Fight Club: 10 Cool Facts You Do NOT Talk About
Fox 2000 Pictures
Fight Club, one of David Fincher’s most celebrated films, hit cinemas in 1999, and has since become a cult classic.
Here are 10 cool facts about the film…
1) Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were really drunk during the golf scene
One memorable scene in the film occurs when the two leads are drunkenly hitting golf balls. The two actors had some drinks before the scene, to get into character, and were indeed drunk whilst filming. They were hitting the balls at the film’s catering truck.
2) Blue-blockers
In many scenes, Tyler Durden is wearing blue-blockers. These are sunglasses often worn by insomniacs. They block out blue light, which affects the amount of melatonin our bodies create. Melatonin is a hormone that encourages the body to sleep.
3) Three days of sex noise
Although you only hear them through a closed door, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter had plenty of sex noise to create for the film. All in all, the pair spent 3 days recording the noises.
4) Brad Pitt had a cap on his chipped tooth removed for Fight Club
Before filming started on Fight Club, Brad Pitt paid a visit to his dentist. He’d chipped a tooth when he was younger, and had had it capped. He asked the dentist to remove the cap, so he could show the chipped tooth throughout the film. This helped paint Tyler Durden as somebody that got into a lot of fights.
5) One hundred pounds of bird seed
Meatloaf played Bob in the film – a cancer survivor who is carrying some excess weight on account of his hormones. To make his large breasts and love handles fold over convincingly, Meatloaf’s fat suit was loaded up with bird seed. It weighed over one hundred pounds.
6) Norton punched Pitt for real
Just before the scene where Norton punches Brad Pitt in the ear, director David Fincher called Norton aside, and told him not to pull a fake punch, but to follow through and punch Pitt;s ear for real. Norton did just that, and the pain you see in Pitt’s face in the movie is genuine.
7) I haven’t been f**ked like that since grade school
An original cut of the movie saw Marla say, ‘I want to have your abortion.’ Laura Ziskin, the President of Product for Fox 2000 Pictures, was disgusted by the line, and asked Fincher to remove it. Fincher said he’d replace the line if he was able to keep a new line with no further changes. Ziskin agreed, and Fincher changed the line to, ‘I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.’ Ziskin was even more upset with this new line, and asked Fincher to revert it to the original abortion line. Fincher refused.
8) There’s a Starbucks coffee cup in every scene in Fight Club
To emphasise a line in the film about there someday being a ‘Planet Starbucks,’ which is to say Starbucks is taking over the world, David Fincher hid a Starbucks coffee cup in every scene in the film.
9) The author wrote it after being beaten up on a camping trip
Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the novel the film is based on, came up with the idea after he was beaten up on a camping trip. When he went back to work, with visible bruises, none of his co-workers would ask him what had happened; instead asking, ‘how was your weekend?’ He realised it was because they didn’t care enough about him to want to engage with him.
10) Fincher was asked to cut a scene with the Narrator’s boss
During one scene, The Narrator’s boss finds a copy of the Fight Club rules and confronts him about it. The Narrator says, ‘the person who wrote that is dangerous,’ and describes how the person might stalk through the offices one day massacring co-workers. During the first test screening, which took place before the Columbine massacre, the audience howled with laughter at the scene, and rated it highly. However, at later test screenings that took place after the Columbine shootings, the scene got no reaction and scored poorly. The studio asked Fimcher to remove the scene, but the director decided it couldn’t be removed as it was pivotal to the next scene.
There you have it – 10 cool facts about Fight Club!
Fight Club trailer
What’s Fight Club about?
Edward Norton plays an unnamed insomniac office worker whose life changes drastically after he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) – a devil-may-care soap salesman. Together, they form an underground fight club, but things quickly lead down a sinister path.
If you liked Fight Club, try this…
For another 90s thriller about a depressed white-collar worker whose life spirals out of control, leading to mass carnage and disastrous results, check out Falling Down.