Behind the Scenes: Fight Club
Four years ago, when I finished the manuscript of my first novel, Fight Club, I sat down in my apartment with four friends - all of whom I'd turned into characters in the book - and asked them. "What do you want to get out of this?" Most of them laughed, but my friend Ina said, "I want to meet Brad Pitt."
Bearin mind that this was before everything - before an agent had seen the manuscript, before it was sold and published in more than 20 foreign countries, before it was a movie starring Brad Pitt. In 1995, Fight Club was just 250 double-spaced pages in a folder, a dark romantic comedy about a yuppie loser who finds true love through fighting. It was basically a collage of my friends' lives in which disgruntled waiters with shaved heads sabotage food, drink and slug one another.
So, fast-forward to the summer of 1998 and Los Angeles, where 20th Century Fox is shooting Fight Club the movie. The studio executives invited my friends - Ina, Geoff, Jim and Mike - and me to leave our homes in Oregon and visit the set. They found us a house in the Hollywood Hills with a pool and Val Kilmer staying next door. Every morning, we had breakfast at the same West Hollywood diner, where the same charming, funny waiter, Charlie, would serve us. Then the real characters in the book - my friends - traveled to the set in San Pedro.
The first time we met Pitt (who plays Tyler Durden, based on Geoff), he ran out of a crowd, smiling and tanned, his shirt open. He shook our hands and told me, "Thanks, man, for the nest f--ing part of my whole f--ing career!" Pitt had to shave his head for Fight Club. He had the caps knocked off his front teeth and replaced with broken, snaggle-tooth caps. He touched a bruise on Ina's arm and said, "Nice trophy!" And Ina's life was pretty much complete.
Covered in fake bruises and scars, Edward Norton (who is based on me) asked me, before a fight scene, what his character was thinking. What was his motivation for the scene about to happen? Smartass that I am, I told him I hadn't read the book. I said I was waiting for the movie. And he just looked at me.
The director, David Fincher, showed me rushes of scenes that had been shot, and it was like watching my own memories, my past, but better lighted, funnier, and with better-looking people. Here was basically my whole life - my friends, my past - re-created bigger than life. Huge.
One morning, before breakfast, the cashier at our diner asked us if we were in town on business, and I told him, yeah, we watched someone film a movie called Fight Club. The cashier laughed and called for Charlie, our waiter. He told us how Charlie was an extra in the movie, and Charlie walked out of the kitchen with a newly shaved head. He was living in my plot, and I was part of that new reality.
It was time to get home. Fast.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
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