Breaking The Rules

You Do Not Talk About Fight Club? Try Telling David Fincher That. Twenty Years After The Film Smashed S Into Cinemas, The Director Shares Tales And Unseen Photos From His Archives

- NEV PIERCE

David Fincher didn’t think Fight Club was violent enough. At least, not until he started showing it to people. “They were alternately horrified and titillated,” he tells Empire. “Depending on which side of the hallway you stopped after the screening, you were either getting, ‘I was really not expecting this and I was taken with it,’ or, ‘Oh my God, what have you done?’”

A lot of critics took the latter view. The gleefully acerbic story of an office drone (Edward Norton’s Narrator) inspired by Arctic-cool anarchist Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) to feel through fighting, it smacked eminent noses out of joint. Legendary US critic Roger Ebert called it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish”. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker labelled it as “anti-capitalist, anti-society, and, indeed, anti-God”. It went down like death at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. Taking their cue from the poor notices, audiences stayed home.

And yet… word spread.