Courtney Love joined Marc Maron for an interview on the “WTF” podcast and said that David Fincher hired her to star opposite Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in 1999’s “Fight Club.” Love said she won the part of Marla Singer, eventually played by Helena Bonham Carter in the film. The “Hole” frontwoman was fresh off strong reviews for “The People vs. Larry Flynt” at the time. According to Love, she got fired from “Fight Club” after rejecting Brad Pitt’s pitch for a Kurt Cobain movie.
Love said she “went nuclear” on Pitt after he and director Gus Van Sant approached her about making a Kurt Cobain movie. Love and Cobain married in 1992 and they were together until his death in 1994 at age 27. Van Sant eventually made the Cobain-inspired drama “Last Days,” starring Michael Pitt, but Love said this wasn’t the project Pitt and the director wanted her approval on.
Category: Fight Club
BP Gallery Update
• x028 The Audition – Screencaps
• x007 Fight Club Other & Photoshoot
• x030 Bullet Train Trailer screencaps & Stills
• x020 October 16, 2014 – Jimmy Fallon (screencaps)
• x001 OUATIH – On set (10/24/18)
• x001 Ocean’s Thirteen – Photoshoot
David Fincher Responds To China’s Censored Fight Club Ending
One of the most surprising stories of 2022 so far has been the discovery that a new Chinese cut of Fight Club ends with considerably less mayhem than the version seen everywhere else in the world. David Fincher’s satire of toxic masculinity and capitalism recently came to streaming service Tencent Video, where it ended not with collapsing city blocks to the strains of Pixies classic ‘Where Is My Mind?’, but with the following text card: “Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to [a] lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.” It’s not far off ‘Poochie died on the way back to his home planet’ for abrupt text-based closers – and now, Fincher himself has spoken out about the edit.
Fight Club Gets Its Original Ending Restored in China After Backlash
A bizarre ending had been added to a Chinese cut of Fight Club but the film has since had its original ending restored.
Fight Club is now streaming in China with its original ending intact. Recently, the film had made headlines when it was reported that a Chinese cut of the film had heavily censored the ending. Rather than featuring the original movie’s climax with buildings exploding as Tyler Durden carries out his master plan, China’s version censored the film so the cops would win. The new ending explained this with a title card that was abruptly shown to viewers before the credit rolled.
Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk weighs in on the film’s censored Chinese ending
The 1999 cult classic was recently released on China’s biggest streamer with a very different finale.
There’s one person who doesn’t seem too fussed by the new censored Chinese ending to the 1999 film Fight Club — and that’s author Chuck Palahniuk.
“The irony is that the way the Chinese have changed it is they’ve aligned the ending almost exactly with the ending of the book, as opposed to Fincher’s ending, which was the more spectacular visual ending,” he said. “So in a way, the Chinese brought the movie back to the book a little bit.”
New ‘Fight Club’ Censored in China Changes Movie’s Ending
A Chinese streaming service has started carrying the 1999 cult film favorite Fight Club—but with a very different ending to the surprise of viewers.
While Edward Norton’s character is seen at the end of the original version watching buildings explode after killing off Tyler Durden, his imaginary alter ego played by Brad Pitt, the version on Tencent Video fades to black before the explosions begin and displays a brief message.
“Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012,” the message read.
Talk About “Fight Club”: A New Book Goes Behind the Scenes on the Set of the ’90s Cult Classic
Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club is a story told by an unreliable narrator about the ways wounded masculinity can become toxic masculinity — and how a populist movement can curdle into something far more violent and authoritarian. It’s an unlikely choice for the source material for a cult-classic film, and yet that’s exactly what it’s become over the years, with David Fincher’s 1999 adaptation of it continuing to spark debate decades after its release.
Adam Nayman’s new book David Fincher: Mind Games explores the director’s work to date, including a detailed look at how his adaptation of Fight Club came together, an excerpt from which recently showed up at Literary Hub.
It’s an intriguing glimpse into the creative process, and, given that both Fincher and Norton would go on to direct other high-profile literary adaptations, it’s also an interesting piece of foreshadowing for the careers that would follow, long after an unexpected cult classic first hit theaters.
BP Gallery Update
• x010 Babylon – On set
• x005 Magazines – Vanity Fair
• x002 Burn After Reading – Behind the Scenes credits to Chississippimixtape
• x002 Thelma and Louise – Behind the Scenes
• x003 Twelve Years a Slave – Portrait (’13) thanks Shann
• x001 Fight Club – License
• x014 De’Longhi – Photoshoot & Behind the Scenes
Jared Leto Says You Can Thank Brad Pitt For His Wild Fight Club Look
Jared Leto has worked on a number of impressive films over the course of his career, often while sporting an off-kilter look – including in David Fincher’s 1999 controversial 1999 hit Fight Club. Recently, he revealed exactly why his character in the film, Angel Face, has such noteworthy style, as it turns out that Brad Pitt, who played the iconic Tyler Durden, is partly responsible for Leto’s bleach blond hair.
In a recent interview with GQ, Jared Leto revealed that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star Brad Pitt was one of the main reasons that he made the choice to bleach his hair in the cult classic. Talking about his experience making the David Fincher film, Leto said,
“I remember bleaching my hair and my eyebrows white. We did one pass, and I think it was Brad Pitt, he said something about, ‘Billy Idol.’ he was like, ‘Blonder!’ So we went even whiter with it. I liked being on that set because I got to watch Brad. He’s incredibly loose, naturalistic; always does something very different take to take and that was interesting to see. Everyone on it just kind of felt like we were just getting into trouble and doing something that was potentially special but on the darker side of the universe.”
David Fincher Opens His Personal Fight Club Archive – Exclusive
It’s been 20 years since David Fincher’s cult classic Fight Club first exploded onto screens. The film, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same name, repelled and excited audiences in equal measure when it was released, changing the optics of how political cinema could or should be – with the first worries of copycat rebels emerging from the gutters. Today, Fight Club boasts a loyal and fervent fanbase still full of praise, discomfort, conspiracy theories and fascination for the iconic relic of modern cinema.
Exclusively for Empire, David Fincher opened his personal photography archives in the 2020 Preview Issue, leafing through his memories on-set, and sharing insights on many of the film’s key ingredients – from the setting of Project Mayhem’s headquarters, to his stellar leading trio of Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter, to the mechanics of successfully shooting Edward Norton’s cheek off. Here’s a sneak preview of the feature, in which Fincher explains why the dynamic of his three stars, as the story’s mismatched trio of lonely and dangerous sociopaths, worked so well – with photos from Fincher’s own collection.
Fight Club archive material courtesy of David Fincher. Black and white photography by Merrick Morton. Special thanks to Ceán Chaffin and Andrea McKee.
• x003 Empire (UK, December 2019)
BP Gallery Update
• x022 April 15, 2017 – Los Angeles, CA.
• x010 April 24, 2017 – Los Angeles, CA.
• x010 January 25, 2017 – Santa Monica, CA.
• x005 June 01 – Universal Studios – Hollywood, CA.
• x003 June 07 – Leaving El Rey Theater – Los Angeles, CA.
• x006 June 18 – Nice, France.
• x007 March 20 – Los Angeles, CA.
• x012 March 30 – Los Angeles, CA.
• x002 War Machine – Stills.
• x001 June 24, 2004 – Rome, Italy.
• x006 May 16, 2017 – The Late Show w/ Stephen Colbert.
• x001 Fight Club – Stills.
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