Fight Club (film)/Trivia

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• Acclaimed Flop: This movie made only $11 million in its opening weekend.
• Creator Preferred Adaptation: Palahniuk has spoken on several occasions about how he prefers the film over his novel, to the point the book now slightly embarrasses him.
• Dyeing for Your Art: As the filming went on, Norton deliberately lost weight and slept little while Pitt exercised and got tanned. One character wasting away while the other gets stronger has plot relevance here.
• Enforced Method Acting: When Tyler asks the narrator he wants to be hit as hard as he could, the narrator winds up and... hits him in the ear. Brad Pitt was told Ed Norton would hit him in the shoulder. "Ow! Motherfucker! Why the ear, man?!" is a legit reaction. Apparently Norton and Pitt also got drunk before shooting the scene in which Tyler and the narrator drunkenly fling golf balls at the paper factory opposite Tyler's house. Pitt's amused giggle certainly sounds quite realistic. It was early in the morning and they were aiming the golf balls at the catering truck.
• Fake American: British Helena Bonham-Carter as Marla
• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Bruce Banner has a different split personality?
  • If I had a tumor, I'd name it Lovett.
  • Hey, look -- it's Jared Leto getting his face beaten in. Heheheh.
  • This is Meat Loaf. Meat Loaf had bitch tits...
    • Meat Loaf was actually a little peeved about playing Bob because he had just lost a ton of weight - and you'll never know it in the movie.
  • Tyler Durden is having wild monkey sex with Bellatrix Lestrange.
• Technology Marches On:
  • None of the characters appear to use or own mobile phones. The Narrator calls Tyler on a payphone and Tyler *69s him to see who called (except not really).
  • One of Project Mayhem's pranks involves pouring petrol into the tube of a CRT monitor so that it explodes when turned on. Another prank involves using electromagnets to wipe the VHS tapes in a video rental shop. (Amusingly related to the second prank: David Fincher gave interviews around the time of the film's release in which he specifically mentioned DVDs.)
  • The film averted one instance: in the novel, the narrator writes haiku and faxes them to everyone in his office, but the film changed the delivery method to e-mail.
• Throw It In:
  • Pitt and Norton mostly ad-libbed the scene in Lou's Bar. Fincher cut together the final version of the scene from thirty-eight separate takes.
  • When the Narrator punches Tyler in the ear, Pitt's reaction was genuine; Norton actually punched him straight in the ear.
• Vindicated by Cable: Not a success at the box office, this film is now considered one of the best of its time, and is, as of 2021, ranked the 11th best film of all time on IMBDB.
• Writer Revolt:
  • Executives felt Marla's line after she has sex with Tyler ("I want to have your abortion") would prove too offensive, so they asked David Fincher to change it -- which he did, to "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school". He refused to change it back.
  • The movie contains a great deal of product placement, nearly all of which ends up criticized, smashed, blown up, or otherwise vandalized over the course of the movie.

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