20 Things You Didn't Know About Fight Club

[Music] despite the first and second rule of Fight Club hey sing along if you know the words a a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about Fight Club over the past 20 years that being the case it's been a bit of a challenge to come up with 20 snippets of information for the 20th anniversary that aren't necessarily common knowledge amongst every Fight Club fad because of the film's popularity you might already be in the know about a couple of these You cheeky scampia but there's plenty of Secrets still hiding in that 20 year history worth making a video about I'm Josh from watch calm and these are 20 things you didn't know about Fight Club number 20 the protagonists name is confusing Edward no one's protagonist is never named once in the film even in the credits he's just known as the narrator some fans of the film infamously took to calling him Jack Vil after the Doretta satirical use of nonfiction article titles I am Jack's : I am Jack's raging bile duct etc etc and those article titles were adapted from real-life Reader's Digest pamphlets however Reader's Digest refused permission at a late stage for Finch's film to use their copyrighted titles and this led to Norton haven't a step back in to re-record sections of his narration replacing the original jaw with Jack and the name just kind of stuck number 19 how many times does Tyler Durden appear before Tyler Durden actually appears everyone knows that Fincher spliced subliminal flushes of Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden into the movie but just how many of them arvin well the first one pops in when Jack is at his works for a copier the second comes at the tail end of Jack's visit to the hospital the third at the first support group meeting and then a fourth on the street as Jack looks for Marla however there is another subliminal Brad that not everyone picks up on at first and that's in the hotel welcome video of that Jack has on in his room while traveling for work there is of course yet another appearance as well where the camera lingers on him this time showing him on an airport travel later going in the opposite direction to Jack who has his back to him number 18 Pitt kind of work with DiCaprio on the film kinda although this years once upon a time in Hollywood is the first time Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio have acted together it's not quite the first time they've been in a film together in the scenes with Jax meditational keV towards the beginning of the movie there is a lot of icy breath which was of course created by CGI composites blue sky studios who worked on Fight Club have multiple points of contact with VI FX who worked on similar areas of CG manipulation for James Cameron's Titanic the I FX have been on record as suggesting that their work on cameras project provided them with their court library of generic breath elements to use in other movies as a result that's not Edward Norton's breath in the final movie that's actually the ghostly huffing of another Jack puffed out from beyond the grave number 17 Helena Bonham Carter changed her career by playing against type Helena Bonham Carter has been in a lot of weird movies now but people forget that 20 years ago Fincher cast her against type following a discussion with costume designer Michael Kaplan she based her performance only troubled judy garland's finally yes leading to Fincher actually calling her Judi while on set she also insisted on the film's makeup artist supplying her makeup with their offhand believing that Marla wouldn't care enough it was the smoking though where things went a bit too far for her by the time shooting wrapped after five months or so Bonham Carter was on 60 a day and had bronchitis thanks to finished shooting so many ticks and the characters smoking constantly and so she made sure to pointedly give the director a copy of her lung x-ray as a parting gift number 16 none of the main cast with a first choice the cast of Fight Club was so perfect for this movie that it's still baffling that anyone else could have possibly been considered for these roles yet before going for pit the film's producers had first considered Russell Crowe for the part of Thailand Durden not a terrible choice by any means but they admitted afterwards that Pitt had been the perfect match for the role the part of Jack on either hand had both Matt Damon and Sean Penn in consideration before Fincher decided on Norton primarily because of his performance in the people Larry Flynt it was Marla who caused the most deliberation though with both Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Michelle Gellar initially offered the role but obviously neither ended up with it number 15 Fincher wasn't even the first choice either although David Fincher was involved in the development of the film from the very beginning he nearly didn't get the job at all in fact he was the producers fifth choice Peter Jackson fresh from the well received Heavenly Creatures was the first choice however by that point he was a year into developing the Lord of the Rings movies having won the rights in 1997 after that Universal tied him down to do King Kong while he was finishing the Return of the King so he wouldn't have been available until 2006 on the other hand Bryan Singer was free but he hadn't bothered reading the book when he met with Fox for the job David O'Russell had read the book but didn't understand it that left transporting director Danny Boyle who would have been an interesting choice but he elected to develop Alex Collins the beach instead number 14 the studio tried to make Marla Singh's less crude Laura Ziskin was the head of Fox 2000 back when Fight Club was being met and made some down flying creative movies in her tenure but balked at a number of fight clubs more challenging aspects specifically tireless toxic relationship with Marla the original line Marla Otis after a bout of shagging was supposed to be I want to have your abortion which obviously didn't sit well with the suits and Fincher agreed to change the line provided he would not be required to amend it a second time the replacement he came up with was I haven't been asked like that since grad school which is so much worse this can also apparently flailed when she saw the yellow rubber gloves and otherwise naked Tyla is wearing when jack interrupts the tiller they Ben Pitts idea but Siskin was appalled at the crude implication however she let it slide after the gloves got a big laugh in a test screening number 13 insomnia is the film's secret protagonist the books original author was an insomniac all his life and so sleeplessness was a key to the original story and it shows up throughout the film as well specifically insomnia self techniques are all over the film for instance some insomniacs open a window or drink iced water before bed which led to Jax ice cave meditational zone with its puffs of frozen breath likewise tireless tinted shades can also be used to control sleep cycle this also extends to the fights as well though the film's idea to pick a fight and lose is mirrored in studies showing that when a fighter actually loses their testosterone levels drop and their metabolism slows allowing them to sleep like babies number 12 there are more hints about Tyler than you think with hindsight there are a lot of clues throughout Fight Club about the true nature of Tyler Durden when Jack and Tyler get on the bus Jack only pays the fare for one so on barges past the two men but only apologizes to Jack later on the same thing happens with the doorman at the bar and Tyler's business card shows two identical angels facing each other and the two men have identical briefcases likewise before Tyler crashes the car the film shows Jack getting in on the driver's side and scooching over but afterwards he's then dragged out of the driver's side on top of this when Jack answers the phone the noise of Tyler and Marla having horrible sex instantly stops earlier before then Tyler returns Jack's call from a payphone but a sticker on the machine reads no incoming calls allowed and that's just the start as well so feel free to expand on this entry in the comments below number 11 the differences between the novel and the film roll script is remarkably faithful to the original novel but there are still key differences between the two the ending has the most significant changes though in the novel Tyler plans to destroy the building he's it making himself a kind of martyr in the process Marla and a collection of support group members try to reason with the narrator but the bomb simply fails to go off and then he shoots himself instead the movie version obviously has Tyler acting with far grander more political motives tackling several credit-card company officers to eliminate their books and give America a clean slate in the book though the narrator wakes up in a psychiatric hospital although he believes himself to be in heaven and that his doctor is actually God number 10 the lost art of subliminal messaging we've talked about the subliminal Brad's before and everyone knows about the penis frame spliced into the end of the movie and on top of this everyone also knows about the fact that on the original Fight Club DVD following these standard piracy warnings a one-second long subversive message from Tyler Durden appears however Fincher actually wanted to do more he wanted to splice subliminal images into the title cards at the beginning of the film but neither Foxx Norwegian see pictures would allow him to mess with their logos however think she got a mess around a little more on the 10th anniversary blu-ray version of the film where the menu for a Drew Barrymore rom-com never been kissed appears for a good 15 seconds before the real menu for Fight Club comes up over time the towers they blow off were based on real buildings of course the final scene where they blow up all of the buildings isn't real not just the explosions but the skyline itself however in the classic framing of the shot with Jack and Marla holding hands you can see the twin Century Plaza towers in the center with the st. Regis Hotel on the right and the flocs Plaza tower to the left in the foreground all of which are in totally different locations to each other in real life the ladder by the way also doubled as the Nakatomi Plaza in diehard so there's an extra fact via what's interesting though is that they're all buildings owned at that time anywhere but the Fox conglomerate it's not just some Simpsons desk middle finger to the parent company either the practical consideration was that threats of litigation might arise should they blow up real buildings owned by third party saw they decided to play it safe no Bret there's a reason they trashed the Beatle during their brainstorming sessions over the script in the development stage Pitt and Norton bonded over one specific loathing of Generation X for a boomer icon gone mad the new updated Volkswagen Beetle had debuted in 1997 a middle wave of nostalgia for the 60s and 70s and fight clubs two stars headed it with a passion the car had been a key symbol of 60s youth culture but the radicals at the 60s had become the bosses and gatekeepers of the 90s in their minds this kind of packaging of authentic culture as in in authentic marketing experience was exactly what Fight Club was kicking against and that's the reason why they insisted on one of the cars that Tyler and Jack beat to hell with bats be a New Beetle number seven Tyler and mala have bullet time sex now everyone knows that Pitt and Carter took three days recording the sex noises that bug the hell out of Jack what you might not know however is that the sex scene is computer-generated or at least shot and enhanced in fact it was created using the exact same revolutionary bullet time technique pioneered by The Matrix still cameras had been set up to surround the bed each recording a single image in sequence which would then edit together and enhanced with CG apparently this represents the first photorealistic CGI sex scene in a film which which is nice I guess number six Brad Pitt didn't ship his own tooth for the film one of the perennial bits of misinformation that still flies around about Fight Club is that Pitt had a tooth on more than one tooth chipped in order to play a Tyler Durden the truth of course is much less dramatic than that Pitt likes to be authentic but he's not method his tooth was already chipped and had been capped some years before all he did for Fight Club was half a cap removed to reflect some measure of imperfection in the character Fox paid for the dental work required to refit the cap after filming but only on the condition that Pitt would be shirtless in at least two scenes in the actual movie which in my opinion I think they got their money's worth number five the production caused problems with locals the mammoth Fight Club shoot included 200 locations in addition to studio shooting which inevitably caused some friction with the locals however during nice shooting at the location of the Paris treehouse director of photography Jeff Crowe newirth had floated lights on helium balloons above the house in order to get the lighting he needed funnily enough though these lights ended up causing a number of reports of UFO sightings in the local area which prompted a visit from the local sheriff's department to get to the bottom of what the hell was going on and before all the guys had a hand in the script although jimal's has sole credit for the screenplay he wasn't the only person to have input into the writing of the movie while the project was in the later stages of development Fincher Norton and Pitt made frequent trips to meet with Andrew Kevin Walker the writer of Finch's seven a few years earlier who provided uncredited revisions here and there WG air rules state that uncredited means uncredited though they couldn't even include a thank you to Walker in the credits or as a gesture then she named the three detectives in the last third of the movie after him number three the house at Paris Street doesn't exist so Tyler Durden is a dissociative personality Jack's evil twin for lack of a better term but he's not the only thing in the movie that isn't real although the paper street name is in reference to in dialog Fincher makes she with the audience knows what it is by visually showing it the thing is in mapmaking terminology paper streets are roads that only exist on maps not in real life they're made to trap people duplicating the map without permission from the copyright holders not only that but when Tyler and Jack a screening potential Project Mayhem members on the front porch we see the address of the paper Street house by the door one be when the address on Tyler's business card was 537 this is a format usually used with apartment all hotel room numbers as well and Tyler even says they give crappy basement apartment letters instead of numbers meaning this house doesn't exist at least not how it looks in the movie number 2 Marla singer isn't real either Marla offset stylist style throughout chants marking shares rings of fur court she lives in a hotel as well as Jack almost certainly does when Tyler meet sir he struts and grins but never says a word which is odd for a man who never stops talking otherwise like why she walks out into traffic without anyone slowing down all reacting this combined with other evidence makes one thing clear Marla doesn't exist either she's into the alternate personality I mean remember that classic shot at the end with the two holding hands without trousers on wearing a long court Jack kind of mirrors her perfectly and yeah you might think that the restaurant scene where a waiter appears to take varlas order plays against this but how many other times in the third act did we see insanely loyal fight clubbers across the country humor their leaders insanity number one where is my mind so if Marla is potentially as much a figment as Tyler then what else is in the movie that we haven't been spoon-fed well logically if the house at paper Street is all in Jack's head and so is Project Mayhem as how can they occupy a house that doesn't exist Jack spends a long time asleep in the movie ie with Tyler in charge while convalescing from his head injury we know this because the wound on his forehead is completely healed when he comes downstairs to find the house being used as a paramilitary best if the house is in his head then then now his brain is round with potential new personalities nameless and identically dressed and Jack falls further aware so uh Celeste wants it you guys think down the comments below are there any cool facts that I am pissed off here and are you gonna give Fight Club another watch on its 20th anniversary either way while you down there could be give us a like share subscribe and head over to what coach.com from our list Sun news like this every single day even if you don't though I mean Josh thank you for watching and I'll see you soon you

Channel: WhatCulture

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Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 04 2020