Fight Club Turns 10

A decade after Brad Pitt and Edward Norton punched their way into our hearts, director David Fincher talks to Paul Cullum about his macho masterpiece.

When some future generation looks back on the 1990s as the golden age of indie-inflected cinema, they’ll settle on 1999 as its apotheosis—one of those watershed years in American cinema that gave us American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, Boys Don’t Cry, Election, The Limey, Magnolia, The Matrix, Office Space, Three Kings, and The Sixth Sense, among others. But none of them will carry quite the lasting shock, or present as clear an endcap on the era, as Fight Club, now celebrating its 10th anniversary with a specially re-mastered Blu-ray disc. With its continuing controversy and fiercely divided audience, it may well be to the ’90s what Apocalypse Now was to the ’70s.

“When we were shooting,” Fincher said of Fight Club, “everybody loved the idea that we were making this movie, that it was so nasty, and when it finally came in and they could see it, they were appalled that it was as nasty as they had promised everyone it was going to be.”

In his bracing screed and incendiary satire on rampant consumerism, end-of-the-century capitalism, political agitprop, the macho yearnings of metrosexuals and the outer banks of narcissism, director David Fincher not only throws in the kitchen sink—for good measure he packs it with a homemade recipe of household cleaning products and blows it to kingdom come. As Fincher told Fox 2000 head Laura Ziskin at their first meeting (as reported by Amy Taubin in the Village Voice, virtually the only positive press on the film’s release), “The real act of sedition is not to do the $3 million version.” Instead, they spent $65 million of Fox’s money and hired bona fide movie stars (Brad Pitt and Edward Norton) in a marriage of ambition and scale unseen since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick.

Weighing in by phone from the Boston set of The Social Network, his movie about the founding of Facebook, Fincher reports that 10 years after he dressed an apartment set with Ikea furniture and set it on fire or rolled a giant globe-like piece of corporate art through the front window of a Starbucks, he will not be able to use the word Google as a verb.

“I had sort of vowed never to go back there,” he says of Fox Studios, where he estimates that no more than 25 percent of his original cut of Alien 3, his debut feature, made it to the screen. Instead, however improbably, in Ziskin, producer Art Linson, and Fox head Bill Mechanic, he found a perfect calm of studio executives willing to give him carte blanche. “[Ziskin] basically said, ‘We realize that this is not a movie that can be made via committee,’" says Fincher. “We were just sort of misbehaving; they were the tissue between vertebrae—where the rubber meets the road.”

They settled on Jim Uhls to adapt Chuck Palahniuk’s 1993 novel (restoring the novel’s first-person voiceover in the process), and producer Linson, who Fincher saw as “appropriately anti-establishment.” And to his credit, Mechanic, whose fights with his boss Rupert Murdoch over the film are the stuff of legend, kept his director shielded from the bulk of that drama. “He had made them a bunch of money with Titanic, and I think he thought it was OK for them to try and do something different,” says Fincher, whose Se7en two years before that had earned $300 million worldwide. “I think when we were shooting, everybody loved the idea that we were making this movie, that it was so nasty, and when it finally came in and they could see it, they were appalled that it was as nasty as they had promised everyone it was going to be.”

One line in particular, Helena Bonham Carter’s post-coital, “I want to have your abortion.” When Ziskin asked for that single line to be excised, the replacement the filmmakers came up with—“I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school”—reportedly made her long for the original.