again. Then Ziskin heard the changed line
[“I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school”]. “You
know in ET,” says Fincher, gleefully. “When his head extends on
his neck? Laura did the inverse. The first vertebrates in her neck just contracted
wafer thin. She just cringed so hard.”
You wake up in Manhattan, New York. Lose an hour, gain an hour. Edward is taking
two out from editing modern western Down In The Valley, on which he is lead
actor/cutter. His power animal? “It’s pretty hard to top the penguin.”
His historical figure? “I’d be happy to go 12 rounds with any member
of Bush’s cabinet.” He’s recounting the grade school story
and laughing hard. “They begged him to put the other one back and he wouldn’t!”
There’s no doubt, Norton knows how significant Fight Club is. But for
all his intellectual edge and perception—his demolition of the critics;
name checks from Nietzsche to Goya; spot-on analysis of how the film nailed
the zeitgeist-the overwhelming sense from him is that Fight Club was, well,
fun.
“We were looking at each other going, ‘We can’t believe a
studio is going to give us this much money to make this movie. They’re
giving us $70 million to make a movie that they are going to fucking hate!’”
he laughs. “From the beginning, when we got the book, we all had the same
response, sort of half-laugh, half jaw-dropping that someone was saying those
things. We felt that this is for us and our crowd. Not in an inside-joke sense,
but very much this is about our times as we have experienced them. We definitely
had the feeling that if a lot of people didn’t understand it, then we’d
probably done it right. Now and then I’ll give a script that I’m
working on to my dad. He’s a very smart, very broad-minded guy. He loved
The Graduate, and he gave me this look like, ‘Why the hell would you want
to do this?’ In a way it was liberating because it confirmed that feeling
that this was a generational statement to me.”
And what is that statement> “In part, Fight Club turns on the Baby
Boomer generation and says, ‘Fuck you for the world you made.’ Of
course it’s irritating, at the least, to some people.” Little wonder
Fight Club riled so many viewers, then—as Pitt acknowledges, “It
attacks a way of life, it attacks the status quo that men have given 40 years
to. They can’t roll over now.”
But it did find an audience. With time, it connected. It was on the tip of
everyone’s tongue. Tyler just gave it a name. “We would have loved
for it to be The Matrix, you know what I mean?” says Norton. “But
it just couldn’t be and it may have been the way it was supposed to be.
The movie itself was like the experience of Fight Club is for the people in
the movie. It was the kind of thing that you didn’t want other people
to understand, you didn’t want other people to tell you it was okay, you
wanted to find it yourself, talk about it with your friends and that’s
how it radiated out.”
Norton discovered how much it had “radiated” when Dustin Hoffman
phoned him and asked him to read the Edward Albee play Zoo Story at his daughter’s
high school. “It’s very much about the inability to connect with
other people and the sense that maybe an act of violence is the only way to
get someone to pay attention to you,” says Norton. “And we did this
Q&A after and these kids immediately started comparing it to Fight Club.
This was six months after the movie came out. You could feel the parents and
the teachers in the room looking around and whispering to each other, ‘What
is this?’ It became the conversation in this entire school how this play
is just the Fight Club of its time. I called Fincher up saying, ‘There’s
a whole school of 12 to 17 year olds in Santa Monica who are obsessed with the
film and none of their parents even know what it is!’ That was our experience
of it, it kind of leaking in slowly. I went to some concert around that time
and as I was walking out, these two young guys turned and looked at me and said,
‘Nice to see you out and about, sir’. I was like, ‘Aww, man,
this is weird.’”
But the older generation still don’t get it. “I really think that
Fight Club is an expression of a lot of the same things that our parents’
generation got out of The Graduate, but explored through a very different lens,”
observes Norton. “I think the Baby Boomer generation was a much more innocent
generation than ours. Fight Club really, really got down into the textures of
the world we grew up in and the psychological impact of those particular pop
culture/marketing/advertising/materialist experiences. I’m not saying
nobody over the age of 45 understood the film—that’s ludicrous,
lots of people deeply appreciated it—but I think for the same reasons
a lot of Baby Boomers didn’t understand Nirvana, they didn’t understand
Fight Club. I think a lot of the Baby Boomers looked at their children and said,
‘Why so negative?’ I don’t think they related to the ambivalence
of our generation. We have grown up with so much broader a sense of global dynamics,
of the impending catastrophes of the environment and the economy and world politics
and nuclear war—all mainlined into us at a speed that they can’t
comprehend. I think that feeling of being overwhelmed at a very young age, being
overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to engage in adult life, just didn’t
resonate for them the way it does for us. But I think at its core Fight Club
springs out of a feeling of being overwhelmed and alienated, cut off from anything
that feels like an authentic sense of being alive. If you choose to fully explore
what are the roots of those negative feelings, on the way to maybe suggesting
that there’s a way out of that, you’re going to lose a lot of people.”
“My mom,” chuckles Pitt, reflecting on the generation divide, “She
actually justifies the movie because I play a character who’s not really
real. She can sleep at night, cos it’s really Edward doing it!”
Autumn 2001. Manhattan, New York. The air is thick with smoke. People are screaming,
crying, looking horrified at the sky. The second plane smashes into the second
tower. The world has changed.
I Am Jack’s Cold Sweat.
“Fight Club was never meant to be, ‘Watch out or this will happen!’”
says Fincher, reflecting on the link between the film’s skyscraper-smashing
conclusion and the attack on the World Trade Center of two years later. “For
me t goes back to the Monty Python routine where Graham Chapman says, ‘Who
can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn’t set fire to some
great public building?’ For me it was more deeply rooted in Monty Python
than it was in, you know, Fail-Safe. It was a very oblique look at where some
of this could take us. Chuck Palahniuk is a prescient guy.”
“Yeah,” says Norton. “I think that you can carry it too far
and yet I agree. I don’t think that what’s being explored in Fight
Club is deeply interrelated with, you know, those kinds of events, but on the
other hand certainly there’s something in there, when you’re talking
about the kind of furious compulsion to tear down, like, everything that’s
oppressive about modern consumer material society. You have to be careful, because
there’s nothing positive or valid in those real-world actions, but there
may be something in the psychology of it that has echoes to the kind of frustrations
that are being expressed in that film…”
You wake up in Portland, Oregon. This is your life and it’s ending one
minute at a time. Chuck Palahniuk. Power animal: “Oh, the penguin.”
Historical figure? “Jesus would be good. It isn’t fighting in the
traditional sense. It’s more consensual—exploring power through
an organized kind of S&M. Jesus would understand that, because spirituality
he was into endurance and asceticism.” Palahniuk is where it all began.
“I read scripts all the time,” says Pitt. “And after a whole
you just start seeing the same thing. Then, out of nowhere, comes this voice:
Chuck Palahniuk.” Fincher seems genuinely awed by his talent; his “beautiful
prose”. “To me,” says Fincher, “the movie is 60-70 percent
of what the book is and that’s as much as I think you could do in 1999
in Hollywood.” Says Palahniuk. “I actually wish they’d taken
more licence with the book and surprised em a little bit more.” Not that
he doesn’t love it. “It’s raised the standards and made me
disgusted with most movies!” And he has a lone on why, perhaps, the likes
of Walker and US critic Roger Ebert [who called the film “cheerfully fascist”]
were so down on Fight Club. “It strikes a chord with young men, but tends
to frighten older men.” He says. “They have the power, but they’re
not ready to give it up. They recognize the world they’re moving into
isn’t their world, and that’s gotta be scary.” Palahniuk took
a backseat with the adaptation. My editor told me not to get excited when it
was optioned because only two percent f books are ever optioned and only two
percent of them ever get made into movies. I had some conversations with the
screenwriter, Jim Uhls, but I thought I would just fuck it up if I tried to
control it.” He did, however, visit the set, taking along some of the
real-life inspirations behind the book’s unforgettable characters,”
he says. “I took a handful of friends who met the actors who were playing
them. ‘Tyler Durden’ now lives in Bend, Oregon. He’s a carpenter.
He was a rebel who wasn’t sure what he wanted but knew that he didn’t
want what he was getting. He was ready to fight everything just so he was fighting.
Just a big bundle of anger and angst.”
And Palahniuk helped the actors, whether he remembers it or not. “I spoke
to Chuck,” recalls Bonham Carter. “And I got a feel for the person
who inspired Marla and I read the book in ad out.” The other touchstone
was an idea from costume designer Michael Kaplan. Recalls Fincher, “he
said, ‘Here’s who she is’ and showed me a picture of Judy
Garland. I was like, ‘Run with it, it’s a great idea.’ We’d
call her Judy, just out of fun. Or Liza. But mostly we called her Hells. ‘Hells,
daarrling!’” Kaplan wasn’t the only unlikely voice, with Cameron
Crowe having a somewhat surprising, but crucial, influence on the script. “I
talked to Cameron,” says Fincher, “because we had problems with
Tyler. And he’s like, it’s easy! The real problem with Tyler is
that Tyler knows the answer. You’ve got to take out that Tyler knows the
answer, so that every time somebody says to him, “my life’s fucked
up, what should I do?”, instead of him saying, “Well you do this”
you have him say, “I don’t know, I don’t know your situation,
I don’t even know you, but if it was me, I’d try this, because at
least you might learn something, even if it’s painful.”’”
Screen writer Andrew Kevin Walker [Se7en] was drafted in for the changes—about
20 percent of the script, by Fincher’s reckoning [“Jim had done
all the fuckin’ heavy lifting”]—but the Writer’s Guild
of America denied him a credit. Hence, the three detectives who try to castrate
The Narrator are credited. ‘Detective Andrew, Detective Kevin, Detective
Walker’.
Autumn 1998. Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. Pitt’s tossed Norton’s
stunt double down the stairs several times already. Eventually, Fincher will
use take one. Now, he’s heading for take 12. Pitt grabs the guy and chucks
him… Out, out, out, missing the first flight of steps and –CRUNCH!—slamming
like meat on a chopping block, down onto the first landing. Fincher gasps. There’s
a long, long silence. The crew is waiting. The director takes his hands from
his mouth and says, voice questioning, “Um, cut?”
I Am Jack’s Smirking Revenge.
“Fincher does all these tough things and he’s such a puss when it
comes to blood and injuries,” laughs Norton. “There’s a shot
in the movie where Brad throws me through the roll booth of a parking lot and
Fincher wanted to do it all in one. So we did it a lot of times. Like a lot.
Like 20 or 25 times. I remember going into a head state of like, ‘Fuck
it. I can do as many as he wants me to, because there’s no going back
now.’ Eventually Brad started getting uncomfortable, around 33 or 34,
and he said, ‘Look, seriously, no more. He’s really getting beat
up!’ Fincher just goes, ‘last one, I swear! Last one!’ So
I went crawling under the car as hard as I could and I was too tired and I didn’t
duck enough and I really rang my head hard against the transmission and sort
of screamed and he jumps up and goes, ‘That was the one!”
“Yeah, a lot of people got hurt,” remembers Fincher. “We
had people with dislocated fingers and broken ribs. We didn’t want burly
stunt cooks and concierges and bellmen. The great news about actors is they
all, ironically, look like waiters…”
The oddest experience, though, was surely for the leads, whose injuries started
mirroring each other. “It was weird,” says Norton. “Like,
I jammed my thumb really badly and then brad jammed his thumb, and then he really
took a bad shot to the ribs and he was hurt under his ribs and I remember thinking,
‘Ooh, I hope I don’t get that one!’ And then like a week later
I fell on it right on my ribs. I remember walking out of the soundstage holding
my ribs and Brad was like, ‘Noooo!” it wasn’t the only parallel.
The pair did a lot of “fun things”—they learnt to make soap
and, at the mischievous suggestion of Fincher, Norton hired the same truck as
his co-star. He also chose to lose weight for the role of The Narrator, while
Pitt bulked up for Tyler. “Fincher and I both thought a little bit of
Fight Club as like a drug metaphor,” says Norton. “The Narrator
talks like a junkie. And the more The Narrator falls apart, the more in his
mind Tyler is becoming more and more idealised. I don’t remember if it
was a conscious conversation between me and Brad and Fincher, but I know Brad
got bigger and bigger the more the shoot went on and I got smaller and smaller
and felt worse and worse and I think it just seemed right. It seemed like the
right progression, because it takes him a long time to see that it’s not
empowering him anymore, he’s turning into a bruised, scabbed skeleton
and I think I tried to go as far as I could with that.”
The differences weren’t only physical, with the stars’ acting styles
contrasting, too. “Edward’s strength is he always knows where he
wants to be within the context of the story,” says Pitt. “The drawback
is sometimes his planning keeps it from being fresh, in theory anyways, but
the guy is just so exquisitely good that he never gets in the way. I’m
the opposite, I let the day dictate what’s going to happen and so for
me it’s more of a hit-and-miss. The drawback for me is when I’m
missing I’m really missing, I don’t have that to fall back on.”
“Brad’s more anarchic,” says Bonham Carter. “He’s
more instinctive and intuitive and playful and prepared to be extremely bad
in order to release something interesting. I think people who are willing to
go off the deep-end are going to be the most exciting and unpredictable. And
Ed’s got amazing facility but he’s very intellectual. But they were
both really impressive.”
It was up to Fincher to juggle the different personalities and styles. “They
aren’t fuckin’ puppets, you know?” he recalls. “No matter
how far you stick your hand up their asses you can’t make their lips movie.
A dance is two people and when you’re dancing with a camera, a dance is
five people. It can be tricky.”
Everyone, though, is full of praise for the director, in a manner which he
would no doubt find embarrassing face to face. “He’s got the most
encyclopaedic knowledge technically of any filmmaker I’ve worked with,”
says Bonham Carter. Although, regarding the amount of takes he demands, she
adds, “as long as the camera’s moving don’t even start acting
until take 12!”
“I remember when Fincher sent me the book,” recalls Norton. “I
thought, just off having seen Se7en, ‘This is such a great guy to make
this movie because he is completely comfortable posing questions and refusing
to give you the answer. That’s the kind of courage needed to make Fight
Club.’ I mean, it’s a high compliment to say, I think he just doesn’t
give a fuck, you know? He really doesn’t. he’s human, and more than
he lets on he’s as susceptible as any of us to that sort of reflexive
disappointment when a movie doesn’t catch a wave, but he never baulked
at all. His leadership gave everybody the courage to say, ‘We’re
going to go all the way.’”
I Am Jack’s Broken Heart.
You wake up in Hollywood, California. It’s the second meeting with Fincher,
after a weekend spent discussing Fight Club with half its cast. His power animal?
“A scorpion.” Historical figure? “I don’t know…
Irving Thalberg.” He chuckles, “if I had a dime for every person
that was offended by that movie, I’d buy the negative from Rupert Murdoch.
I was born to make this movie.” You wake up in Beverley Hills, California.
“it’s an amazing movie,” says Pitt. “It’s a provocative,
but thank God it’s provocative. People are hungry for films like this,
films that make them think.” You wake up in London, England. Bonham Carter
says, “Fincher’s got a big streak of a girlie. He’s a huge
softie. He’s deliciously soft and vulnerable and a really nice person.
He bullies everyone but he’s not a proper bully, it’s Come on, cry
babies! And again and again and again!’” You wake up in Manhattan,
New York. “Fincher can be a pretty hard-ass in his talk and sarcastic,”
says Norton. “But I think it’s not insignificant that he decided
to put the ending in a different place than the book. You know, even thought
The Narrator’s shot through the cheek and the world is falling down, when
he turns to her and says, “I’m okay,” I actually believe him.
Like it doesn’t matter, you still have to ultimately link up with other
people and care about other people if not all the bullshit around you. I thought
it was kind of hopeful.” You wake up in Hollywood. Again. “It’s
less of a love story than it is an apology,” says Fincher. “it’s
an apology for bad behaviour.”
Autumn 1999. Venice, Italy. The premiere audience hates the picture. It doesn’t
matter. The credits roll, the house lights flicker on. Pitt turns to Norton
and smiles, “That’s the best movie I’m ever going to be in.”
The crowds are dispersing. Some people storm out shouting, “Fascists,
fascists!” Norton nods, “me too.”