Happy Birthday, David Fincher (to the right of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton below)!
David Fincher on "Fight Club" (1999):
"We opened at the Venice film festival, and I think to say they hated it would be an understatement. Let's put it this way: the youngest person in the screening was Giorgio Armani. They called for our hides and we split town. We thought it was funny. Actually, Helena Bonham Carter's mother was three seats down from me and she was just laughing and laughing - she was the only one. She's cool. I'm always surprised at how seriously people take movies. It always surprises me what people get their bowels in an uproar about. It's a movie. It was interesting to me, the critics who felt they had a moral obligation to 'the broader audience' to warn them. But it didn't surprise me that some people didn't think it was funny. It didn't surprise me that some people thought it was morbid. It surprised me, the people who went out of their way to save other people from this experience. I thought that was kind of silly.
It's a cult movie - it's just that it's a big cult. Here's a tricky thing: if you spend $15m, it's not even a pimple on the @ss of that kind of multinational media conglomerate. But if you spend $67m, they gotta release your movie. That's a big number, they can't write it down. I happen to know that the movie's in the black, but there's receipts and there's worth. They are two different things. Because there are movies that make money and there are movies that are worth money, and sometimes the movies that are worth money make money later on. I honestly believe 'Fight Club' is a title 20th Century Fox knows is going to make money for them in perpetuity."
Author Chuck Palahniuk first came up with the idea for the novel after being beaten up on a camping trip when he complained to some nearby campers about the noise of their radio. When he returned to work, he was fascinated to find that nobody would mention or acknowledge his injuries, instead saying such commonplace things as "How was your weekend?" Palahniuk concluded that the reason people reacted this way was because if they asked him what had happened, a degree of personal interaction would be necessary, and his workmates simply didn't care enough to connect with him on a personal level. It was his fascination with this societal 'blocking' which became the foundation for the novel.
After Fincher was finished editing the film, the studio executives were baffled by the piece, and unsure how to market it. Fincher had wanted a highly unique marketing campaign which would mirror the film's theme of anti-commercialism, but already worried about the possible backlash against the film, the Fox executives refused to go ahead with Fincher's idea (two of Fincher's trailers can be found on the DVD in the 'Internet Spots' section). Instead, a campaign was launched which was built largely upon the presence of Brad Pitt in the film, as well as concentrating on the fighting (which plays a minor role in the actual film itself). The campaign was highly criticized as giving the impression that the film was basically just about men beating each other up, completely ignoring the comic and satiric elements of the narrative, and for marketing the film to the wrong audience. David Fincher was particularly incensed when he saw ads for the film during WWE and UFC programming. (IMDb)
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