Brad Pitt’s Cult Classic Movie Outdid the Source Material So Well that the Author was Envious
1999’s Fight Club starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter is one of the cult classics that fans enjoy to date. Directed by David Fincher, the movie is based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name. Fincher developed the script with Jim Uhls who was hired by Fox 2000 Pictures producer Laura Ziskin.
The movie, which had very high expectations, failed to meet them upon its release and ended up receiving polarized reactions from critics and audiences. Fight Club at the time was dubbed as one of the most controversial movies of the 1990s. However, on its tenth anniversary, The New York Times named the movie a cult classic. Did you know Chuck Palahniuk was envious of Fincher’s Fight Club? Let’s know why.
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Jim Uhls describes the script of Brad Pitt starrer Fight Club as a ‘romantic-comedy’
David Fincher’s Fight Club starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton was based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name. It was published in 1996 and followed the story of a young man who has a white-collar job but is discontent with it and ends up forming a fight club with Tyler Durden. The unnamed narrator also gets involved in a relationship with an attractive and enchanting woman Marla Singer.
The screenwriter Jim Uhls describes the script as a romantic comedy adding that it’s not a typical romantic comedy. He explained via Salon,
“It has to do with the characters’ attitudes towards a healthy relationship, which is a lot of behavior which seems unhealthy and harsh to each other, but in fact does work for them because bother characters are out of the edge psychologically”.
He continued,
“When I read the novel, I warmed to it not because I have exactly the same sensibility as Chuck but because I felt a connection to the emptiness and the numbness of the lead characters’ life. I think everyone’s gone through periods like that, and has questioned the overlay of consumerism and commercialism in the society around them.”
Uhls noted that the book is more of a dream than the movie, in a way that it establishes the emotional logic of why someone would follow something else.
Chuck Palahniuk believed Brad Pitt starring in Fight Club managed the story better
The author of the novel had shared in an interview that he thinks that the cast and crew outdid his novel with Fight Club. He said via, DVD Talk,
“I was sort of embarrassed by the book because the movie had streamlined the plot and made it so much more effective and made connections that I had never thought to make. There is a line about ‘fathers setting up franchises with other families’, which I never thought about connecting.”
He shared,
“David Fincher would drag me off the set to his trailer to show me dailies. He would be watching me for my reaction and I had little or no idea where these scenes fit together. Here were these wonderful reaction and shots and thing like that which seemed so random, beautifully compassed, attractive and funny in their own way.”
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Chuck was also asked about the one thing people would take back from the movie if they watched it. The director replies by claiming that he wants people to be more accepting of and comfortable with chaos. He claimed that things that people see as disastrous are often opportunities for them to redeem and change themselves.
