Fight Club Round Table- Edward Norton 9/28/99
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About this interview: The round table was basically reporters asking EN questions about Fight Club. You can hear EN clearly since he was miked, but you can not always hear what the reporters asked him. Also sometimes the question was fairly involved. For the transcript, usually I've just written down the gist of the question, but I have left EN's comments intact. I acquired the interview secondhand, so there's really nothing more I can tell you about it. The clip is approximately 23 minutes long.
Transcript
[Question about EN's voiceover in the film]
It's very specific. It's both a technical and a performance challenge because it's a.. And we did it a number of times, that whole text. We redid and redid and redid. And Fincher is very, very attentive to the integration of voiceover not only with image and to the tone of it, but also its integration with all the incredible soundstuff that he's doing. I've never spent more time doing what they call ADR looping on this film. We would do stuff and then redo it and then redo it.
[Question about if they were hesistant to use the voiceover technique]
Well, the thing is that it's such an integral part of the book, this interior monologue. It's like this weird, millennial Catcher in the Rye. It's like this long, self-conscious narrative about a person telling his own story. And it's so funny in the book. This guy's constant..And in the book he literally almost does it structurally like he breaks off and does a new line for all these "I am Jack's inflamed sense of rejection". It's so funny you're like, "God, if we can get a sense of..if we can transpose this over into a cinema experience, it will be really whacked."
[Question about what EN thinks the film is about]
I think its about a lot of things and I think that was what was very appealing about the idea of trying to tackle it is that the book is so dense with ideas and with both complaints and many different themes. One of the things that made me initially think that Fincher will be a great person to work with on this is that I feel..You know, the first time I saw Seven I literally walked back out and got a Coke and went back in and saw the next show because I felt, apart from just how virtuoso I thought the filmmaking was, you know, the precision of the filmmaking, I thought what was really interesting about it was that, unlike a lot of films that you see today, he had not been afraid to set up a dialectic between two characters, between an idealist and a cynic, and let it play out over the course of a film. And then end without ever coming to a conclusion about who was right, he left it in your lap. And that was one of the things, I just walked out going, "I'm going to keep thinking about this movie because I'm going to keep debating in my head where I come down on it." And so few people are willing to give you a narrative and take a position of almost moral ambiguity, leave it in your lap to do the thinking. And I thought that was very courageous. And as we approached this, we talked about it a lot. We talked about how much of a point do we want to bring this to. And Fincher was always, I think, very firm in saying that again it needed to be a film about two people exploring certain questions and in the end, going in two different directions. There's a dialectic between Brad's character and between my character and again at the end, things happen a certain way, but you're left without essentially a pat theme or glib conclusion by the film. It doesn't get wrapped up in a neat package for you so that you can walk out and say, "Oh, the message of that film was this." You have to, in essence, take out of the density of it all. You have to think about it a little bit and decide was Tyler's practical execution of this idea of self-liberation through kind of an anarchism, is that negative. Did that become negative in its own right? Did the people surrounding them, were they losing their identity as much as they had been before they got into this whole thing? Or was this narrator afraid to go the final mile. And what happened here? And I liked all of that as a general approach to the film, the idea of wrestling around in it and leaving it in an audience's lap. I think that's a great thing to do. And I think the things that drew me to it on a thematic level, I thought the book has.. My experience of reading the book was interesting. I just laughed all the way through it, partly because laughing in that way that you laugh when you're reading something that is crystalizing, articulating a feeling that you've had or that you know people around you have had but a name hasn't really been put to yet. It was the kind of book you read and instantaneously remember forever little passages in it like saying that, "We're the first generation raised on television and we've been raised to all believe that we should be millionaires and rock stars and eveything and we're discovering that most of us aren't and we're getting very upset about that." Things like that. This idea of our generation having its value system largely dictated to it by advertising culture and by all these cultural signifiers telling you what you're life is supposed to be, what are the trappings of your life that if you take them on will result in spiritual happiness. Like the idea of being sold all of our lives, the idea that you will achieve spiritual peace through home furnishing or your material possessions or that happiness is tied to lifestyle. And the phenomenon that I think our generation has been going through of waking up into adulthood and recognizing the emptiness of that promise and the inability of that promise to be fulfilled by those acquisions and kind of the whole idea of a received value system really isn't working for you or making you happy and what do you do at that point? 'Cause I do think, I've always felt that our, my generation in particular, is a generation that is having its midlife crisis in its twenties. And I think that that on some level is a very healthy thing, but it is disturbing. But I felt that the film in those themes. It also dealt more specifically in how men in particular feel emasculated in the contemporary culture. It was kind of like some weird 90s version of reading Nietzsche in college or something. It was like "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," it's about two people exploring how do we liberate ourselves from value systems that aren't ours or that have been applied to us and that we've been told we ought to accept and exploring the practical limitations of that kind of nihilism. And I sat down with Fincher and Brad the first time we all got together and I said, "You know, the fun of this is if
you get even 75% of this in an interesting way up on the screen, it could be for us what The Graduate was for people in the sixties, the kind of film your parents truly don't understand. I remember my dad telling me that he went to The Graduate five times and his father just hated it, thought it was inappropriate and negative. And I gave the script of this to my dad and he read it and he went, "This is interesting. I don't really get this." And I was going, "I got to do this." This is something I absolutely guarantee my friends will howl with laughter over and probably my grandmother will say indicates the decline of Western civilization. To me, that's a great provocation. That's a really exciting thing to wrestle around in. I think a lot of those things that get made, those are the things.. they create an enormous reaction at the time and they get called dangerous but then we look back of them as our real landmarks of the psychology of the time like Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? which was dangerous and inappropriate and radical and Dr. Strangelove or Taxi Driver. These films that kind of put a mirror up to some of our dysfunctions in a way that is going to make some people uncomfortable, but kind of puts a name on something.
[Question is too unintelligible on audio]
I'm drawn as a film audience member. I've always been drawn equally to films as entertainment and then.. Film is an almost alamingly potent art form right now. It is such a potent cultural medium right now that it would be really frightening to me, given it's potentcy right now, playing another important role in the continuum of what art does. That is to say, it should also be engaging in a discussion of what's dysfunctional. I was reading these writings of this Polish poet the other day, this Czeslaw Milosz, he's a Nobel Laureate [1980] and I flagged it out and gave it to Fincher because he wrote this thing saying something like "Art should be the flaw in the diamond that we perceive our culture to be." It should show us where we're unhealthy but people resent the showing. And I just thought,"That's why you make a film like this." I do enjoy.. that was what drew me to a film like Larry Flynt or to a film like American History X or this film. But, then on the other hand, I've done lots of things that are very light entertainment- not light entertainment, just entertainment and I think that's great too. It's just, these don't come along that often. They certainly don't come along that often where something as thematically provocative as this is actually getting the level of support on a production level from a major studio that this one was. The chance to make this kind of a film for this kind of a budget with these kinds of ideas in it is miraculous to me.
It seems that you have more of an opportunity to do these types of films than other actors
Well, I look for them, though. I mean I hold out for them. I wait and wait and wait and don't work for a long time until I can find one. I'm not saying they're out there in abundance. I'm saying I do think I certainly prioritize them in terms of if I can find one that I can respond to on that kind of a level I'm going to take a shot at it 'cause it scares me a little bit. And if it scares me a little bit, I figure that's probably gonna be something that might vault up into a place that's actually kind of having an impact on people.
So how are you in a fight?
[laughs] I haven't been in a real fight in over ten years so I shouldn't really say.
What was it like fighting with Brad?
It was great. Brad's just great to work with on every level. He's one of the most committed, hard-working people I've worked with. From the first phases of it, from literally two or two and a half months of sitting around just the three of us in a room, just going over the nuances of the script and trying to take the book and looking at the book and then looking at the script and trying to transpose it, talking about the beats and talking about our own little pet peeves and trying to splice those in there too. Brad and I figured out we had this mutual loathing of the new Volkswagen Beetles and we managed to put one in the thing where we whack it with baseball bats because we were saying, "There's a perfect example of the Baby Boomer generation marketing its youth culture to us." As if our happiness is going to come by buying the symbol of their own youth movement, even with the little flower holder in the plastic molding. It's appalling to me. I hate it. [laughs] And Brad was Brad, so we bashed it. And it was fun. He was really fun..And the fighting in specific, it's very choreographed. When you make a film, you gotta.. obviously things like that are about camera angles and tight choreography so we spend a long time doing it. But Brad's the kind of guy, he'll dive in. You always have to be careful and make sure someone's willing to go a little bit past the point of pure safety with you and Brad was very much. He's not afraid to let things get a little bit loose.
Someone must have gotten hurt at some point
Given what the actual nature of our relationship in the film is, we got these very disturbingly synergistic bruises. We got them in the exact same places. Sometimes it was very strange. We both bruised a rib at one point in the exact same place. It was a little eerie.
What was your real fight about?
I can't really remember. It was in Spain, that's all I remember.
[Question]
Well, God forbid a movie should come out that you have to see twice to maybe take the full measure of, you know. And this is not said in a contentious way but I do feel that there is dynamics where the critical community, ostensibly speaking for the audience it represents, clamors for more sophisticated films from the studio system. They ask for films that are not so formulaic, that give sophisticated or complicated treatments and take unusual cinematic approaches, they complain when they don't come. And then when one does come out, I think, the responsibility shifts to the critical community to grant a film like that a more sophisticated treatment, and maybe to see it twice before you write a review of it. And when that doesn't happen, what you essentially get is lazy journalism. A more complicated film comes out and in a weird way, people flip the switch on you and just skewer you for the attempt, skewer you for pretentiousness or whatever it is because, frankly, they didn't spend long enough time with the film to really understand it. And it's not to say you have to like it at all. But when, miraculously, a film like this emerges from 20th Century Fox for the kind of budget that this came out in and is this dense with provocative ideas, you would hope that people would take a harder look at it in a way and say, "Okay, we got what we asked for. Now let's assess this with a different set of criteria." It's amazing to me that before a film even comes out to start reading these very sort of glib, I think, lazy connections being drawn because it's called Fight Club, between that and some headlines that have happened recently and saying, "Are these part of the same dynamic?" when anybody who looks at the film with any real attention, you can see on a lot of levels that the idea of the fighting in this is not about the suggestion that violence directed outward toward other people is a solution to your frustrations. It's a metaphor for self-transforming radicallism. The idea of directing violence inward at your own presumptions. He doensnt walk out of that bar saying,"Can I hit you because I really need to get this out." He says, "Will you hit me?" This idea of needing to get shaken out of your own cocoon. And the idea that the fighting is, in essence, a metaphor for stripping yourself of received notions and value systems that have been applied to you that aren't your own and freeing yourself to discover who you actually are and I think in that context to make some glib associative link between this film and a school shooting is just lazy journalism. It's not giving it a sophisticated treatment. And even to the degree that there is some sort of link, violence is in the culture and if art stops addressing the violence in the culture, then you're got a culture in denial, in essence. I think it's a completely legitimate debate and thing to question of how is violence presented in films. And when violence is presented as entertainment or violence is presented without impact or almost as a pure aesthetic itself, like I liked The Matrix, but there you have a film where it was literally violence as ballet. And those raise interesting questions. But for my money, I think a film that is in essence about the dynamics that go into shaping people's frustrations, I think the idea of squelching that kind of discussion is more dangerous than having the discussion and having it be misinterpreted by anybody. You would have most of the things that we now great cultural landmarks that were mirrors up to the times. You wouldn't have Taxi Driver or Dr. Strangelove or A Clockwork Orange or Lolita if people had said, "I'm not going to make this because it might be misinterpreted as espousing this."
Have you seen that in print already?
Yeah, some British critic started, I think without seeing the film, talking about the "fascist overtones of it" or something. And I was like, "Where the hell are you getting that?"
about what it was like producing and directing debut, Keeping the Faith]
It was really challenging, really challenging in a way. Someone said something to me in the other room, it was the funniest lines I've heard today to me and Brad "Is acting a fight club for you." I sort of went, yeah, that's not a bad way of putting it. To me, shifiting over into taking on some of those responsibilities was just a way of keeping myself off-balance creatively or getting back into a place where I was feeling like I didn't have a frame of reference. And it was that. It's just a highly adrenalized experience.
Does it make you a different actor?
Yes, it does affect..I'll never be late again [laughs]
Are still going to do a staged reading of "A Streetcar Named Desire" [Click here for more info!]
Yeah, I think we're still going to do that. I'm not quite sure if that's come together or not. Meryl Streep has some conflicts with her schedule. I'd love to do it.
Is your hair blonde for a role?
Yeah, yeah, it was a film [Keeping the Faith]. But actually it was dyed dark in this film. In Fight Club it was black.
[Various comments about Fight Club]
Fincher was in the other room going, "Not enough people are pissed off about it. I've done something wrong."
At this point, the people are leaving so there are just some random comments.
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