David Fincher has lots of ideas — Fight Club
Next month David Fincher’s new film Mank is released on Netflix. The period drama about the creation of Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane was written by Fincher’s late father Jack, and marks the director’s return to film-making.
Fincher has enjoyed a six-year hiatus following the release of Gone Girl in 2014.
The 58-year-old made his film-making debut in 1992 with Alien3 however due to consistent meddling from executives he disavowed the finished product.
Since then he has made 9 feature length films, each one released with a director’s commentary.
Listening to Fincher’s commentaries one thing is clear — he loves his films bristling with ideas. With almost every scene, even with some specific shots, he is trying to present an idea. And he loves to talk about it.
Fight Club initially received a mixed reception having been poorly advertised as a film about fighting (and not a criticism of consumerism while also a warning about a fascistic reaction to that).
Ed Norton is the the Narrator, an uninspired man living a humdrum job who befriends Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who is everything he is not.
Here are David Fincher’s ideas in Fight Club (spoilers ahead, obviously):
Camera shows the preparations to demolish the credit card buildings
“The shot where the camera tilts down and falls away from the skyscraper and then goes through the street and into the subterranean parking then across the street and into the other subterranean parking lt was kind of something we hit on late in the film.
“We were trying to come up with ideas, for ways to show his thought process, his manic dissociative state. And so we had this idea, we knew were going to do the whole kind of tour through his kitchen and show how the whole kitchen had filled up with gas and some kind of logical explanation for how his kitchen exploded, and when we saw the tests for it we said ‘we’ve got to do more of this’.”
Edward Norton’s boss ‘trying to be empathetic’
“I always liked the idea of the boss being this guy who is trying to be empathetic to this guy who works for him but he doesn’t want to get involved enough to truly find out how deranged he is.
“So he’s caught between a rock and a hard place and it’s only later in the movie he realises that this guy is a disgruntled postal worker in the making.”
A panning shot of Ed Norton’s condo rips off an Ikea catalogue
“The Furni catalogue idea was some kind of visual representation of this, the idea that we’re a byproduct of the armour that we select to let people know who we are, that’s not just clothes and cars and hairstyles but it’s also the furniture you pick, whether or not it’s Southwestern or Pottery Barn or Ikea… in this case it’s Ikea.”
The subliminal Brad Pitt’s
“This is another example of what we called the subliminal Brad’s, there are 4 or 5 shots in the first reel before we meet Brad where Brad appears for one frame and I always loved the idea, there’s a book in the 70s called Subliminal Sex (nb: it’s actually called Subliminal Seduction) — and it was supposed to be an expose on the advertising industry and the use of subliminal imagery, the idea of airbrushing skull and cross bones and death imagery onto ice for close ups for Johnny Walker ads that would be in Sports Illustrated, I always loved that idea and I loved thematically, Chuck (Palahniuk, Fight Club author) kind of had this, you know, Tyler is a character who abuses subliminal imagery for his own morbid sensibilities.”
Edward’s character ‘trying to make peace with the world’
“I love the idea of him, Edward’s trying to make peace with the world, trying to figure out his way, there’s this character who’s about to come into his life in a meaningful way and he just keeps appearing for one nano-second and he’s just there and he’s always in this sort of impatient like ‘when are you going to get around to it, when are you going to create me, I can solve a lot of these problems for you.’ He’s always sort of exasperated.”
Poster ideas
“We had an idea early on that one of the images for the poster might be just all these stickers that say ‘hello my name is’ or these stickers that all these guys wear in the support groups, name tags.”
Brad preparing to get punched outside the bar
“Nobody knew Brad was going to do his big jumping thing where he jumps up and down so he just goes out of frame but I always loved the idea of a character just leaping out of the top of the frame to prepare themselves for this really stupid shit.”
Tyler cycles through the Paper Street house
“I love the idea of having a house big enough you can ride a bicycle through it.”
Tyler sits in the bath while the narrator dresses a wound
“I love the idea that Tyler is so comfortable with himself, not only in what he wears, but that he can just be naked, he can just wander naked and it wouldn’t be like… you’d be on the phone to him and ‘oh my god my roommates naked again’ it was like he just doesn’t care that Edward could be dressing his bruised knuckles while Brad is in the bath scrubbing with his disgusting water so we went back and it was shot in a half day, set up two cameras and had a chance to resuscitate it (the scene).”
The narrator’s choice of sunglasses
“Edward had this very specific idea about the sunglasses that he should be wearing so we had to wait for these sunglasses to come over from his trailer, because he had these… and I was like ‘yeah whatever they’re sunglasses who gives a shit’ so we’re waiting and waiting, his assistant runs down and gives him the sunglasses and puts them on and he just looks like… it’s so great because it’s such a half-assed Mission Impossible, they’re trying to be cool but they’re just not right, you look at them and you go ‘that’s exactly right’.”
The narrator’s tooth falls out and Tyler has a quip ready
“I love the sentiment of this, the idea that yeah the Mona Lisa is falling apart. That there’s only two constants, entropy and chaos and I always wanted the film to embody that. There’s entropy then cut to Marla and there’s chaos.”
Brad’s idea about the rubber glove
“This was Brad’s idea… the rubber glove where he points in the background and says ‘do you wanna finish her off?’ and I remember the studio came back saying you have to get rid of that.”
Abandoning idea of only shooting Tyler in singles
“We started off with the idea that we would only see Tyler in singles, that Tyler would never be in a two-shot unless he was in a two-shot with Edward but we kind of ended up abandoning that because it didn’t seem necessary.”
Edward Norton as Travis Bickle
“We always thought it was really, really funny, the idea of Ed Norton as Travis Bickle, the guy who’s right on the verge of exploding. And it was one of those things that was really, really funny until Columbine and then all of a sudden this scene just took on this completely different… it was one of those things where in the early cuts of the movie when we showed it to people they would laugh at the notion of Edward physically threatening the boss — then all of a sudden you have the Columbine massacre and then this scene became… it was amazing to watch how public opinion gets swayed by tragedy.”
Blood is more frightening than a gun
“I love the idea that we live in a time and place where if you were standing in line somewhere and somebody came by and brandished a gun that would be frightening but probably not as frightening as somebody took a test tube filled with blood and spattered you with it, you’d almost be more shocked and horrified by that. I definitely wanted to get in the idea to turn the other cheek thing to this AIDs generation extreme.”
Edward Norton angered by the new Beatle
“Edward was just adamant that they had to hit the new Beatle because he’s just so angered by the idea of Baby Boomer’s recycling of their own kind of historical references so he was just like ‘I’ve got to beat that car up’.”
The narrator constantly trying to impress Tyler
“I love the idea of Edward constantly trying to say ‘look what I did’ and Brad saying ‘yeah… that’s interesting but I’ve got this other thing I’m thinking about’ so there’s a constant kind of tension there with every time the narrator thinks he’s standing next to Tyler and they’re both kind of equals Tyler’s already off thinking about this other thing and how it can be executed.”
The idea of Tyler’s madness
“Brad and I had been talking about this idea — since he read the book — the idea of Tyler’s kind of madness. We sort of see Tyler on his little rant in the basement himself, kind of practising, trying to consolidate or make clear his manifesto and so we got this idea of coming out of the explosion where you could see the flames still superimposed over Brad as he’s carrying these power tools around the basement and as the camera moves in and he looks right in the camera and he starts his whole… we started going through this litany of things that Tyler is reminding you that you aren’t. It’s almost like the intensity of this moment actually causes the film to jump out of the gate of the projector.”
The scar on the narrator’s hand
“I just love the idea of the scar, I thought the scar was great. We had Brad like kiss pieces of paper with lipstick on and we kept choosing ‘okay that’s the one we want’.”
Tyler attacks someone who has done nothing to him
“I love the castration scene. I love the idea of its like Tyler doesn’t just say what he’s going to do he literally goes… he attacks this guy who has done nothing to him. But Brad added this bit where he punches him in the solar plexus before he carries him off and he wraps the necktie around his neck and drags him by his neck.
“Because it should be scary, here’s this guy who’s puffing on cigars and telling everybody ‘yeah we’ll find out who these guys are and we’ll make them pay’ and then I love the idea you have these crazed like Clockwork Orange waiters assault him.”
Tyler and the narrator deliberately crash their car
“I love the idea, I love the line that Chuck had in this which was ‘we just had a near-life experience’.”
Project Mayhem is inhabited by morons
“(We) started to wonder whether or not we made a mistake by — everywhere he goes he finds people who are not particularly bright or not particularly listening to what he’s asking and I always liked that idea that everybody who is part of the whole conspiracy is kind of just… not the brightest bulbs in the tree.”
Bartender wearing a ‘halo’
“We wanted the bartender to be pretty fucked up and I always loved, I always loved those halos, I mean not loved but there’s something so extreme about them and the idea of a guy who is going ‘you remember you scarred me on my hand’ but the scar on his hand has to be the least of his worries.”
Tyler as a rockstar
“We got the idea of Tyler as a rockstar, Tyler comes back with the glacier glasses and the fur coat and this is his new incarnation and I loved that idea, I found it so amusing that he comes back as Michael Hutchence (lead singer of INXS) or something.”
Cut scene of Edward running
“There was an idea for a scene in the original script where as Edward goes running to the 1888 building to find the bombs, where as he’s running along Brad ends up running beside him saying ‘hey, where you going?’ so it’s got a real kind of Looney Tunes feel to it but we ended up cutting that out.”
Edward Norton is the thinking man’s hero
“I love the idea of Edward Norton as a thinking man’s action hero — this guy in his underwear running down the street with a folder in the middle of the night with a .45.”
Alternate personality gets sick to death of you
“I love the idea of your alternate personality, this creation of yours that just gets fed up with you at a certain point, he’s just like sick to death of you and your weakness and he has to takeover.
“Originally this fight scene was very Dr Strangelove… but it ended up being goofy funny but we sat down and said this should be really brutal, he should beat the living shit out of this guy.”
Trying to reason with the hyper-stylised masculine side of yourself
“I love the negotiation with the insane, hyper-stylised masculine side of yourself. I love the idea of him trying to reason with him. He’s still trying to get through to him but he’s obviously not physically powerful enough to overcome Tyler but his mind is still, he’s still looking for some way out.”
The narrator is ‘an ungrateful fuck’
“We had this idea in rehearsals as we were rehearsing this that Tyler should address this idea that… ‘look at all this I’ve done for us, you ungrateful fuck’ and that he calls him on, ‘take some responsibility for it’ and I always loved that notion of this very intellectual argument coming down to some of the more salient points are brought up by the truly insane person.”
The narrator’s face is fucked up
“I love the idea of her coming up to him to finally go ‘you fucker, I hate you, I don’t even wanna — oh my god, what is wrong with your face?’”
Total number of ideas: 30
Film length: 139 minutes
Ratio of minutes to ideas: 4.6
Next up: Zodiac
