“This movie hits on the same level”: the band Brad Pitt called the ‘Fight Club’ of music
David Fincher and Brad Pitt had the sneaking suspicion that Fight Club would be polarising when it hit cinemas in October 1999, but they may not have been able to guess its cultural staying power.
The leading man and Edward Norton had to sit there during the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere and listen to it being booed vociferously by certain sections of the audience, but the former still felt confident that he’d made something capable of standing alongside his finest work, which he did.
The costly production underperformed at the box office, adding financial insult to the divisive initial misery, but then it gradually morphed into one of the defining movies of its era, if not always for the right reasons, as Fincher has repeatedly been at pains to point out.
The filmmaker has never been too happy that the odd cultural and societal subset has completely misinterpreted his intentions and championed Fight Club for all the wrong reasons, but no matter how many times he’s felt the need to point it out, his biting satire on consumerism and toxic masculinity continues to appeal to a percentage of the wrong sorts.
As for Pitt, he seemed to know the storm clouds were gathering, comparing the incoming and almost inevitable controversy to one of his favourite bands. “Well, that’s the whole question of, ‘What is art?'” he pontificated. “There’s art that’s meant to just take us away, let us forget our troubles, and then we’re right back where we were.”
Obviously, he hadn’t made that kind of film. “That is definitely not Fight Club,” he declared. “There are things that push the buttons. That speak some kind of truth. Like Radiohead.” The star was on an OK Computer kick at the time, so much so that he asked Thom Yorke if he’d be interested in working on the soundtrack.
He wasn’t, with the musician admitting he was “too fucked up to do it,” but their influence was keenly felt nonetheless. It wouldn’t be the first or last time the actor and producer waxed lyrical about Radiohead, and comparing their approach to their art to how he and the Fight Club team approached the picture put them in a certain kind of synchronicity, nonetheless.
“What comes out in them I don’t think is anything they could actually articulate, but I would certainly say that it’s that which we all know is true somewhere when we’re in our deepest sleep,” Pitt explained. “That is their importance, and this movie hits on the same level.”
The A-lister might have considered Radiohead to be the Fight Club of the music industry, but there can’t be a lot of people who’d put the shoe on the other foot and call Fight Club the Radiohead of the film business, even if those parallels between the film and ‘Creep’ are hard to ignore.
