Six wild behind-the-scenes facts from David Fincher movie ‘Fight Club’
Though Fight Club was a box-office failure, its subsequent rise into the ranks of cult-favourite has led to it being one of the most highly-praised films of the 1990s. The film explored contemporary Western lifestyles’ inertia and toxic masculinity’s dangers. It was without a doubt controversial, but controversy creates conversation, and conversation can create change. The film also had many surprising facts from behind the scenes.
One of the many iconic scenes in the film comes when Tyler Durden and the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) are out in a derelict part of town and are firing golf balls out into the abyss, though one actually manages to hit a truck. However, the scene wasn’t written into the script. The occurrence came to be when Brad Pitt and Norton were performing the act after having had a few drinks together. David Fincher spotted them with the golf clubs and thought it was the perfect chance to grab a bit of extra footage for the film.
The film is loved for the fact that it features an acting role for the late singer Meatloaf. Meatloaf’s character was written to be severely overweight, but Meatloaf – typically a portly man himself – had actually lost some weight prior to filming. So Fincher had to fill Meatloaf’s figure out with a fat suit, mainly focusing on the chest area.
If you thought that the film adaptation of Fight Club was bordering on the unacceptable, then you ought to read Palahniuk’s novel. In one particular scene, Helena Bonham-Carter‘s character, Marla, says, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school”, which implies that she had been assaulted during her youth. However, the original line, taken from the novel, was meant to be, “I want to have your abortion”. This was, rightly, felt to be distasteful, so it was removed. Producer Laura Ziskin actually thought that the original line was probably less offensive, but it was too late to change it back.
Seeing as much of Fight Club is about, well, fighting, its characters had to look as though they had been doing so. Brad Pitt heroically went to great lengths to achieve the right look, including chipping his front teeth intentionally at the dentist. This made Tyler Durden look like he was constantly scrapping, though it was down to Pitt’s deep dedication to his craft and portrayal of the psychotic illusory fighter.
Along with fighting, much of the physical action of the film focus on sex, particularly between Marla and Tyler Durden. In one part of the film, the narrator is enraged from hearing Durden and Marla constantly at it. To get the soundbites of them screwing, Helena Bonham-Carter and Brad Pitt reportedly spent three days recording sex noises so that David Fincher would have a wide variety of sonic-shagging to choose from for the final cut.
This wasn’t the only behind-the-scenes sex-focused fact from Fight Club, however. In a particularly trippy scene, we see Durden and Marla in a wild sex scene, but it was actually filmed using CGI and motion capture. Pitt and Bonham-Carter wore motion capture suits and took up a series of positions from the Kama Sutra. The resulting images were then morphed to give the scene its famous hallucinatory nature.
