The offensive line David Fincher was forced to cut from ‘Fight Club’
The 1990s was the decade of outsider cinema. Independent directors pushed their way to the front to tell stories filled to the brim with grit, sex, and violence, unflinching in their portrayal of the darker sides of society. As the decade drew to a close, David Fincher delivered a film that would completely encapsulate those qualities: Fight Club.
Starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, the future cult classic follows an unnamed insomniac narrator as he crashes support groups in search of emotional release and sleep. When he meets Tyler Durden, a soap salesman played by Pitt, the film devolves into mayhem, fight clubs, capitalist critique and a killer twist. Somewhere in between it all, our narrator embarks upon a relationship with fellow support group crasher Marla Singer.
Fight Club may be one of the grittiest popular films to come out of the era, but there are still certain elements that were deemed too dark to include in the film. Adapting the story from the equally dark novel of the same name, Fincher freely lifted from Chuck Palahniuk’s original words, but there was one line that his producer would not allow the director to put on film.
In Palahniuk’s book, the first sex scene between the narrator and Marla ends with the line, “I want to have your abortion.” Rightfully, producer Laura Ziskin thought the line was far too offensive to feature on-screen and might alienate viewers. Despite her protests, Fincher filmed the scene with the line and resolved to let the audience decide what they thought of the line themselves.
At an early screening, audience members gave the distasteful line a laugh, but the producer was still adamant that Fincher shouldn’t include the line in the film. The director agreed to her pleas, promising to shoot a new version of the scene with a different dialogue. The caveat was that Fincher would decide on the replacement line.
Ziskin couldn’t imagine anything worse than Palahniuk’s original dialogue, so allowed Fincher to go ahead and reshoot the scene. Much to the producer’s dismay, Fincher replaced the line with the words, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school”. Ziskin begged him to return to the original line, but the film went ahead with the revised version of the scene, delivered by Helena Bonham-Carter, which garnered an even bigger laugh at audience test screenings.
True to his reputation as an excruciatingly precise and specific director, Fincher was unwilling to back down when it came to Fight Club’s unflinching unpleasantry. The shocking line remains in the movie, despite Ziskin’s protests.
