1
00:00:05,298 --> 00:00:06,508
<i>(man)</i> David Fincher.

2
00:00:06,591 --> 00:00:12,931
<i>(David)</i> So, originally we tried to get,
I think, ILM to do the new Fox logo.

3
00:00:13,848 --> 00:00:16,643
It was being done
while we were doing <i>Alien 3,</i>

4
00:00:16,726 --> 00:00:19,229
and we were trying to get the digital files

5
00:00:19,437 --> 00:00:25,944
so that we could put some
subliminal Tylerisms into the Fox logo.

6
00:00:26,069 --> 00:00:29,113
Actually, I went to Arnon
after the thing and said:

7
00:00:29,197 --> 00:00:32,825
"Please let me redo the Regency logo."

8
00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:40,074
5 days of Hacking / Camping / Lectures
Join May Contain Hackers: MCH2022.org

9
00:00:43,628 --> 00:00:47,632
So the opening title sequence
was supposed to be

10
00:00:47,757 --> 00:00:52,637
starting inside the fear centre
of Edward Norton's brain,

11
00:00:52,762 --> 00:00:56,224
and the electricity that's
running through it

12
00:00:56,307 --> 00:01:01,688
is like photoelectrical stimuli
that's running through his brain.

13
00:01:01,771 --> 00:01:07,694
These are supposed to be fear-based
impulses, and we're pulling through.

14
00:01:07,777 --> 00:01:11,135
We're changing scales the whole
time, so we're

15
00:01:11,160 --> 00:01:14,016
just starting at,
like, the size of a...

16
00:01:14,242 --> 00:01:17,370
you know, a dendrite,
or whatever these things are.

17
00:01:17,453 --> 00:01:21,916
We're pulling back through
the frontal lobes, and we're gonna exit.

18
00:01:22,000 --> 00:01:25,336
We go into this,
there's this whole black section in there

19
00:01:25,420 --> 00:01:28,506
where it's just like
little particles going by,

20
00:01:28,590 --> 00:01:33,595
we've left the brain, and we're now
moving to the skull casing.

21
00:01:33,678 --> 00:01:38,224
This is inside the skull
where Arnon's name appears.

22
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He's actually inside the...
the skull of... inside bone,

23
00:01:43,896 --> 00:01:47,025
which, apparently, there's fluid in.
I didn't know that.

24
00:01:47,108 --> 00:01:51,195
And we pull out through this clogged pore
in Edward's face.

25
00:01:51,279 --> 00:01:55,742
I remember showing him... The first time
we showed him the rough test of this,

26
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he was, like, "My face is not that dirty."

27
00:01:58,453 --> 00:02:04,709
And I said, you know, "This is all based on
actual photographs of your skin."

28
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But I wanted to do this...

29
00:02:11,549 --> 00:02:16,429
If there's ever a chance
for a <i>Fight Club</i> ride at Universal Studios,

30
00:02:16,512 --> 00:02:21,976
this is gonna be it,
the brain ride, flying down Edward's nose,

31
00:02:22,060 --> 00:02:27,815
and seeing all the little crusty scabs
at the end of his nostrils.

32
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The shot where the camera tilts down
and falls away from the skyscraper,

33
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and then goes through the street,
and goes into the subterranean parking,

34
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then across the street
into the other parking,

35
00:02:52,965 --> 00:02:56,928
was kind of something
that we hit on late in the film.

36
00:02:57,053 --> 00:03:03,518
We were trying to come up with ideas
for ways to show his thought process,

37
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his kind of manic dissociative state.

38
00:03:08,856 --> 00:03:11,109
So we had this idea we were gonna do...

39
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We knew we were gonna do
the whole kind of tour through his kitchen

40
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and show how the whole kitchen had filled
up with gas, and how his apartment...

41
00:03:20,743 --> 00:03:24,455
some kind of logical explanation
for how his apartment exploded.

42
00:03:24,580 --> 00:03:29,293
And when we started seeing the tests for
it, we thought, "We gotta do more of this."

43
00:03:29,377 --> 00:03:32,171
There has to be
a couple of other times in the movie

44
00:03:32,296 --> 00:03:38,386
where we see kind of how quickly
he thinks, his thought process.

45
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When we saw the photogrammetry
tests of the kitchen stuff,

46
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we started thinking, "Wow."

47
00:03:44,684 --> 00:03:48,938
We could really open the movie
on the 31st floor of this building,

48
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then go out the window
and drop all the way down,

49
00:03:51,315 --> 00:03:54,527
and see the bombs, see the jerry cans,

50
00:03:55,027 --> 00:03:58,364
go through the side of the van
and across the street into another.

51
00:03:58,448 --> 00:04:05,496
So that became sort of a little... not
thematic, but it was a little bookended...

52
00:04:05,580 --> 00:04:11,961
kind of a precursor
to how crazy his thought process is.

53
00:04:20,511 --> 00:04:25,433
There's another example of it
the galactic tour of garbage.

54
00:04:41,032 --> 00:04:45,036
This is Zach Grenier.
He's a really terrific actor.

55
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I don't think he appreciated us saying:

56
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"Oh, you're perfect for
the smarmy boss's role."

57
00:04:52,376 --> 00:04:56,589
I don't know if anybody likes being perfect
for the smarmy boss's role.

58
00:04:56,672 --> 00:05:02,053
But I always liked the idea of the boss
being this guy who's not...

59
00:05:02,178 --> 00:05:06,849
He's trying to kind of be empathetic to
this, you know, guy who works for him.

60
00:05:06,933 --> 00:05:08,601
But he doesn't want to
get involved enough

61
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to truly find out how deranged he is.

62
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So he's caught between
a rock and a hard place.

63
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It's only later in the movie that he realizes

64
00:05:17,026 --> 00:05:21,572
that this guy's
a disgruntled postal worker in the making.

65
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The Fürni catalogue idea was, again,
some kind of visual representation

66
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of this, you know, the idea that we're
a by-product of the armor that we select

67
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to let people know who we are,

68
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and that that's not just clothes
and cars and, you know, hairstyles,

69
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but it's also the furniture that you pick,

70
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whether or not it's, you know, sort of
Southwestern, or Pottery Barn, or Ikea.

71
00:05:53,187 --> 00:05:56,274
In this case, it's Ikea.

72
00:06:07,076 --> 00:06:08,995
Funny thing when we...

73
00:06:09,120 --> 00:06:14,625
I got asked to do some liner notes
for the record that the Dust Brothers did.

74
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And I got called by Fox Legal
and they said...

75
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'Cause I'd written this thing
in the liner notes that said

76
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the Dust Brothers are talented, and witty
and brilliant and all these things,

77
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and the little quote ended saying, "They
don't have a stick of Ikea between them."

78
00:06:34,604 --> 00:06:39,734
And we got a call from Fox Legal
saying we can't use these liner notes

79
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'cause it's corporate disparagement.

80
00:06:42,361 --> 00:06:47,074
And I remember asking
if they'd seen the movie.

81
00:06:47,158 --> 00:06:51,162
"Have you seen the movie? Do you
know what corporate disparagement is?"

82
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But they were very nervous
about Ikea being upset.

83
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Thus far,
we haven't heard anything from them.

84
00:06:57,418 --> 00:07:01,339
Actually, I got a call -
"Can you rewrite this thing?"

85
00:07:01,464 --> 00:07:03,424
"Does it have to say...

86
00:07:03,507 --> 00:07:06,636
"Can it just say they don't have
a stick of prefabricated furniture?"

87
00:07:06,719 --> 00:07:10,640
I said, "It's a joke. It's in the movie.
You have to understand that."

88
00:07:10,723 --> 00:07:15,353
And they said, "Well, we've called them,
and John King swears to us

89
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"that they do have a lot of Ikea furniture."

90
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And I just said, "You're not understanding
what we're talking about here."

91
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So they ended up killing the liner notes.

92
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Meat Loaf. I was wondering who...

93
00:07:49,887 --> 00:07:53,391
Bob was always
a favorite character of mine in the book

94
00:07:53,474 --> 00:07:59,563
and I couldn't figure out
who should play this guy, like, who...

95
00:07:59,647 --> 00:08:02,650
And I was watching
<i>VH1 Behind the Scenes,</i>

96
00:08:02,733 --> 00:08:04,652
and it was a whole thing on Meat Loaf.

97
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And I remember watching this thing going,
"This guy is so sweet."

98
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He has this incredible sweetness.

99
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I always remember him,
you know, covered in sweat

100
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with long hair
kind of matted to his face, you know,

101
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bellowing at the top of his voice.

102
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So I'd always picture,
and, obviously, the <i>Rocky Horror</i> images,

103
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this kind of Tasmanian devil
on a motorcycle.

104
00:08:28,592 --> 00:08:33,514
But I saw this special and I thought, "Wow,
there's something amazing about him."

105
00:08:33,597 --> 00:08:38,227
I remember saying to Edward, "What do
you think of Meat Loaf?" And he was, like:

106
00:08:38,310 --> 00:08:41,439
"Dave, I hope you're not
gonna populate this whole movie

107
00:08:41,522 --> 00:08:44,025
"with your music-video friends."

108
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And he came in to read,
and I think he read for about 20 seconds,

109
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and he did this embrace,
and he started doing his high-pitched...

110
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he does this higher voice
than he has in real life.

111
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It's a very little voice, it's up here
'cause his testicles have been lost.

112
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And I remember Edward
just howling with laughter.

113
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Literally, at about 25 seconds,

114
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we'd got through
one page and Edward looked at me:

115
00:09:11,385 --> 00:09:18,059
"He's perfect. We gotta get him."
And so we offered him the job right there.

116
00:09:18,559 --> 00:09:23,898
And we tried to get these stamps made up
for what a face would look like

117
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so we could just stamp these shirts
so that all the shirts would look the same.

118
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They never looked right. So we ended up
having to paint them on the day.

119
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When I first read the book...

120
00:09:50,549 --> 00:09:53,594
Actually, when we first started
writing the screenplay,

121
00:09:53,677 --> 00:09:56,055
when Jim Uhls
was writing the screenplay,

122
00:09:56,180 --> 00:10:02,812
I was very concerned about
who was gonna be watching these dailies

123
00:10:02,895 --> 00:10:08,067
because we were gonna be shooting
support groups to the terminally ill,

124
00:10:08,150 --> 00:10:14,365
and the humor in the movie, for those of
us who think there is humor in the movie,

125
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comes out of the voice-over and how he
comments cynically on his surroundings.

126
00:10:19,245 --> 00:10:21,914
He's very... he has
a very sardonic sense of humor,

127
00:10:23,415 --> 00:10:25,126
the Edward Norton character.

128
00:10:25,209 --> 00:10:27,586
And I remember thinking,

129
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"We'd better have a really
good producer on the lot at Fox

130
00:10:31,382 --> 00:10:35,052
who can walk these executives
through these dailies,

131
00:10:35,136 --> 00:10:39,557
because they're gonna see
about five weeks of shooting

132
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that is just gonna be a bunch of people
with shaved heads, crying."

133
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One of my favorite movies as a kid
was <i>The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.</i>

134
00:11:03,747 --> 00:11:10,004
I always loved the little flights of fancy
in the movie, his little dream sequences.

135
00:11:10,087 --> 00:11:14,008
I always saw the penguin sequence
as being one of those little moments

136
00:11:14,091 --> 00:11:19,722
where you just kind of say,
"Yep, things can get this surreal."

137
00:11:19,805 --> 00:11:21,807
"Get ready."

138
00:11:25,060 --> 00:11:28,814
Marla's entrance is
one of my favorite moments in the movie.

139
00:11:28,898 --> 00:11:34,695
I just love the way she kind of takes
the stage. She was so funny.

140
00:11:35,279 --> 00:11:38,073
She had these boots on that were clogs.

141
00:11:38,157 --> 00:11:40,993
It was like a Clydesdale
coming up the stairs.

142
00:11:41,118 --> 00:11:45,289
You could hear this woman coming from,
like, three floors below.

143
00:11:45,372 --> 00:11:48,167
We wanted to make that
a part of Marla's character.

144
00:11:48,250 --> 00:11:53,047
Everywhere she went, she enters a room,
like, five minutes before she gets there.

145
00:11:53,130 --> 00:11:56,050
Clomp, clomp, clomp.

146
00:11:57,468 --> 00:12:02,139
And this is a joke
that was often lost on preview audiences.

147
00:12:02,223 --> 00:12:08,979
They didn't really understand
the sickle-cell anemia gag.

148
00:12:12,191 --> 00:12:16,237
I love this moment.
I love her as this kind of...

149
00:12:18,155 --> 00:12:24,828
you know, the sort of perverse Goth
version of a Tony Scott femme

150
00:12:24,912 --> 00:12:28,123
with the sunglasses on inside, and she's
sort of sleek,

151
00:12:28,207 --> 00:12:32,169
but just a little teeny bit crusty.

152
00:12:32,920 --> 00:12:35,214
She smokes so well.

153
00:12:36,465 --> 00:12:40,344
There's another example
of what we call the "subliminal Brads".

154
00:12:40,427 --> 00:12:45,599
There's four or five shots
in the first reel before we meet Brad

155
00:12:45,683 --> 00:12:48,185
where Brad appears for one frame.

156
00:12:48,269 --> 00:12:54,108
And I always loved the idea of... There was
a book in the '70s called <i>Subliminal Sex.</i>

157
00:12:54,191 --> 00:12:59,321
And it was supposed to be sort of
an exposé on the advertising industry

158
00:12:59,405 --> 00:13:04,952
and the use of subliminal imagery, the
idea of airbrushing skulls and crossbones

159
00:13:05,035 --> 00:13:09,331
and death imagery into ice for close-ups,

160
00:13:09,415 --> 00:13:13,502
for, you know, Johnnie Walker ads
that'll be in <i>Sports Illustrated.</i>

161
00:13:13,585 --> 00:13:19,633
I always loved that idea and I loved,
thematically, the way Chuck had this...

162
00:13:19,717 --> 00:13:23,053
Tyler is a character
who abuses subliminal imagery

163
00:13:23,137 --> 00:13:28,809
to his own kind of... morbid sensibilities.

164
00:13:29,435 --> 00:13:31,895
But I loved the idea of him...

165
00:13:31,979 --> 00:13:37,484
Edward's kind of trying to make peace with
the world, and trying to figure his way,

166
00:13:37,568 --> 00:13:41,155
and there's this character
who's about to come into his life

167
00:13:41,238 --> 00:13:44,033
who just keeps appearing
for one nanosecond.

168
00:13:44,116 --> 00:13:48,037
He's just there,
and he's always sort of impatient, like:

169
00:13:48,120 --> 00:13:53,542
"When are you gonna create me? I can
solve a lot of these problems for you."

170
00:13:53,625 --> 00:13:56,545
He's always sort of exasperated.

171
00:14:11,727 --> 00:14:14,188
I never took advertising seriously enough

172
00:14:14,271 --> 00:14:19,777
to worry if there is
any moral ambiguity about...

173
00:14:19,860 --> 00:14:28,452
I mean, I think that this film probably more
accurately depicts my take on advertising,

174
00:14:28,577 --> 00:14:31,789
and its, you know...

175
00:14:31,914 --> 00:14:36,335
and what it provides for society
than any of the advertising I did.

176
00:14:36,418 --> 00:14:42,007
But, you know, you...
you work where you can, you know?

177
00:14:42,132 --> 00:14:44,134
I'd rather have started off in movies,

178
00:14:44,218 --> 00:14:48,389
but nobody was that interested
in hiring me to make movies early on,

179
00:14:48,472 --> 00:14:56,063
so I did music videos and commercials as a
way to just, you know, play with the tools.

180
00:15:08,075 --> 00:15:11,286
We had an idea early on
that one of the images for the poster

181
00:15:11,370 --> 00:15:16,166
might be just all these stickers
that say, "Hello, my name is"...

182
00:15:16,250 --> 00:15:22,506
these stickers that all these guys wear
in the support groups, the name tags.

183
00:15:39,189 --> 00:15:41,358
I love her topknot that she always has.

184
00:15:41,442 --> 00:15:44,361
She always has this
little kind of shark's fin

185
00:15:44,445 --> 00:15:46,780
that kind of pokes up above the frame.

186
00:15:46,864 --> 00:15:52,995
It's very difficult to frame Helena
because her face is so beautiful and round

187
00:15:53,078 --> 00:15:55,914
and she has this kind of perfect little head.

188
00:15:55,998 --> 00:16:00,127
And then, you know, I think
Michael and Frida came up with this idea

189
00:16:00,210 --> 00:16:03,547
for her always having this, like,
little spout at the top that's... <i>(laughs)</i>

190
00:16:03,630 --> 00:16:08,135
She becomes a real cinematic conundrum.

191
00:16:08,218 --> 00:16:14,850
It's very difficult to frame her face because
you're always trying to include this thing.

192
00:16:24,568 --> 00:16:28,113
Edward Norton has
some of the best bags under his eyes.

193
00:16:28,197 --> 00:16:32,367
I mean, just naturally. Just, as a person,
he always has these circles.

194
00:16:32,451 --> 00:16:37,039
He was perfect for this.
He's almost like Buster Keaton.

195
00:16:49,968 --> 00:16:55,057
I was sent a book... I was sent <i>the</i> book
by Josh Donen, who's an agent...

196
00:16:55,140 --> 00:16:57,392
who's now one of my agents at CAA,

197
00:16:57,476 --> 00:17:01,021
who was a producer,
who had a deal here at Fox.

198
00:17:01,104 --> 00:17:04,858
He called me and said, "I'm sending you
this book, read it tonight."

199
00:17:04,942 --> 00:17:08,320
And I was, like,
"I can't read a book tonight."

200
00:17:08,403 --> 00:17:12,574
I was finishing <i>The Game,</i> and I was
working, you know, 12-hour days cutting.

201
00:17:12,658 --> 00:17:17,287
And... you know, I wasn't that inclined.

202
00:17:17,371 --> 00:17:20,290
I'm not the kind of person
who reads a lot, anyway.

203
00:17:20,374 --> 00:17:23,210
He said,
"No, you can read this book in a night."

204
00:17:23,293 --> 00:17:27,714
I said to him, "Give me a reason
why I should read this book."

205
00:17:27,798 --> 00:17:31,385
He said, "There's a scene in this book
where this guy, this anarchist,

206
00:17:31,468 --> 00:17:36,974
"who pisses in soup and splices single
frames of pornography into family films,

207
00:17:37,057 --> 00:17:41,228
"takes a convenience-store worker
in the middle of the night."

208
00:17:41,311 --> 00:17:45,065
"Brings him out to the parking lot
and puts a gun to his head,

209
00:17:45,148 --> 00:17:47,484
"and asks him what
he wanted to do with his life."

210
00:17:47,568 --> 00:17:50,070
"And the guy says
he wanted to be a veterinarian,

211
00:17:50,153 --> 00:17:51,822
"but the school was too tough."

212
00:17:51,905 --> 00:17:55,784
"And the guy cocks the gun
and says, 'Give me your wallet.""

213
00:17:55,867 --> 00:17:59,204
"And he says, 'I have your wallet.
I know where you live.""

214
00:17:59,288 --> 00:18:02,499
""If you're not working to become a vet
in six weeks, you're dead.""

215
00:18:02,583 --> 00:18:07,004
And I just thought, "Okay,
I gotta read this book. Send it over."

216
00:18:07,129 --> 00:18:10,632
Next morning, I called and said,
"How do we get involved in this?"

217
00:18:10,716 --> 00:18:13,802
And he said,
"Well, Fox just bought the material,

218
00:18:13,885 --> 00:18:18,098
but you can go in and sort of
pitch your version of it to Laura Ziskin."

219
00:18:18,181 --> 00:18:25,439
And I'd met Laura before, but I didn't
understand. I could not fathom the idea

220
00:18:25,522 --> 00:18:29,234
that 20th Century Fox
would want to make this movie.

221
00:18:29,318 --> 00:18:32,696
I went in and said, "I want to take
the book, make it into a movie."

222
00:18:32,779 --> 00:18:37,618
"I don't want to change it much. I want to
try to maintain as much of this voice."

223
00:18:37,701 --> 00:18:44,166
I think, ultimately, that the strongest thing
the film has going for it is Chuck's voice.

224
00:18:44,249 --> 00:18:49,713
He's truly got his own take on things.

225
00:18:49,796 --> 00:18:54,009
I went in and I basically said that,
and we kind of made this deal.

226
00:18:54,092 --> 00:18:57,971
I said, "I'm not interested
in getting involved in a big situation

227
00:18:58,055 --> 00:19:02,684
"where junior development people
read the script and we get these notes."

228
00:19:02,768 --> 00:19:05,771
"What I'll happily do
is not take any money,

229
00:19:05,854 --> 00:19:08,982
"and I'll work with the writer
that we can mutually select,

230
00:19:09,066 --> 00:19:12,778
"and we will come back
whenever we're done."

231
00:19:13,654 --> 00:19:20,744
"And we'll bring you a script, and a budget,
and a cast, and storyboards for the film."

232
00:19:21,161 --> 00:19:25,040
"You'll have an idea of the film
that we want to make,

233
00:19:25,123 --> 00:19:26,917
"and you can decide if you're in."

234
00:19:27,000 --> 00:19:32,923
"I'm really not looking to get involved in
some kind of long-term back and forth."

235
00:19:33,048 --> 00:19:38,136
And she was great. She said,
"Fine. That's sounds great."

236
00:19:38,261 --> 00:19:44,518
So we went away, about a year later
came back, and gave them the script,

237
00:19:44,601 --> 00:19:46,186
gave them the storyboards.

238
00:19:46,269 --> 00:19:51,274
It was, like, the size of a bible
or a giant unabridged dictionary.

239
00:19:51,358 --> 00:19:53,235
Boom, put this whole package down.

240
00:19:53,318 --> 00:19:55,737
And I said, "It's Brad Pitt
and Edward Norton.

241
00:19:55,821 --> 00:19:58,240
"We don't know who the girl is yet."

242
00:19:58,323 --> 00:20:02,035
"Call me if this is a movie
you want to make."

243
00:20:02,119 --> 00:20:04,955
And they called and said,
"Yeah. Let's go do it."

244
00:20:05,038 --> 00:20:06,665
To their credit, I gotta say,

245
00:20:06,748 --> 00:20:13,880
I've never been involved in a movie
where things were not second-guessed.

246
00:20:13,964 --> 00:20:17,134
When we got into the screening process,
for the audience,

247
00:20:17,217 --> 00:20:22,013
there were definite issues about length,
you know, most of which I had myself.

248
00:20:22,097 --> 00:20:24,307
If I could make the movie shorter, I would.

249
00:20:24,391 --> 00:20:29,062
But given my intimate knowledge of all
the material, I couldn't get it any shorter.

250
00:20:29,146 --> 00:20:33,525
I probably could now. If I could take a year
off and walk away and go, I could.

251
00:20:33,608 --> 00:20:36,194
But at that time,
those were the only concerns.

252
00:20:36,278 --> 00:20:40,824
I think that Bill and Arnon and Laura really,
from the day they first saw it,

253
00:20:40,907 --> 00:20:44,828
really said, "No, we like it the way it is."

254
00:20:44,911 --> 00:20:51,168
"If you can make it more user-friendly,
great, and if you can't, great."

255
00:21:30,916 --> 00:21:35,545
The movie was supposed to come out
in summer and we pushed back till fall

256
00:21:35,629 --> 00:21:38,590
after, I think, our final test screening.

257
00:21:41,176 --> 00:21:45,180
And a lot of people speculated that it was
because of the Columbine incident.

258
00:21:45,263 --> 00:21:52,896
But, in actuality, Bill Mechanic and Arnon
Milchan both called me one day and said:

259
00:21:52,979 --> 00:21:56,233
"If you had your druthers,
would you like to do more work?"

260
00:21:56,316 --> 00:22:00,695
And of course, I'd always like to do
more work. So I said, "Yeah, I'd love to."

261
00:22:00,779 --> 00:22:05,242
And they said, "How much time... within
reason, how much time can you use?"

262
00:22:05,325 --> 00:22:09,663
And I said, "If I could have another
three or four weeks, it would be great."

263
00:22:09,746 --> 00:22:13,917
And so they spent the 650, 700,000 dollars

264
00:22:14,042 --> 00:22:20,465
to give me that time to make the movie
better and take a few more frames out.

265
00:22:22,342 --> 00:22:25,595
But nobody balked.

266
00:22:28,473 --> 00:22:31,726
It's difficult to make a film
if you don't have people saying:

267
00:22:31,810 --> 00:22:34,688
"No, no, no.
We knew what we were getting into,"

268
00:22:34,771 --> 00:22:38,400
'cause there's a lot of room
for interpretation.

269
00:22:38,483 --> 00:22:40,610
A lot of people come back and say:

270
00:22:40,694 --> 00:22:44,197
"We knew it was gonna be
about support groups and cancer victims,

271
00:22:44,281 --> 00:22:47,534
but we never knew
it was gonna be quite like this."

272
00:22:47,617 --> 00:22:50,078
"Can you soften the blow?"

273
00:22:50,161 --> 00:22:56,710
But I never got any of that. It was actually
the best experience I've ever had.

274
00:22:57,961 --> 00:22:59,588
Especially with this material.

275
00:22:59,671 --> 00:23:03,967
I could not have imagined
we would get the support we got.

276
00:23:31,036 --> 00:23:37,334
This is funny. This is the scene where we
meet Brad for the first time, on the plane.

277
00:23:37,417 --> 00:23:40,337
I love this scene.
I love the way it was written.

278
00:23:40,420 --> 00:23:42,005
This scene doesn't exist in the book.

279
00:23:42,088 --> 00:23:44,758
In the book, they meet on a nude beach.

280
00:23:44,841 --> 00:23:48,261
And I thought, "Hm."
As much as I'd like to shoot that,

281
00:23:48,345 --> 00:23:51,431
and I think that that would be
a really uncomfortable place

282
00:23:51,514 --> 00:23:54,768
for an audience to meet characters,
I don't think we can do...

283
00:23:54,851 --> 00:23:59,022
It's all about a guy
who's flying from here to there,

284
00:23:59,147 --> 00:24:04,402
and him being out of this time zone
and insomniacal.

285
00:24:04,486 --> 00:24:07,572
So we gotta kind of
set this meeting scene on an airplane.

286
00:24:07,697 --> 00:24:10,784
Jim came up with the scene.
I always loved the way it read.

287
00:24:10,867 --> 00:24:13,954
I always had this nagging feeling
in the back of my head

288
00:24:14,037 --> 00:24:16,665
that it wasn't gonna come off.

289
00:24:16,748 --> 00:24:19,542
There are certain scenes
that you work and polish.

290
00:24:19,626 --> 00:24:25,715
You try to get them as tight
and as concise and funny or whatever.

291
00:24:25,840 --> 00:24:29,260
I remember shooting the master,
and the camera kind of eases over

292
00:24:29,386 --> 00:24:33,139
and reveals Brad behind Edward
as he wakes up.

293
00:24:33,223 --> 00:24:37,394
And, you know, it's really the master,
the two-shot of them.

294
00:24:37,519 --> 00:24:43,358
Take eight into it, it was like...
Not even looking at the monitor,

295
00:24:43,441 --> 00:24:47,278
just hearing it over the headphones,
it was, like, "This is great."

296
00:24:47,362 --> 00:24:56,162
Brad was completely that aberrant
creature that you meet that's fascinating.

297
00:24:56,246 --> 00:25:01,209
And Edward was so perfectly:

298
00:25:01,292 --> 00:25:04,212
"I just woke up
and I'm not sure what you're saying."

299
00:25:04,295 --> 00:25:07,173
There was this great
kind of half-step behind.

300
00:25:07,257 --> 00:25:11,845
It's one of those moments where you go,
"These are the perfect guys for this."

301
00:25:11,928 --> 00:25:15,056
"It just worked out."

302
00:25:37,412 --> 00:25:41,958
The book takes place
in Wilmington, Delaware,

303
00:25:42,042 --> 00:25:47,714
because that's, like, a headquarters
for a lot of credit card companies.

304
00:25:48,381 --> 00:25:52,302
And we wanted to make the film
take place in Wilmington, Delaware,

305
00:25:52,385 --> 00:25:56,097
but there's some kind of clearance issues.

306
00:25:56,181 --> 00:26:03,855
If it's a specific town, then you have to
get clearances for specific names, streets,

307
00:26:03,938 --> 00:26:05,815
apartment buildings.

308
00:26:05,899 --> 00:26:08,568
We decided to,
in the interest of clearances,

309
00:26:08,651 --> 00:26:14,074
which has really become just the bane of
my existence, the whole legal clearances...

310
00:26:14,157 --> 00:26:17,786
I think there was actually
a situation with Marla Singer

311
00:26:17,869 --> 00:26:20,830
where, when they did
the name clearance on Marla Singer,

312
00:26:20,914 --> 00:26:25,460
they do this, like, global search,
or at least, you know, the United States,

313
00:26:25,543 --> 00:26:27,879
they did a search for Marla Singer.

314
00:26:27,962 --> 00:26:31,674
Had they found five or six Marla Singers
or a thousand Marla Singers,

315
00:26:31,758 --> 00:26:37,097
it wouldn't have been an issue. Somebody
says, "I'm being disparaged in this movie."

316
00:26:37,180 --> 00:26:42,268
"In this chain-smoking person addicted
to support groups, you're disparaging me."

317
00:26:42,352 --> 00:26:47,607
But if there's a thousand, you can always
say, "It's not you. Prove that it's you."

318
00:26:47,690 --> 00:26:50,777
And so you don't have to
get any kind of clearances.

319
00:26:50,860 --> 00:26:56,533
But there's only one Marla Singer in
the United States, in Illinois somewhere.

320
00:26:56,616 --> 00:27:01,329
And as soon as attorneys get involved,
the whole thing gets completely fucked up.

321
00:27:01,412 --> 00:27:05,166
Somebody told her there was this book,
and that we're making a movie

322
00:27:05,250 --> 00:27:07,418
based on this character with her name.

323
00:27:07,502 --> 00:27:10,672
Then her attorneys are calling,
and we had to pay her off.

324
00:27:10,755 --> 00:27:15,343
So it becomes this big issue
if you set a movie in a specific place.

325
00:27:15,426 --> 00:27:20,056
You have to get specific clearances
based on... Like, the Pearson Towers.

326
00:27:20,140 --> 00:27:22,016
If they say it's Delaware,

327
00:27:22,100 --> 00:27:25,895
you have to get permission
if there's a Pearson anything in Delaware.

328
00:27:26,020 --> 00:27:30,817
So we just said it was,
like, any city, anywhere.

329
00:27:30,900 --> 00:27:34,571
But our homage to Wilmington, Delaware
is that the...

330
00:27:34,654 --> 00:27:40,326
I believe the Delaware state motto is,
"Delaware, a place to be somebody."

331
00:27:40,410 --> 00:27:41,953
So we decided to...

332
00:27:42,078 --> 00:27:47,000
The Pearson Towers,
their little logo on their brass sign is:

333
00:27:47,083 --> 00:27:49,711
"A place to be somebody."

334
00:27:51,838 --> 00:27:54,257
We had the Delaware flag
in the background.

335
00:27:54,340 --> 00:28:00,722
The props department kept bringing the
flag and we would put it on the flagpole.

336
00:28:00,805 --> 00:28:03,600
The camera never tilts up
high enough to see it.

337
00:28:03,683 --> 00:28:08,062
But, of course, the Fox representatives
were down there on the set,

338
00:28:08,146 --> 00:28:11,357
watching the monitors,
making sure we didn't see the flag

339
00:28:11,441 --> 00:28:16,905
because then we'd have to go back
and reclear everybody's names.

340
00:28:16,988 --> 00:28:21,993
"There might be a Lou's Tavern
in Wilmington, Delaware."

341
00:29:19,342 --> 00:29:24,681
This scene, where they first have
their real, kind of, thesis scene,

342
00:29:24,764 --> 00:29:27,392
was written very late in the game.

343
00:29:27,475 --> 00:29:33,273
I think it was Andy Walker, who kind of
came in and figured this one out.

344
00:29:33,356 --> 00:29:36,025
We could never...

345
00:29:36,109 --> 00:29:42,073
we could never figure out how to sort of
begin Tyler's rant, as it were,

346
00:29:42,198 --> 00:29:47,704
his anti-consumerism... leanings.

347
00:29:47,787 --> 00:29:50,707
We could never present them
or announce them.

348
00:29:50,790 --> 00:29:55,962
And finally, we, the four of us,
Brad and Edward and Andy,

349
00:29:56,045 --> 00:30:00,133
sat down for a couple of afternoons
and just spitballed this scene.

350
00:30:00,216 --> 00:30:03,803
He came back with some pages
and we threw about half of it out.

351
00:30:03,886 --> 00:30:10,977
And then I put two cameras on them
and kind of just let them go

352
00:30:11,060 --> 00:30:15,148
so that both these angles
were being recorded at the same time,

353
00:30:15,231 --> 00:30:18,568
and we shot thousands of feet on this,

354
00:30:18,651 --> 00:30:22,030
just saying, "Okay, try to kind of
get this idea. Now try..."

355
00:30:22,113 --> 00:30:24,407
And we just sort of let them go wild.

356
00:30:24,532 --> 00:30:28,953
A great thing about using two cameras is
every time Brad does these hand gestures,

357
00:30:29,037 --> 00:30:33,416
you can see them in the other camera
and they're actually in synch,

358
00:30:33,499 --> 00:30:37,879
which is always a total nightmare
when you're doing it single-camera.

359
00:30:37,962 --> 00:30:41,799
But it was one of those scenes
where we just... DPs hate this.

360
00:30:41,883 --> 00:30:45,261
But we went in and said,
"Here are the two cameras."

361
00:30:45,386 --> 00:30:50,350
"They're both on 35s
and bring lots of film."

362
00:30:50,433 --> 00:30:55,271
I think we shot, like, 37,
38 takes of this scene.

363
00:30:55,396 --> 00:31:00,735
Probably shot 40,000 ft that day,

364
00:31:00,818 --> 00:31:03,571
which is a lot.

365
00:31:25,676 --> 00:31:28,304
This is probably
my favorite scene in the movie.

366
00:31:28,388 --> 00:31:34,394
I think the first punch
that Edward delivers as the narrator,

367
00:31:34,477 --> 00:31:40,316
at first, it was always a question like,
"Can you bring the audience to this?"

368
00:31:40,400 --> 00:31:43,069
"Can it be an innocent enough thing?"

369
00:31:43,152 --> 00:31:47,156
I guess there are undercurrents of
sadomasochism throughout the movie,

370
00:31:47,240 --> 00:31:55,998
but they're supposed to be the initial hook
in his cheek for Edward Norton's character.

371
00:31:56,082 --> 00:31:59,627
It's supposed to come from this very, like...

372
00:31:59,710 --> 00:32:03,923
"I've been thinking about this thing. Maybe
I'm wrong... I'm doing you a favor."

373
00:32:04,006 --> 00:32:06,509
"If you want to
spend the night at my house..."

374
00:32:06,592 --> 00:32:09,429
"Just do me this one thing
I've been thinking about."

375
00:32:09,512 --> 00:32:13,057
"I'm not sure where it's going.
I don't know what it's about,

376
00:32:13,182 --> 00:32:16,811
but if you could just hit me,
I think there's something in this."

377
00:32:16,894 --> 00:32:21,065
And I was always very concerned
that we'd be able to pull off this kind of...

378
00:32:21,149 --> 00:32:26,988
that it could come from this innocent place
of, like, you know... "Do it. Just try it."

379
00:32:28,030 --> 00:32:32,160
And that it wouldn't feel forced,
that it wouldn't feel manufactured.

380
00:32:32,243 --> 00:32:36,289
And I think it was take ten
we shot of the master,

381
00:32:36,372 --> 00:32:39,000
I remember
just almost falling out of my chair.

382
00:32:39,083 --> 00:32:42,962
It was so funny, the way
he hit Brad on the side of his head

383
00:32:43,045 --> 00:32:49,677
with that completely limp... It just looked
like two five-year-olds on a playground.

384
00:32:49,760 --> 00:32:53,473
And just this experiment,
this, like, raw experiment in...

385
00:32:53,556 --> 00:32:58,352
"Okay, I'm gonna try this."
And it just cracked me up.

386
00:32:58,436 --> 00:33:01,564
Brad's reaction to being punched
in the ear was so...

387
00:33:01,647 --> 00:33:05,651
It just seemed like... The camera
was still rolling, and this guy was...

388
00:33:05,735 --> 00:33:11,991
He was, like, "Where are the stunt guys?
Why? Why did this happen? Ouch."

389
00:33:14,118 --> 00:33:17,663
When I was 16, I used to work
in a theatre as a projectionist,

390
00:33:17,747 --> 00:33:23,377
and I worked for this guy
who literally collected, not pornography,

391
00:33:23,461 --> 00:33:26,881
but he collected the most bizarre...

392
00:33:26,964 --> 00:33:35,765
He collected frames from movies.
He had the anamorphic squeezed breasts

393
00:33:35,848 --> 00:33:39,477
from the body double in <i>Dressed To Kill.</i>

394
00:33:39,560 --> 00:33:42,939
And he had, like, Nancy Allen's panties.

395
00:33:43,022 --> 00:33:46,734
Like, a shot of the joystick in the B-25,

396
00:33:46,817 --> 00:33:49,445
and Nancy Allen's panties in <i>1941.</i>

397
00:33:49,529 --> 00:33:54,033
He had all these, like,
little tiny shavings from films.

398
00:33:54,116 --> 00:33:59,747
They weren't even like girlie magazines.
They were, like, so kind of...

399
00:34:00,873 --> 00:34:02,458
They were so innocent.

400
00:34:02,542 --> 00:34:05,086
He had this whole collection
in an envelope

401
00:34:05,169 --> 00:34:06,837
that was taped up to the window.

402
00:34:06,921 --> 00:34:10,216
I remember just seeing this collection
grow and grow and grow.

403
00:34:11,384 --> 00:34:16,097
Bizarre. But I remember reading the book
and laughing out loud because it's so true.

404
00:34:16,180 --> 00:34:23,980
Projectionists have weird little proclivities
that they, you know, expand upon.

405
00:34:24,522 --> 00:34:28,985
Nobody knew Brad was gonna do his big
jumping thing so he goes out of frame.

406
00:34:29,068 --> 00:34:32,822
But I love the idea of a character
who just leaps out of the frame

407
00:34:32,905 --> 00:34:37,368
to prepare themselves
for this really stupid shot.

408
00:34:48,838 --> 00:34:55,386
I remember we came to Long Beach
to shoot this sequence,

409
00:34:55,469 --> 00:35:02,101
and I had said, "I need just, like,
a regular old... an old beat-up car."

410
00:35:02,184 --> 00:35:04,520
"Just find me some old beat-up car."

411
00:35:04,604 --> 00:35:07,732
And we got down there
and there's this station wagon.

412
00:35:07,815 --> 00:35:11,986
I thought,
"That station wagon looks really familiar."

413
00:35:12,069 --> 00:35:15,990
And I walked up to the windshield

414
00:35:16,073 --> 00:35:21,370
and it had a sticker on it that said CRS,
it was one of the vehicles from <i>The Game.</i>

415
00:35:21,454 --> 00:35:25,416
It's actually the car that James Rebhorn

416
00:35:25,499 --> 00:35:28,502
takes Michael Douglas
into the CRS parking garage in.

417
00:35:28,586 --> 00:35:33,382
I was just, like,
"Oh, you cannot get away from the past."

418
00:36:04,914 --> 00:36:10,044
This is a house that we built in...
It's down in Long Beach at the...

419
00:36:10,127 --> 00:36:13,589
It's probably gone now.
I know the house is gone...

420
00:36:13,673 --> 00:36:18,511
It was, like, six blocks. It was gonna
be redeveloped as the new port.

421
00:36:19,053 --> 00:36:25,935
And so we got this deal on this empty lot
and we built this house. And it was wild.

422
00:36:26,018 --> 00:36:31,023
We went down there one day
to look at the progress of the house.

423
00:36:31,107 --> 00:36:36,070
It was basically, like, acres and acres
of land that's all gonna be torn down.

424
00:36:36,153 --> 00:36:40,533
There were all these, like, you know,
scrap-metal dealerships

425
00:36:40,616 --> 00:36:43,285
and car-repair places.

426
00:36:43,369 --> 00:36:46,914
And so we started building
this Victorian façade there.

427
00:36:46,997 --> 00:36:50,543
I remember one day, the sun was setting,
people were driving by.

428
00:36:50,626 --> 00:36:53,212
They could see people
constructing this house.

429
00:36:53,295 --> 00:36:57,425
And this guy rolled his window down,
and said: "I don't know if you know this,

430
00:36:57,508 --> 00:37:00,970
I don't know who sold you this land,
but they're gonna..."

431
00:37:01,053 --> 00:37:05,391
He was concerned that we'd been ripped
off, that we were building this house

432
00:37:05,474 --> 00:37:09,562
on this piece of land that was
gonna be reclaimed by the port authority.

433
00:37:09,645 --> 00:37:14,817
And we were, like, "No, no, no.
It's okay. We were aware of that."

434
00:37:37,006 --> 00:37:42,678
Michael Kaplan, who did the costumes,
brought me this photograph of Brad

435
00:37:42,762 --> 00:37:46,766
in this red leather jacket
that he found in this thrift store.

436
00:37:46,849 --> 00:37:49,482
I looked at it and thought, "Red.
It's a little

437
00:37:49,507 --> 00:37:51,920
loud." And he's, like,
"It's a Tyler thing."

438
00:37:51,979 --> 00:37:54,523
"Tyler should really be the kind of guy

439
00:37:54,607 --> 00:37:58,778
"who doesn't understand
how loud his clothing is."

440
00:37:58,861 --> 00:38:02,782
And that was Brad's take too,
he just doesn't care.

441
00:38:02,865 --> 00:38:08,913
I mean, he just... he has no idea that
wearing rust-colored polyester pants

442
00:38:08,996 --> 00:38:15,169
and tan Gucci loafers and a bright red
leather jacket is in bad taste.

443
00:38:15,252 --> 00:38:18,672
And so I kind of went along
with this thing, thinking:

444
00:38:18,756 --> 00:38:21,884
"If that's the way it's gonna be,
then that's fine."

445
00:38:21,967 --> 00:38:25,721
I remember seeing a photograph
of the Halloween parade

446
00:38:25,805 --> 00:38:28,390
on Santa Monica Boulevard in Boys Town.

447
00:38:28,474 --> 00:38:33,729
And there were, like,
25 guys in red leather jackets

448
00:38:33,813 --> 00:38:36,482
looking like Tyler Durden
as part of the parade.

449
00:38:36,565 --> 00:38:42,279
It was very, very funny.
I thought, "Well, there's our movement."

450
00:38:55,501 --> 00:39:00,381
I love the idea of having a house big
enough you can ride a bicycle through it.

451
00:39:42,882 --> 00:39:46,468
It was supposed to take place
in the backyard.

452
00:39:46,552 --> 00:39:50,973
They were gonna be on their backs,
looking up at this old rusted-up swing set

453
00:39:51,056 --> 00:39:56,061
that it looked like a complete disaster
for children to ever play on.

454
00:39:56,145 --> 00:40:00,733
They were laying there, smoking
and drinking and looking up at the sky.

455
00:40:00,816 --> 00:40:05,738
When we got there to shoot that, there
was so much noise and so many problems

456
00:40:05,821 --> 00:40:09,283
and, you know, we couldn't
put the cameras where we wanted to.

457
00:40:09,366 --> 00:40:14,079
We ended up shooting this kind of...
it was a sort of vague version of it.

458
00:40:14,163 --> 00:40:18,334
And then, later on,
as we were completing the film,

459
00:40:18,417 --> 00:40:25,007
they were about to tear down the big
Paper Street interior set at stage 16, Fox.

460
00:40:25,132 --> 00:40:28,344
I thought, "We'll never shoot in here again.

461
00:40:28,427 --> 00:40:30,763
"Is there a scene we
could've staged better?"

462
00:40:30,846 --> 00:40:34,850
I remembered that scene. I never really
liked the way that it turned out.

463
00:40:35,017 --> 00:40:39,521
It was too posed.
And then I got this idea that...

464
00:40:39,605 --> 00:40:42,942
I love the idea that Tyler
is so comfortable with himself,

465
00:40:43,025 --> 00:40:46,362
not only in what he wears,
but that he could just be naked.

466
00:40:46,445 --> 00:40:49,531
And it wouldn't be like
you'd be on the phone:

467
00:40:49,615 --> 00:40:52,076
"Oh, my God,
my roommate is naked again."

468
00:40:52,159 --> 00:40:56,330
He just doesn't care that they
could actually be dressing wounds while...

469
00:40:56,413 --> 00:40:59,917
that Edward could be
dressing his bruised knuckles

470
00:41:00,000 --> 00:41:04,964
while, you know, Brad was in the bathtub,
scrubbing in this disgusting water.

471
00:41:05,047 --> 00:41:08,175
So we went back in,
and we shot it in a half-day.

472
00:41:08,258 --> 00:41:13,973
Just set up two cameras
and had a chance to resuscitate it.

473
00:41:14,056 --> 00:41:17,977
A lot of moviemaking is fucking things up
so that you can then go:

474
00:41:18,060 --> 00:41:19,979
"This is what it should be."

475
00:41:20,062 --> 00:41:24,149
Every time I hear about
how Woody Allen shoots for six weeks,

476
00:41:24,233 --> 00:41:27,820
and then goes down for six weeks
and cuts the film,

477
00:41:27,903 --> 00:41:31,240
then shoots for six weeks,
you go, "That is the way to do it,"

478
00:41:31,323 --> 00:41:36,245
because the preconceived
notion, oftentimes,

479
00:41:37,079 --> 00:41:38,664
is the thing that
makes movies feel so stilted.

480
00:41:38,747 --> 00:41:42,126
I don't know how great it is now,
but it's much better than it was.

481
00:41:42,209 --> 00:41:44,169
It just seemed so precious.

482
00:41:44,253 --> 00:41:46,839
And then, all of a sudden,
it was, like, "Whoa."

483
00:41:46,922 --> 00:41:51,385
"We can walk up here before they tear
this thing down and bang this thing off."

484
00:41:51,468 --> 00:41:55,514
Often it's living with stuff so you go,
"No, no. This is what it should be."

485
00:41:55,597 --> 00:42:00,102
There's so much time and energy spent
making a decision and getting specific

486
00:42:00,185 --> 00:42:04,440
and hemming yourself in, because
there's so many ways that a scene can go.

487
00:42:04,523 --> 00:42:07,443
There's so many different ways
to skin a cat.

488
00:42:07,526 --> 00:42:11,905
You find yourself going, "We'll do that
because we're gonna be in that area,

489
00:42:11,989 --> 00:42:15,534
and we'll do it in this way, and..."
And a lot of times, it's...

490
00:42:15,617 --> 00:42:18,078
We shot the scene
in the backyard because

491
00:42:18,162 --> 00:42:21,498
we loved the way the backyard looked,

492
00:42:21,582 --> 00:42:28,380
and then finally, once it was done, it was
kinda like, "This is stupid. Let's fix it."

493
00:44:19,992 --> 00:44:21,952
There's a scene coming up
at the food court

494
00:44:22,035 --> 00:44:25,247
where he's having a salad and an iced tea.

495
00:44:25,372 --> 00:44:31,336
I love this image of Edward. He had this
very specific idea about the sunglasses,

496
00:44:31,420 --> 00:44:34,089
so we had to wait for these sunglasses

497
00:44:34,173 --> 00:44:36,258
to come over from his trailer
'cause he had these...

498
00:44:36,341 --> 00:44:40,721
I was, like, "Sunglasses. Who gives a
shit?" And we're waiting and waiting.

499
00:44:40,804 --> 00:44:45,267
His assistant runs and gives him the
glasses, he puts them on and looks like...

500
00:44:45,350 --> 00:44:48,812
It's so great 'cause it's a half-assed
<i>Mission: Impossible...</i>

501
00:44:48,937 --> 00:44:52,608
They're trying to be cool,
but they're just not right.

502
00:44:52,691 --> 00:44:54,985
You look at him and go, "Exactly right,"

503
00:44:55,068 --> 00:44:57,905
because it's just the image
of a guy in this grey suit

504
00:44:57,988 --> 00:45:03,076
with this Adam's apple and this bruise
and these kind of trendy sunglasses.

505
00:45:03,160 --> 00:45:06,205
It says great things about
the secret society of Fight Club.

506
00:45:06,288 --> 00:45:08,207
It just always cracked me up.

507
00:45:35,776 --> 00:45:38,904
In the fight scene
where Brad pummels a guy's nuts,

508
00:45:38,987 --> 00:45:42,199
we got that from
Ultimate Fighting Championship.

509
00:45:42,324 --> 00:45:47,496
When we were viewing tapes, we were
looking at what the fights should look like.

510
00:45:47,579 --> 00:45:49,581
If people really want to win fights,

511
00:45:49,665 --> 00:45:52,751
it's a different thing than
when they're trying to box

512
00:45:52,834 --> 00:45:55,212
or if it's kind of professional fighting.

513
00:45:55,295 --> 00:46:00,008
In the Ultimate Fighting Championships
you have guys with different disciplines.

514
00:46:00,092 --> 00:46:03,762
Some of them are boxers
and some of them are street brawlers

515
00:46:03,845 --> 00:46:06,807
and some of them are,
like, Gracie jujitsu guys.

516
00:46:06,890 --> 00:46:09,518
It's always really interesting to watch that.

517
00:46:09,601 --> 00:46:13,146
So we looked at a lot of it, and it was raw.

518
00:46:13,230 --> 00:46:15,857
The fighting was...
And the people bleed so much.

519
00:46:15,941 --> 00:46:21,613
When you see a guy get his nose broken
with the palm of somebody else's hand,

520
00:46:21,697 --> 00:46:24,825
and their nose moves an inch and a half
across their face,

521
00:46:24,908 --> 00:46:28,537
it's completely different
from watching Evander Holyfield,

522
00:46:28,620 --> 00:46:30,914
although there's good things in that too.

523
00:46:30,998 --> 00:46:35,836
But I remember this thing where this guy
just pummeled this other guy's nuts, and

524
00:46:35,919 --> 00:46:41,133
I was just looking at Brad, and he was just
going, "We gotta get that in somewhere."

525
00:46:41,216 --> 00:46:45,595
That's about the most effective way
to win a fight.

526
00:47:11,496 --> 00:47:15,167
I love the sentiment of this,
that the <i>Mona Lisa</i> is falling apart,

527
00:47:15,250 --> 00:47:18,754
that, you know, there's only
two constants, entropy and chaos,

528
00:47:20,756 --> 00:47:24,593
and I always wanted the film
to embody that.

529
00:47:26,136 --> 00:47:30,932
There's entropy and then,
cut to Marla, there's chaos.

530
00:47:38,482 --> 00:47:41,943
I love how she always has things
wrapped around her neck

531
00:47:42,027 --> 00:47:45,655
or she's always kind of throttling herself
or choking on smoke,

532
00:47:45,781 --> 00:47:50,577
or perched on these dangerous shoes
and walking into traffic.

533
00:47:51,119 --> 00:47:55,082
She's a very, very gifted actress
and when I explained to her this scene,

534
00:47:55,165 --> 00:47:57,334
she was, like,
"It's all close-ups of my face?"

535
00:47:57,417 --> 00:48:00,170
I said, "But you're gonna
be moving around."

536
00:48:00,253 --> 00:48:04,216
"Your head's over the side of the bed,
then you sit up into this close-up,

537
00:48:04,299 --> 00:48:08,261
"then flop down into this close-up,
then roll into this other close-up."

538
00:48:08,345 --> 00:48:10,680
She was so amazing at it.

539
00:48:10,806 --> 00:48:14,059
And she just cracks me up.

540
00:48:14,142 --> 00:48:17,813
And, for somebody
who's this extraordinarily beautiful,

541
00:48:17,896 --> 00:48:23,193
she is so not interested in
presenting herself in a beautiful way.

542
00:48:23,318 --> 00:48:27,155
She would have the makeup artist
put her eye makeup on with her left hand

543
00:48:27,280 --> 00:48:32,577
'cause she was, like, "Marla wouldn't know
how to do eyeliner right, so try this."

544
00:48:32,661 --> 00:48:35,372
So she would come in
with giant smears of eyeliner

545
00:48:35,455 --> 00:48:37,416
and fake eyelashes
stuck to her cheekbone.

546
00:48:40,419 --> 00:48:43,213
She was pretty hilarious.

547
00:48:52,681 --> 00:48:55,308
I don't know how to shoot
sex scenes or ask people to...

548
00:48:55,392 --> 00:48:57,561
It seems embarrassing and silly.

549
00:48:57,644 --> 00:49:01,648
I can't imagine... Pornography seems to me
to be a little bit more honest.

550
00:49:01,731 --> 00:49:06,278
It'd be easier for me to shoot pornography
than to shoot the love scene from <i>Top Gun,</i>

551
00:49:06,361 --> 00:49:10,949
'cause I'd just go, "I don't know how to
do this." I don't know how to, you know...

552
00:49:11,032 --> 00:49:14,578
"Okay, you really need to moan,
but you need to moan lovingly."

553
00:49:14,661 --> 00:49:18,790
You know, it's just awful.
Do people, like, lick each other's throats?

554
00:49:18,874 --> 00:49:21,084
Or do they... What are they gonna do?

555
00:49:21,168 --> 00:49:24,754
So we were really...
I was actually kind of, like, scared.

556
00:49:24,838 --> 00:49:26,673
I didn't know how to approach it.

557
00:49:26,756 --> 00:49:30,135
And then I saw this Rolling Stones video

558
00:49:30,218 --> 00:49:34,097
that Michel Gondry did
and Harry Savides shot.

559
00:49:34,222 --> 00:49:38,226
It was all these still cameras,
and it's a technique we've seen since then

560
00:49:38,310 --> 00:49:44,399
and it was used pretty effectively in <i>The
Matrix</i> and a lot of television commercials.

561
00:49:44,483 --> 00:49:50,739
But I just thought... I mean, I just couldn't
bring myself to ask people to feign that,

562
00:49:50,822 --> 00:49:52,991
so I thought,
at least if we did it this way...

563
00:49:53,074 --> 00:49:56,203
'Cause it's supposed to be kind of a dream.

564
00:49:56,286 --> 00:49:59,247
In an odd way, it's not supposed
to represent what happened,

565
00:49:59,331 --> 00:50:01,875
just what he remembers,

566
00:50:01,958 --> 00:50:09,216
and it's supposed to be easily confused
with his obsessive thoughts about her.

567
00:50:09,299 --> 00:50:12,427
So I thought maybe this would be
a sort of heightened reality,

568
00:50:12,511 --> 00:50:14,262
so we ended up doing this.

569
00:50:14,346 --> 00:50:16,431
I mean, it ended up being even weirder

570
00:50:16,556 --> 00:50:20,936
'cause you have actors who are ostensibly
naked, and they're covered with dots.

571
00:50:21,019 --> 00:50:23,104
You have to put dots all over them.

572
00:50:23,188 --> 00:50:26,691
Brad, because his skin was darker,
had white dots all over him,

573
00:50:26,775 --> 00:50:30,070
and Helena had black dots all over her.

574
00:50:30,153 --> 00:50:34,199
We would plot the course the camera
was gonna move with still cameras,

575
00:50:34,282 --> 00:50:39,496
and then fire the still cameras, and they
would be in the throes of some orgasmic...

576
00:50:39,579 --> 00:50:42,415
So it ended up just as awful
as having to shoot it.

577
00:50:42,499 --> 00:50:45,794
But, still, at least you could
hide behind all these cameras

578
00:50:45,877 --> 00:50:49,881
and come out with a slide rule and take
measurements of people's eyebrows

579
00:50:49,965 --> 00:50:54,052
and make it seem like you weren't
looking at the crack of their ass.

580
00:50:54,135 --> 00:50:56,888
It ended up being very, very weird.

581
00:50:56,972 --> 00:50:59,266
With actors that people know,

582
00:50:59,349 --> 00:51:02,227
you have to be so careful
where the negatives get processed

583
00:51:02,310 --> 00:51:06,648
and who handles stuff, and make sure
it doesn't end up at <i>Entertainment Weekly.</i>

584
00:51:06,731 --> 00:51:09,693
So you have all these,
you know, security issues.

585
00:51:09,776 --> 00:51:13,071
They're naked
and there's cameras all around them.

586
00:51:13,154 --> 00:51:18,827
We, like, strategically positioned
where sheets and stuff were, but still.

587
00:51:18,910 --> 00:51:21,288
It would've been an interesting photo op.

588
00:51:21,371 --> 00:51:25,500
So we ended up doing this thing
and it becomes very clinical, you know.

589
00:51:25,584 --> 00:51:31,131
It was more about this technique than,
"More thrusting. More moaning."

590
00:52:53,004 --> 00:52:56,132
The shot of the condoms in the toilet

591
00:52:56,216 --> 00:52:59,386
was the one thing that we...

592
00:52:59,469 --> 00:53:02,931
<i>(laughs)</i>..we ended up
getting studio notes on.

593
00:53:03,014 --> 00:53:06,017
It was the one thing they said,
"You cannot have this.

594
00:53:06,101 --> 00:53:08,269
"This is just awful, these condoms."

595
00:53:08,353 --> 00:53:12,982
I remember getting these condoms
and filling them with, like, cream rinse,

596
00:53:13,066 --> 00:53:16,945
and twisting them off and trying to get
them to float in this toilet.

597
00:53:17,028 --> 00:53:20,573
We shot ten takes of it and everybody
was, like, "You have enough."

598
00:53:20,657 --> 00:53:24,077
It's funny, the things
people are offended by.

599
00:53:25,286 --> 00:53:29,499
You'd think, in a movie like this, that
would be the least of anyone's worries,

600
00:53:29,582 --> 00:53:31,626
the condoms floating in the toilet.

601
00:53:31,751 --> 00:53:35,714
Then you cut to the next scene,
which is Edward eating out of Tupperware,

602
00:53:35,797 --> 00:53:41,553
and so many people
drew the Eisenstein conclusion

603
00:53:41,636 --> 00:53:45,640
that he was eating condoms. So...

604
00:53:47,392 --> 00:53:51,646
The human mind.
It works in such mysterious ways.

605
00:54:00,739 --> 00:54:03,074
A little homage to <i>Blade Runner,</i>

606
00:54:03,158 --> 00:54:06,077
all the water pouring down the walls.

607
00:54:11,166 --> 00:54:13,084
This was one of my
favorite scenes to shoot,

608
00:54:13,168 --> 00:54:16,588
this moment when Edward comes upstairs

609
00:54:16,671 --> 00:54:22,969
and he looks into the room. He's got to be
shockingly curious about what is going on,

610
00:54:23,052 --> 00:54:26,681
'cause she's having this,
like, minute-long orgasm,

611
00:54:26,765 --> 00:54:31,895
and it's human behavior
to want to find out what is going on.

612
00:54:32,020 --> 00:54:34,773
And then the fact
that Brad completely busts him.

613
00:54:34,856 --> 00:54:37,984
And then, this was Brad's idea,
the rubber glove,

614
00:54:38,067 --> 00:54:41,070
where he points and says,
"You want to finish her off?"

615
00:54:41,196 --> 00:54:43,281
I remember the studio came back saying,

616
00:54:43,364 --> 00:54:46,618
"You have to get rid of that.
There's no way."

617
00:54:46,701 --> 00:54:48,870
"That is not funny. It is too awful."

618
00:54:48,953 --> 00:54:52,665
And we shot the day's dailies
and we only printed that one take.

619
00:54:52,749 --> 00:54:57,921
Laura Ziskin, who from the beginning said,
"You have to cut this. This is just awful."

620
00:54:58,004 --> 00:55:01,883
"No one is gonna think it's funny."
She had never seen the rubber glove.

621
00:55:01,966 --> 00:55:06,429
Everybody in dailies fell out of their chairs
laughing and she was so mortified,

622
00:55:06,513 --> 00:55:10,266
but she called me and said,
"You had to put a rubber glove on him."

623
00:55:10,391 --> 00:55:15,438
I said, "That was Brad's idea. If you've got
a problem with it, call him. Call CAA."

624
00:55:15,522 --> 00:55:20,735
It was probably the biggest laugh
in preview screenings.

625
00:55:20,985 --> 00:55:22,695
It should be a little bit shocking.

626
00:55:22,779 --> 00:55:25,448
I don't know. That kind of stuff
doesn't really shock me,

627
00:55:25,532 --> 00:55:28,076
but it got good nervous laughter.

628
00:55:33,248 --> 00:55:36,300
In the original script,
it was a line that was

629
00:55:36,325 --> 00:55:38,986
taken from the book.
Marla has this line.

630
00:55:39,045 --> 00:55:44,259
In the flashback scene where Tyler's
recalling his evening spent with Marla,

631
00:55:44,384 --> 00:55:48,346
he quotes her where she says:

632
00:55:48,429 --> 00:55:51,432
"I wanna get pregnant.
I wanna have your abortion."

633
00:55:51,516 --> 00:55:55,937
And this was a line
that everybody had problems with.

634
00:55:56,020 --> 00:55:59,858
And it was in the book
and I always felt that it was such a great...

635
00:55:59,941 --> 00:56:03,653
Because I always thought of Marla
as being this romantic nihilist.

636
00:56:03,778 --> 00:56:07,365
She's almost pretending to be
more extreme than what she really is

637
00:56:07,448 --> 00:56:10,368
in order to kind of challenge Tyler.

638
00:56:10,869 --> 00:56:13,204
It's a line that we shot. We were...

639
00:56:13,288 --> 00:56:16,791
We fought for it and we shot it
and everyone hated it.

640
00:56:16,875 --> 00:56:19,502
Everyone thought it was just awful.

641
00:56:19,627 --> 00:56:23,047
Tyler remembers it and he laughs about it.
He does this...

642
00:56:23,131 --> 00:56:25,758
<i>(sniggers)</i>..as he's lighting his cigarette.

643
00:56:25,842 --> 00:56:29,804
When we previewed it for an audience,

644
00:56:29,888 --> 00:56:32,265
it was a huge laugh.

645
00:56:32,348 --> 00:56:36,436
Laura Ziskin, who hated it, came up to me
afterwards and said,

646
00:56:36,644 --> 00:56:37,770
"You're absolutely right."

647
00:56:37,854 --> 00:56:42,567
"It's one of the funniest lines and people
laughed, but, please, do me a favor."

648
00:56:42,650 --> 00:56:46,821
"Will you shoot something to cover it
in case we get into censorship issues,

649
00:56:46,905 --> 00:56:49,490
"or if we have problems in the Bible Belt?

650
00:56:49,574 --> 00:56:53,244
"Can you please do something?"
I said, "I'll make a deal with you."

651
00:56:53,328 --> 00:56:57,874
"If I shoot something else,
you have to use it."

652
00:56:57,999 --> 00:57:01,002
"I'm not gonna reshoot
'cause we got a big laugh from it,

653
00:57:01,085 --> 00:57:04,714
"and if we're gonna reshoot,
it has to be something I'm happy with."

654
00:57:04,797 --> 00:57:09,218
"And if I am, then you have to give me
the leeway to see it in the final movie."

655
00:57:09,302 --> 00:57:13,264
She said, "You can shoot
anything you want, just replace that."

656
00:57:13,348 --> 00:57:17,560
We had scheduled to reshoot the scene,
and the only place that we could do it

657
00:57:17,644 --> 00:57:23,316
was at the end of a reshoot schedule.
We were shooting in a church.

658
00:57:23,399 --> 00:57:25,818
The only place that
we could set up our bed

659
00:57:25,902 --> 00:57:29,822
and lights and everything
was in the rectory.

660
00:57:29,906 --> 00:57:32,700
So I brought the actors in
and started to rehearse,

661
00:57:32,784 --> 00:57:37,622
and they're literally surrounded
by, like, gowns and crucifixes.

662
00:57:37,705 --> 00:57:43,795
I mean, it was the most inappropriate
place to have this line about abortion.

663
00:57:43,878 --> 00:57:46,631
So I was, like,
"I can't ask them to do that again."

664
00:57:46,714 --> 00:57:50,969
"I can't do something about abortion
in here. We're all gonna go to hell."

665
00:57:51,052 --> 00:57:56,391
So Brad and Helena and I
came up with this idea that she...

666
00:57:56,474 --> 00:58:02,397
I came up with "I haven't been fucked like
that since grade school", and she laughed.

667
00:58:02,480 --> 00:58:05,358
So we went into the place,
they got in bed,

668
00:58:05,441 --> 00:58:09,028
and we had this thing where
she was gonna fall back and say this line

669
00:58:09,112 --> 00:58:13,074
and he was gonna just give her
this Ferris Bueller look to the camera,

670
00:58:13,157 --> 00:58:16,244
like, "Wow. What have I stepped in here?"

671
00:58:16,327 --> 00:58:21,749
And so she did the line and the crew just...
I mean, I don't think there's...

672
00:58:21,833 --> 00:58:24,794
There's probably one more frame that we

673
00:58:24,877 --> 00:58:27,672
could use before
the camera starts shaking.

674
00:58:27,755 --> 00:58:31,801
The camera operator was laughing
and everybody started cracking up.

675
00:58:31,884 --> 00:58:34,053
But she delivered it perfectly.

676
00:58:34,137 --> 00:58:38,474
"My God. I haven't been fucked like that
since grade school."

677
00:58:38,558 --> 00:58:42,770
So we cut it into the movie
and we did one last preview screening.

678
00:58:42,854 --> 00:58:44,814
Afterwards, Laura Ziskin
came to me and said,

679
00:58:44,897 --> 00:58:48,735
"Please, please, put
the abortion line back in.

680
00:58:48,818 --> 00:58:50,903
"This is just awful."

681
00:58:50,987 --> 00:58:53,823
But it was too late.

682
00:59:05,501 --> 00:59:09,714
When Marla comes to Edward's character,
to the narrator, in the kitchen,

683
00:59:09,797 --> 00:59:13,384
and does the thing
where she rubs up against him

684
00:59:13,468 --> 00:59:15,970
and she puts her arm around him and...

685
00:59:16,054 --> 00:59:19,807
I knew I wanted this thing
where she puts her hands on his stomach,

686
00:59:19,891 --> 00:59:23,728
or she sort of threads her fingers together
and sort of holds him,

687
00:59:23,811 --> 00:59:26,731
but she had this cigarette.
She said, "What do I do?"

688
00:59:26,814 --> 00:59:28,733
So she did this.
She brought her hand around

689
00:59:28,816 --> 00:59:32,195
and the cigarette became
this perfect kind of...

690
00:59:32,320 --> 00:59:36,491
This tiny, thin, white phallic symbol,
just smoldering.

691
00:59:36,574 --> 00:59:40,161
We wanted that to be the poster,
if we could get them to go for it.

692
00:59:40,244 --> 00:59:44,582
But I loved him
in his little nasty white cotton boxers

693
00:59:44,665 --> 00:59:48,503
with this smoldering cigarette
pointed out.

694
00:59:48,586 --> 00:59:54,258
And that was just a Bonham Carterism.

695
01:00:28,417 --> 01:00:31,921
So many weeks were spent on
trying to devise a material

696
01:00:32,004 --> 01:00:36,759
that would look like liposuction fat.
The prop master, Bucky Moore, when I...

697
01:00:36,843 --> 01:00:40,888
I had offices in Hollywood
where we were starting to prep the movie,

698
01:00:40,972 --> 01:00:46,352
and every day, at 3:00 in the afternoon,
he would bring up biohazard bags

699
01:00:46,435 --> 01:00:48,813
filled with different kinds
of liposuction material.

700
01:00:48,896 --> 01:00:51,232
Some of it was fat, some was...

701
01:00:51,315 --> 01:00:54,777
There would be collagen
and all these different things.

702
01:00:54,902 --> 01:00:57,363
He'd bring these bags in
and it was so revolting,

703
01:00:57,446 --> 01:01:01,534
but seeing these things every day,
you get inured to the whole thing.

704
01:01:01,617 --> 01:01:08,249
It doesn't mean anything to you
after a while. They were trying to concoct

705
01:01:08,332 --> 01:01:10,626
these phony versions of
whatever this material looked like.

706
01:01:10,710 --> 01:01:15,464
And it kind of looked like chicken skin
and sort of rubber cement,

707
01:01:15,548 --> 01:01:20,469
mixed with a bit of blood and snot and
all this stuff. It was just horrifying.

708
01:01:20,553 --> 01:01:23,639
So they came up with
this concoction that...

709
01:01:23,723 --> 01:01:29,312
You know, I'd pretty much kind of
exhausted any revolting quality that it had,

710
01:01:29,687 --> 01:01:33,191
or any revolting spell it cast.
I remember going to shoot that scene,

711
01:01:33,274 --> 01:01:37,403
and they climb over the thing
and the bags rip and the stuff spills out,

712
01:01:37,486 --> 01:01:41,866
and the crew just...
They were close to vomiting.

713
01:01:41,949 --> 01:01:44,410
I remember thinking,
"Hm. This is gonna work."

714
01:01:44,493 --> 01:01:47,955
'Cause it just looked to me like,
"That stuff's a little stringy.

715
01:01:48,039 --> 01:01:49,665
"That's a little too orange."

716
01:01:49,749 --> 01:01:55,963
But as soon as it ripped open and all the
camera assistants had their gag reflexes,

717
01:01:56,297 --> 01:01:59,467
that's when I knew
we were onto something.

718
01:02:37,838 --> 01:02:42,802
Chuck is truly a fucking genius.

719
01:02:42,885 --> 01:02:46,847
I mean, he's, like, got this whole...
He's really thought this stuff out.

720
01:02:46,931 --> 01:02:51,102
He's really... The book is so much
more intricate than the movie.

721
01:02:51,185 --> 01:02:54,438
The movie's a pale imitation.

722
01:02:54,772 --> 01:03:00,027
He really understands the sociology of it
in a profound way.

723
01:03:00,111 --> 01:03:05,449
And Uhls, of course,
had the completely despicable task

724
01:03:05,533 --> 01:03:08,619
of trying to take all these things
that had been...

725
01:03:08,703 --> 01:03:13,958
I mean, it's a 240-page or 250-page book.
You know, it's very dense.

726
01:03:14,041 --> 01:03:19,088
It's kind of surface and glib. He touches
on these things in such a great way

727
01:03:19,171 --> 01:03:22,675
that you only retain the things
that he needs you to know.

728
01:03:22,758 --> 01:03:27,388
Then, when you finally find out, "God, this
person never existed", and you go back,

729
01:03:27,513 --> 01:03:30,766
you realize it's so much deeper
than you ever thought.

730
01:03:30,850 --> 01:03:32,476
But Uhls really figured this shit out.

731
01:03:32,560 --> 01:03:38,190
He really, like, went through and figured
out the scenes that were the best...

732
01:03:38,274 --> 01:03:40,484
you know, the best use of screen time.

733
01:03:40,568 --> 01:03:43,779
It's kind of amazing.
He did an amazing job.

734
01:03:56,083 --> 01:03:59,837
We started off with the idea
that we would only see Tyler in singles.

735
01:03:59,920 --> 01:04:03,174
He would never be in a two-shot unless
it was with Edward,

736
01:04:03,257 --> 01:04:05,634
always over Edward to see him.

737
01:04:05,718 --> 01:04:10,473
But we kind of ended up abandoning that
because it didn't seem necessary.

738
01:04:10,598 --> 01:04:13,934
The end of the scene
where the guy with the shaved head,

739
01:04:14,018 --> 01:04:17,521
when he pounds Edward's face
into the floor,

740
01:04:17,605 --> 01:04:21,233
and then when he gets up,
Tyler says, "Okay, new guy, you're next."

741
01:04:21,317 --> 01:04:25,613
But no one's really looking at him.
You just see, you know...

742
01:04:25,696 --> 01:04:27,948
So I think it's all pretty airtight.

743
01:04:28,032 --> 01:04:31,285
There's definitely...
The car scene is the big cheat,

744
01:04:31,369 --> 01:04:35,206
but we get that out of the way.
That could be a figment of his imagination.

745
01:04:35,289 --> 01:04:38,334
Certainly there's enough other things.

746
01:04:53,349 --> 01:04:59,271
This scene, when the boss has found the
rules of Fight Club in the Xerox machine,

747
01:04:59,355 --> 01:05:02,566
it's a scene in the book
and a scene that was in the script,

748
01:05:02,650 --> 01:05:08,155
and we always thought it was really funny,
the idea of Edward Norton as Travis Bickle.

749
01:05:08,239 --> 01:05:12,785
You know, this guy
who's right on the verge of exploding.

750
01:05:12,868 --> 01:05:17,289
And it was one of those things
that was really, really, really funny,

751
01:05:17,373 --> 01:05:19,917
until Columbine.

752
01:05:20,000 --> 01:05:23,587
All of a sudden, this scene
took on this completely different...

753
01:05:23,671 --> 01:05:27,883
It was one of the scenes where, when
we showed it to people, they would laugh.

754
01:05:28,008 --> 01:05:32,596
The notion of Edward physically
threatening the boss was a funny one.

755
01:05:32,680 --> 01:05:36,517
And then we had the Columbine massacre
and this scene became...

756
01:05:36,600 --> 01:05:42,606
It was amazing to watch, you know, how
public opinion gets swayed by tragedy.

757
01:05:42,690 --> 01:05:46,360
When we started previews,
of course, it wasn't funny anymore.

758
01:05:46,444 --> 01:05:49,864
People were really very uncomfortable
and very nervous.

759
01:05:49,947 --> 01:05:53,993
But it was a scene we couldn't lift
because it has the phone call from Marla

760
01:05:54,076 --> 01:05:59,206
and him going off
to find the lump in her breast.

761
01:06:00,249 --> 01:06:03,878
It was a scene where you're
painted into a narrative corner.

762
01:06:03,961 --> 01:06:07,423
We couldn't really lose
the scene after that.

763
01:06:44,418 --> 01:06:49,381
This is a hotel that we found in downtown
LA that we really liked, the Hotel Bristol,

764
01:06:49,465 --> 01:06:53,177
and I thought it had
a very sort of New York feel, or urban feel.

765
01:06:53,260 --> 01:06:56,305
It didn't have the horizontal expanse

766
01:06:56,430 --> 01:06:59,558
that you normally associate,
pictorially, with LA.

767
01:06:59,642 --> 01:07:05,397
It seemed kind of vertical, and seemed like
a late '30s or late '20s apartment building.

768
01:07:05,481 --> 01:07:08,901
So we were shooting there
and I thought it was a great find.

769
01:07:08,984 --> 01:07:15,157
It was like "Wow, the Hotel Bristol is really
a little goldmine that we stumbled upon."

770
01:07:15,241 --> 01:07:18,452
And then, literally,
the night after we shot this,

771
01:07:18,536 --> 01:07:24,250
I was watching HBO and <i>Gia,</i>
that Angelina Jolie movie, was on.

772
01:07:24,333 --> 01:07:28,629
The whole thing's shot out in front of
the Hotel Bristol. I was, like, "Oh!"

773
01:07:28,712 --> 01:07:34,510
There's just nothing that hasn't been
seen to death in Los Angeles.

774
01:07:54,655 --> 01:07:57,199
I love the scene where Bob
comes back into the movie

775
01:07:57,283 --> 01:08:01,036
because I love the energy Meat has.

776
01:08:01,120 --> 01:08:04,623
He's so sweet.
He's so happy to see him, he really is.

777
01:08:04,707 --> 01:08:08,669
And his life has really kind of
gotten back on the right track.

778
01:08:08,752 --> 01:08:12,089
He's really discovered this thing
that's changed his life.

779
01:08:12,172 --> 01:08:16,677
I love the irony that, indeed,
he's picked up on Fight Club.

780
01:08:16,760 --> 01:08:20,180
He's now part of
another chapter of Fight Club

781
01:08:20,264 --> 01:08:23,517
that Edward, or the narrator,
doesn't even know about.

782
01:08:23,601 --> 01:08:26,061
This was the beginning
of planting the seeds

783
01:08:26,145 --> 01:08:32,484
that this thing is bigger than Tyler and the
narrator, or bigger than Brad and Edward.

784
01:08:32,568 --> 01:08:37,656
And Meat, he's so funny in it.
He has this incredible charm.

785
01:08:42,036 --> 01:08:46,624
And, of course, we gave him the requisite
kind of, you know, fat guy stuff.

786
01:08:46,707 --> 01:08:50,961
He's got his carton of doughnuts
that he's eating in the middle of the night

787
01:08:51,045 --> 01:08:53,714
as he's wandering along the streets.

788
01:08:53,797 --> 01:09:00,554
When we cast Meat Loaf, I had always had
this image of him as a 310-pound guy.

789
01:09:00,679 --> 01:09:06,727
Of course, when I met him, he's almost
twiggy compared to how you think of him,

790
01:09:06,810 --> 01:09:09,605
so we actually had to make
this fat suit for him.

791
01:09:09,688 --> 01:09:12,483
Not only so he'd have breasts,
but also the girth,

792
01:09:12,566 --> 01:09:18,447
'cause the love handles that spill over
his jeans and his jugs are all fake.

793
01:09:18,530 --> 01:09:22,868
So he has this suit that he wears
that's filled with birdseed.

794
01:09:22,951 --> 01:09:26,497
I wanted to have Rob Bottin
make us an appliance

795
01:09:26,580 --> 01:09:31,460
so he could fight with his top off. We were
gonna make this, like, rubber suit,

796
01:09:31,543 --> 01:09:37,383
or flexible, like, skinlike suit, so you
could see him with his tits flapping down,

797
01:09:37,466 --> 01:09:41,470
but we decided that was too much.

798
01:09:41,595 --> 01:09:45,516
But Meat Loaf would wear this
and do fight scenes, and it was so heavy.

799
01:09:45,599 --> 01:09:48,227
He would just be drenched in sweat
after every take

800
01:09:48,686 --> 01:09:53,357
'cause he was flopping around with
50, 60 extra pounds of, like, birdseed

801
01:09:53,440 --> 01:09:57,861
in these giant burlap sacks
that were attached to his chest.

802
01:09:58,320 --> 01:10:00,406
So in between setups,

803
01:10:00,489 --> 01:10:04,201
they would rush out there with oxygen
masks and put them on him.

804
01:10:04,284 --> 01:10:06,704
I was convinced we were gonna kill him

805
01:10:06,787 --> 01:10:10,874
with all the jumping around
and fight stuff that he had to do,

806
01:10:10,958 --> 01:10:15,170
'cause he was incredible, trying to do
these choreographed fight scenes.

807
01:10:15,254 --> 01:10:17,673
Actually, there's a scene later on

808
01:10:17,756 --> 01:10:20,926
when they start handing out
the homework assignments,

809
01:10:21,009 --> 01:10:25,013
and you see Brad handing out envelopes.
And in the background, it's dark,

810
01:10:25,139 --> 01:10:29,852
but you can see Meat with a little
blood pressure cuff, like, around his arm.

811
01:10:29,977 --> 01:10:33,856
There's a giant bottle of oxygen
and he's got the mask to his face

812
01:10:33,939 --> 01:10:37,609
and he's sucking on it
as these guys exit Lou's Tavern.

813
01:10:37,693 --> 01:10:41,238
We thought that would be great,
that one of the guys in Fight Club

814
01:10:41,321 --> 01:10:46,827
worked in a dentist's office
and brought this oxygen.

815
01:11:46,053 --> 01:11:51,683
This was a particularly horrific fight
to shoot, when Lou comes in.

816
01:11:51,767 --> 01:11:55,521
Not the punching out of Brad,
but this wasn't in the book,

817
01:11:55,604 --> 01:11:59,107
but we were trying to find a scene,
sort of the Nuremberg Rally,

818
01:11:59,233 --> 01:12:01,610
where Tyler kind of addresses the troops,

819
01:12:01,735 --> 01:12:05,989
and you get to see the "We're
the middle children of history" speech.

820
01:12:06,073 --> 01:12:11,286
He's kind of indoctrinating them, and
he's sort of giving them his take on things.

821
01:12:11,370 --> 01:12:14,832
Then Lou comes in and beats him up.

822
01:12:14,915 --> 01:12:17,543
I didn't want the Christian
"turn the other cheek".

823
01:12:17,626 --> 01:12:19,837
I wanted to modernize that in some way,

824
01:12:19,920 --> 01:12:22,923
but I love the idea that
we live in a time and place

825
01:12:23,006 --> 01:12:25,300
where if you were standing in a line

826
01:12:25,384 --> 01:12:29,263
and somebody came by and brandished
a gun, that would be frightening,

827
01:12:29,346 --> 01:12:31,765
but not as frightening as if somebody took

828
01:12:31,849 --> 01:12:34,393
a test tube of blood
and spattered you with it.

829
01:12:34,476 --> 01:12:38,397
You'd be almost more shocked
and horrified by that.

830
01:12:38,480 --> 01:12:42,651
I definitely wanted to get in
the idea to turn the other cheek

831
01:12:42,776 --> 01:12:46,405
to this AIDS generation extreme.

832
01:13:11,179 --> 01:13:14,641
Peter Iacangelo, the actor who plays Lou,

833
01:13:14,725 --> 01:13:18,437
you know, had to lie there
for five or six hours

834
01:13:18,520 --> 01:13:20,772
while Brad spewed fake blood,

835
01:13:20,856 --> 01:13:24,776
but he was spitting and it's coming
out of his nose all over this guy,

836
01:13:24,860 --> 01:13:30,032
and it's spattering him in the mouth,
and in his eyes, and it's just horrifying.

837
01:13:30,157 --> 01:13:36,079
And, you know, after about five hours,
I mean, he was truly fed up with us.

838
01:13:36,872 --> 01:13:40,000
He did not want to shoot one more take.

839
01:13:42,502 --> 01:13:45,839
You only see it for a bit,
but it was hours of shooting

840
01:13:45,964 --> 01:13:50,052
with blood just spraying
out of Brad's hairline,

841
01:13:50,177 --> 01:13:53,096
and out of his ears and nose and mouth.

842
01:13:53,180 --> 01:13:55,933
Between every take,
you'd have to clean him off

843
01:13:56,016 --> 01:13:58,810
and get him a new shirt and redo his hair.

844
01:13:58,894 --> 01:14:03,857
So it was just
a monumental continuity nightmare.

845
01:14:58,203 --> 01:15:04,001
This is a funny scene.
Stuart, who plays the Cadillac dealer,

846
01:15:04,084 --> 01:15:08,088
we actually got him to kick his loafer off

847
01:15:08,171 --> 01:15:12,342
at exactly the right moment as he gets
pushed over the hood of the Eldorado.

848
01:15:12,426 --> 01:15:15,804
He actually became
incredibly proficient at this.

849
01:15:15,929 --> 01:15:20,684
He'd ask, "How high do you want it?" I was
like, "12 feet. It's the top of the frame."

850
01:15:20,767 --> 01:15:24,187
He could kick that Gucci loafer up in the air

851
01:15:24,271 --> 01:15:26,231
and ask you,
"How many spins do you want?"

852
01:15:26,314 --> 01:15:30,902
"You want a half gain?" or whatever.
He got so good at it.

853
01:15:30,986 --> 01:15:36,867
In the scene where Holt hits Matt Winston,
who's the priest, as he's running away,

854
01:15:36,950 --> 01:15:41,955
the camera bounces at that point because
the camera operator started laughing.

855
01:15:42,039 --> 01:15:45,042
This was take three.
We didn't know what would happen.

856
01:15:45,125 --> 01:15:47,461
We'd walked him through it,
you saw him spray it,

857
01:15:48,170 --> 01:15:52,591
and in the close-up camera, which is a
300 mm lens, the operator starts laughing.

858
01:15:52,674 --> 01:15:54,885
Then in the wide shot,
as he pans over with them,

859
01:15:54,968 --> 01:15:59,848
as he hits them, he starts laughing
and the camera bounces.

860
01:16:15,530 --> 01:16:19,534
In this scene, we ended up
doing a reshoot of this for Edward's side

861
01:16:19,659 --> 01:16:24,456
because we kind of got a different idea
on how Edward should play this,

862
01:16:24,539 --> 01:16:27,292
so we went back in
and reshot Edward's profile.

863
01:16:27,375 --> 01:16:33,340
In the interim between the first time we'd
been in this building and the reshoot,

864
01:16:33,423 --> 01:16:36,843
they'd changed the thermostat
on the wall behind it

865
01:16:36,968 --> 01:16:39,930
so it wasn't silver any more, it was black.

866
01:16:40,013 --> 01:16:43,725
The walls were the color we
painted them, but every time I look,

867
01:16:43,850 --> 01:16:49,815
I see the thermostat in the background
change from being black to being silver.

868
01:17:12,629 --> 01:17:15,006
The stunt stuff in here is really,

869
01:17:15,090 --> 01:17:19,928
except for actually hitting
the coffee table, is Edward,

870
01:17:20,011 --> 01:17:23,348
and he really just
knocked himself off his feet,

871
01:17:23,431 --> 01:17:25,684
and he's pretty amazing at it.

872
01:17:25,767 --> 01:17:31,731
He could do this Fosbury flop, like, from a
standing position, that was truly amazing.

873
01:17:51,501 --> 01:17:55,881
Originally when we were shooting this,
we got off on the Jerry Lewis thing,

874
01:17:55,964 --> 01:18:00,886
I was always wondering whether it would
work, but a lot of people love this scene

875
01:18:00,969 --> 01:18:06,016
and think it's very, very funny. I just
worried that it wasn't violent enough.

876
01:18:06,099 --> 01:18:10,645
But I love it when he hits himself. He's in
that moment of pause, sitting there,

877
01:18:10,729 --> 01:18:14,983
then he just hauls off and cracks himself
in the face two more times.

878
01:18:15,066 --> 01:18:17,694
We rigged this tube
on the side of his nose.

879
01:18:17,777 --> 01:18:20,447
We had a guy behind him,
spraying blood out

880
01:18:20,530 --> 01:18:25,118
because you can't have blood tubes too far
from the source of their blood bottles.

881
01:18:25,202 --> 01:18:30,248
So we actually had somebody
crawl along the floor after Edward,

882
01:18:30,332 --> 01:18:32,500
squirting blood out.

883
01:18:53,647 --> 01:18:57,984
There's a lot of things in the corner of
frames. I like when Edward's been fired,

884
01:18:58,068 --> 01:19:00,487
he's taking this fax machine
and computers,

885
01:19:00,570 --> 01:19:05,659
all these things he's stolen from his office.
It's a sort of bizarre form of severance.

886
01:19:05,742 --> 01:19:09,871
He's wandering down the hallway,
and you see Eion Bailey, who plays Ricky,

887
01:19:09,955 --> 01:19:13,792
who's in the corner of the frame,
and he's got this look on his face.

888
01:19:13,875 --> 01:19:16,962
He's watching Edward
and he's so impressed with him.

889
01:19:17,045 --> 01:19:22,676
I love those little tiny things
in the background that someday...

890
01:19:22,759 --> 01:19:24,844
someday, someone will see it.

891
01:19:38,400 --> 01:19:41,152
This is where Brad's
handing out the envelopes

892
01:19:41,236 --> 01:19:45,532
and right there in the back, under that
light, is Meat Loaf with a mask on,

893
01:19:45,615 --> 01:19:48,410
sucking oxygen out of an oxygen bottle.

894
01:19:49,452 --> 01:19:53,248
This was one of the first shots we did.
We ended up reshooting it because

895
01:19:53,331 --> 01:19:59,254
we couldn't see that the guys were
destroying satellite dishes, so we redid it.

896
01:20:00,547 --> 01:20:04,884
The erasing of the tapes was

897
01:20:04,968 --> 01:20:07,554
one of those scenes that
we didn't think people would get,

898
01:20:07,637 --> 01:20:12,600
the idea of taking a bulk degausser and
degaussing tapes that are on the shelf,

899
01:20:12,684 --> 01:20:15,228
but it turned out a lot of people laughed.

900
01:20:15,312 --> 01:20:18,064
A lot more people understood
the degaussing thing

901
01:20:18,148 --> 01:20:21,818
better than we could have anticipated.

902
01:20:28,742 --> 01:20:34,497
This scene was... We had the Range Rover
in the back, which is the first car they hit,

903
01:20:34,581 --> 01:20:38,376
then they hit a BMW,
then they go past the little Hyundai,

904
01:20:38,460 --> 01:20:42,672
and then they come upon
the Volkswagen Beetle, the New Beetle,

905
01:20:42,756 --> 01:20:46,134
and Edward was adamant
that they have to hit the New Beetle

906
01:20:46,259 --> 01:20:52,265
because he's so angered
by the idea of baby-boomers

907
01:20:52,349 --> 01:20:57,979
recycling their own kind of
historical references.

908
01:20:58,104 --> 01:21:00,815
So he was, like, "I gotta beat that car up."

909
01:21:00,899 --> 01:21:06,863
I think we rented all these cars
and then we returned them all bashed in.

910
01:21:38,728 --> 01:21:41,356
We had this different order to the scenes.

911
01:21:41,481 --> 01:21:45,318
Originally Edward quits his job,
beats himself up,

912
01:21:45,402 --> 01:21:47,404
then comes back and tells Brad about it,

913
01:21:47,487 --> 01:21:51,741
and then the next scene is Brad
kind of giving the Nuremberg Rally,

914
01:21:51,825 --> 01:21:55,412
then being beaten up by Lou,
sort of escalating the whole thing.

915
01:21:55,495 --> 01:22:02,752
But it didn't end up working as well as Lou
coming beforehand, because it seemed...

916
01:22:02,836 --> 01:22:05,922
The escalation
is sort of more clever in its escalation

917
01:22:06,005 --> 01:22:10,385
because you saw somebody get beaten up
in a very kind of crude, base kind of way,

918
01:22:10,510 --> 01:22:13,847
and then Brad bleed all over him
and say, you know:

919
01:22:13,972 --> 01:22:16,099
"You don't know where I've been, Lou."

920
01:22:16,182 --> 01:22:19,686
And then to see that
taken into the workaday world,

921
01:22:19,769 --> 01:22:21,438
it sort of seemed to work better.

922
01:22:21,521 --> 01:22:27,068
There's a tension when Edward comes in
and says to the boss, "We have to talk."

923
01:22:27,193 --> 01:22:28,862
You've seen them do all these things.

924
01:22:28,945 --> 01:22:32,240
You've seen them pick fights
with people and lose,

925
01:22:32,365 --> 01:22:34,868
and you're waiting for
something to happen.

926
01:22:34,951 --> 01:22:38,830
We ended up losing two scenes
that connected the two things together.

927
01:22:38,913 --> 01:22:43,668
But I loved the moment.
It was a great idea for a scene.

928
01:22:43,751 --> 01:22:48,006
Edward returns and says, "I did this
great thing. I got beaten up by the boss."

929
01:22:48,089 --> 01:22:52,510
Or, "I beat myself up and he ended up
giving me all this. Don't worry. I'm okay."

930
01:22:52,594 --> 01:22:55,805
And Tyler's already thinking,
"We gotta take this thing up a notch."

931
01:22:55,930 --> 01:22:57,515
It's never enough.

932
01:22:57,599 --> 01:23:01,686
I love the idea of Edward
constantly trying to say, "Look what I did."

933
01:23:01,769 --> 01:23:04,814
And Brad saying, "That's interesting,

934
01:23:04,898 --> 01:23:06,774
"but I've got this other thing
I'm thinking about."

935
01:23:06,858 --> 01:23:10,361
So there's that constant
kind of tension there with...

936
01:23:10,445 --> 01:23:14,574
Every time the narrator thinks
he's sort of standing next to Tyler

937
01:23:14,657 --> 01:23:17,827
and kind of can bask in...
they're both kind of equals,

938
01:23:17,911 --> 01:23:22,081
Tyler's already thinking about this other
thing and how it can be executed.

939
01:23:22,165 --> 01:23:24,459
And then the Raymond K Hessel scene,

940
01:23:24,542 --> 01:23:28,421
as I told you, was the one that
Josh Donen told me about over the phone

941
01:23:28,505 --> 01:23:34,093
that made me go,
"Well, I gotta read this book."

942
01:24:15,385 --> 01:24:18,012
Brad and I had been talking about...

943
01:24:18,137 --> 01:24:24,519
Since he read the book, we'd been talking
about this idea of Tyler's kind of madness.

944
01:24:24,602 --> 01:24:27,730
You know, we see Tyler on his little rant

945
01:24:27,814 --> 01:24:29,983
in the basement by himself,
just going, you know...

946
01:24:30,066 --> 01:24:37,490
Kind of practising or trying to consolidate
or make clearer his manifesto.

947
01:24:37,574 --> 01:24:40,577
So we got this idea
of coming out of the explosion

948
01:24:40,660 --> 01:24:43,955
where you could see the flames
still superimposed over Brad

949
01:24:44,038 --> 01:24:46,583
as he's carrying tools
around the basement.

950
01:24:46,666 --> 01:24:49,752
As the camera moves in
and he looks right in the camera,

951
01:24:49,836 --> 01:24:53,172
he starts his, "You're not your job
or how much money you have,

952
01:24:53,298 --> 01:24:56,259
or the contents of your wallet
or the car you drive."

953
01:24:56,342 --> 01:25:00,847
We started going through this litany
of things that Tyler thinks that you...

954
01:25:00,930 --> 01:25:03,016
Or is reminding you that you aren't.

955
01:25:03,099 --> 01:25:06,185
It's almost like the intensity
of this moment

956
01:25:06,269 --> 01:25:10,690
actually causes the film
to jump out of the gate in the projector.

957
01:25:10,815 --> 01:25:14,819
So we had this idea and
we just shot it on the set really simply.

958
01:25:14,902 --> 01:25:18,156
The camera just tracks in and then
Conrad Hall, the camera operator,

959
01:25:18,239 --> 01:25:21,242
just started shaking the camera a little bit,

960
01:25:21,326 --> 01:25:25,413
and shaking it back and forth on the
Panahead, whatever kind of looseness

961
01:25:25,496 --> 01:25:29,083
there was in the gears,
he's shaking this camera like crazy.

962
01:25:29,167 --> 01:25:31,711
We took it on a computer and steadied it

963
01:25:31,794 --> 01:25:35,423
so Brad's nose stays
in the middle of the frame.

964
01:25:35,506 --> 01:25:39,218
We tracked it with the computer,
and then we put the perforations

965
01:25:39,302 --> 01:25:43,514
coming in on either side. It's amazing to
watch this with a projectionist

966
01:25:43,598 --> 01:25:46,142
who's not aware that
this is gonna happen.

967
01:25:46,225 --> 01:25:49,520
Invariably, when you look up
to the booth after this moment,

968
01:25:49,604 --> 01:25:52,523
you see a guy running around in the booth,

969
01:25:52,607 --> 01:25:56,986
crazily trying to figure out the problem,
what's wrong with his equipment.

970
01:25:57,070 --> 01:25:59,989
There's always this moment of panic when
you walk back there.

971
01:26:00,073 --> 01:26:04,911
They're in a sweat going:
"I don't know where that came from."

972
01:26:05,036 --> 01:26:09,165
And we always had to tell them,
"No, that was supposed to be there."

973
01:26:09,248 --> 01:26:14,629
<i>Why does a weaker person need to
latch on to a strong person? What is that?</i>

974
01:26:14,712 --> 01:26:16,923
<i>What do you get out of it?</i>

975
01:26:18,841 --> 01:26:20,468
<i>That's not the same thing.</i>

976
01:26:20,551 --> 01:26:25,348
I love this scene, the way they all relate
to each other in this triangle conversation,

977
01:26:25,431 --> 01:26:31,187
and I love the idea of Tyler listening in
on what they're talking about upstairs,

978
01:26:31,270 --> 01:26:34,691
especially, you know,
with where we're going with the reveal.

979
01:26:34,774 --> 01:26:41,030
I loved that she's completely intent
on the narrator and what he's saying,

980
01:26:41,114 --> 01:26:44,784
and you get sort of derailed halfway
through with the kiss scar.

981
01:26:44,867 --> 01:26:48,413
They're talking about this and
she's pumping him for information,

982
01:26:48,496 --> 01:26:54,627
and Tyler's overhearing. And I love the
way that, at the end, he finishes off what...

983
01:26:54,711 --> 01:27:00,550
It's the first time you see him as the
puppet master and Edward as the puppet.

984
01:27:08,307 --> 01:27:12,645
The first time you see it, you think Marla
is just kind of this pathetic ho,

985
01:27:12,729 --> 01:27:14,188
then, the second time, you go,

986
01:27:14,272 --> 01:27:18,234
"God, she's trying to make this
work and this guy is nuts."

987
01:27:18,317 --> 01:27:20,236
Yeah, I thought that stuff worked well.

988
01:27:20,319 --> 01:27:23,573
It's funny because I'd never
seen <i>The Sixth Sense,</i>

989
01:27:23,656 --> 01:27:27,410
and I finally saw it, like, two weeks ago,
and I was, like, "Oh!"

990
01:27:27,493 --> 01:27:32,999
"No wonder people were ready for this.
They'd seen that movie."

991
01:27:35,752 --> 01:27:38,337
I loved the idea of the scar.
I thought it was great.

992
01:27:39,088 --> 01:27:42,300
We had Brad kiss pieces of paper
with lipstick on,

993
01:27:42,383 --> 01:27:44,510
and we kept choosing, "That's the one."

994
01:27:44,594 --> 01:27:48,014
Then Bottin went off
and he made this appliance

995
01:27:48,097 --> 01:27:54,604
that was kind of the 3-D, kind of
flocked wallpaper version of the imprint,

996
01:27:54,687 --> 01:27:57,774
then these things would be put on,
but there were people...

997
01:27:57,857 --> 01:27:59,484
I remember doing press stuff

998
01:27:59,567 --> 01:28:04,363
and a lot of people were talking about
the homosexual undertones of the movie,

999
01:28:04,447 --> 01:28:06,866
which, I mean, again, once you're...

1000
01:28:06,949 --> 01:28:10,453
If you're working backwards
from where the thing's headed

1001
01:28:10,536 --> 01:28:14,582
and you know Tyler is a figment
of his imagination, Tyler doesn't exist,

1002
01:28:14,665 --> 01:28:20,838
then it's more of a self-love story, which,
I think, is more a product of our times,

1003
01:28:20,922 --> 01:28:24,801
than it is a homosexual love story.

1004
01:29:29,282 --> 01:29:34,537
When we went from a two-hour, 19-minute
movie to two-hour,15-minute movie,

1005
01:29:34,620 --> 01:29:38,583
something had to give,
so we tightened this stuff up, but it was...

1006
01:29:38,666 --> 01:29:43,629
I mean, it's really just a distillation
of the first cut, you know,

1007
01:29:43,713 --> 01:29:46,465
just trying to get it all in.

1008
01:29:46,549 --> 01:29:51,095
What's tough with movies is you become
interested in movies for certain scenes.

1009
01:29:51,178 --> 01:29:53,222
There are reasons why you go,

1010
01:29:53,306 --> 01:29:55,766
"This means something to me."
And everybody has...

1011
01:29:55,850 --> 01:29:58,978
Actors have different scenes
they can point to

1012
01:29:59,061 --> 01:30:00,938
that they say,
"That was the movie for me,"

1013
01:30:01,022 --> 01:30:06,360
or "That was the reason
for wanting to go on the quest."

1014
01:30:06,444 --> 01:30:12,700
But, you know,
I think this is pretty much the movie.

1015
01:30:12,825 --> 01:30:17,079
It's pretty much everything we shot.
A couple of scenes went by the wayside,

1016
01:30:17,163 --> 01:30:19,790
and maybe a couple more should go, but...

1017
01:30:19,874 --> 01:30:25,212
we tried to make all the stuff move
on screen as quickly as we could

1018
01:30:25,338 --> 01:30:30,593
and still give it the weight
that we felt that it needed.

1019
01:31:27,024 --> 01:31:33,364
I love this. Brad added this. He handed him
the beers and then swatted him on the ass.

1020
01:31:33,447 --> 01:31:37,827
It's a girlfriend moment. "Honey, you're
looking good. Take these to the boys."

1021
01:31:37,910 --> 01:31:41,580
But I love the sort of
<i>Animal House</i> kind of like...

1022
01:31:41,664 --> 01:31:45,793
All of a sudden, he comes home
and there's all these people watching TV.

1023
01:31:45,876 --> 01:31:49,130
He doesn't know any of them.
Or he's seen them around,

1024
01:31:49,213 --> 01:31:51,924
but he doesn't really know
what's going on.

1025
01:31:52,049 --> 01:31:57,346
I love the point where they begin to,
you know, move away from each other,

1026
01:31:57,430 --> 01:32:02,810
and Tyler begins to take this whole thing
to a different place.

1027
01:32:21,704 --> 01:32:24,999
Jeff Cronenweth and I talked a lot
about different movies.

1028
01:32:25,082 --> 01:32:29,462
We wanted to make sure that we had
a real kind of naturalistic approach.

1029
01:32:29,587 --> 01:32:32,506
I think the visual look of this movie,

1030
01:32:32,590 --> 01:32:34,383
in terms of its night exteriors and stuff,

1031
01:32:34,467 --> 01:32:37,178
has a lot more to do
with kind of run and gun.

1032
01:32:37,303 --> 01:32:41,766
<i>American Graffiti</i> we talked about because
there was nothing precious about it,

1033
01:32:41,849 --> 01:32:46,062
and yet it still had a real look to it.
It had a real cohesive look to it.

1034
01:32:46,145 --> 01:32:51,275
And yet it's not a movie that you associate
with, you know, spectacular night scenes,

1035
01:32:51,358 --> 01:32:56,113
and yet I think that the night scenes in it
<i>are</i> spectacular because they're so true.

1036
01:32:56,197 --> 01:33:00,618
They feel so real, like you're out in
the night on Fourth Street, San Rafael,

1037
01:33:00,701 --> 01:33:02,703
watching cars go by.

1038
01:33:02,828 --> 01:33:09,085
It never felt like, you know,
you've got a giant crane with Musco Lights

1039
01:33:09,168 --> 01:33:11,670
down the street, helping out.

1040
01:33:11,754 --> 01:33:15,841
It just always felt very naturalistic,
so that was a movie we talked about.

1041
01:33:15,925 --> 01:33:21,889
You know, we just didn't want it to be
beautiful. We didn't want it to seem too...

1042
01:33:22,014 --> 01:33:25,351
It had to feel like it was really happening.

1043
01:33:55,047 --> 01:33:56,799
I love the castration scene.

1044
01:33:56,882 --> 01:34:01,345
I love the idea that Tyler
doesn't just say what he's gonna do,

1045
01:34:01,428 --> 01:34:03,013
he literally goes...

1046
01:34:03,097 --> 01:34:06,851
He attacks this guy
who's done nothing to him.

1047
01:34:06,934 --> 01:34:09,436
Brad added the thing
where he punches him

1048
01:34:09,520 --> 01:34:12,231
in the solar plexus before he drags him off.

1049
01:34:12,314 --> 01:34:14,400
He wraps the necktie around his neck

1050
01:34:14,483 --> 01:34:17,695
and drags him by it,
because it should be scary.

1051
01:34:17,778 --> 01:34:21,407
Here's this guy who's puffing on cigars
and telling everybody:

1052
01:34:21,490 --> 01:34:25,452
"Yeah, we'll find out who these guys are
and we'll make 'em pay."

1053
01:34:25,578 --> 01:34:28,164
And I love the idea that you have

1054
01:34:28,247 --> 01:34:32,585
these crazed <i>Clockwork Orange</i> waiters
just assault him.

1055
01:34:32,668 --> 01:34:38,591
And I was initially going, you know,
"Well, this guy's... he's a geriatric."

1056
01:34:38,674 --> 01:34:40,926
"You can't attack him and wale on him."

1057
01:34:41,010 --> 01:34:44,138
He's, like, "No, no.
That's what Tyler would do."

1058
01:34:44,221 --> 01:34:46,599
"You gotta be worried for his safety."

1059
01:34:46,682 --> 01:34:49,018
And it was exactly right.

1060
01:34:49,101 --> 01:34:52,771
There's a moment where
the audience gets uncomfortable

1061
01:34:52,855 --> 01:34:55,566
with where this is all headed.

1062
01:35:11,874 --> 01:35:15,211
In the back of the scene
where the guys come out,

1063
01:35:15,294 --> 01:35:18,047
you can see Meat Loaf's pants fall off

1064
01:35:18,130 --> 01:35:21,634
'cause he's got love handles
that his pants are belted around.

1065
01:35:21,717 --> 01:35:24,929
Of course, every time he moves,
he has these giant pants

1066
01:35:25,012 --> 01:35:27,973
and they just fall to his ankles
in, like, two seconds,

1067
01:35:28,098 --> 01:35:33,520
then he has the wherewithal to stop and
grab them and pull them up and belt them.

1068
01:35:33,604 --> 01:35:36,774
But this was the best take
and so we just decided to go with it.

1069
01:35:37,274 --> 01:35:43,197
But you can see he's got, you know,
fake thigh pads on and fake leg fat.

1070
01:35:43,322 --> 01:35:45,574
But it's one of those funny things where

1071
01:35:45,658 --> 01:35:47,910
we shot the take and I said,
"Okay, that was it."

1072
01:35:47,993 --> 01:35:51,705
And Meat Loaf goes, "I don't know
if it bothers you, but in the back,

1073
01:35:51,789 --> 01:35:54,583
my pants fell off
and went straight to the ground."

1074
01:35:54,667 --> 01:36:00,381
We went back and shot four or five
more takes, but that was the best one.

1075
01:36:01,507 --> 01:36:08,013
This is a scene that we definitely got into
trouble with the censors in Britain.

1076
01:36:09,932 --> 01:36:13,269
It was funny 'cause they basically found

1077
01:36:13,352 --> 01:36:15,896
that they thought
the beating was too brutal,

1078
01:36:15,980 --> 01:36:19,441
that it went on too long,
and that's the point of the scene.

1079
01:36:19,525 --> 01:36:24,863
The point is that
when the narrator's position with Tyler

1080
01:36:24,947 --> 01:36:27,408
is challenged by somebody else,

1081
01:36:27,533 --> 01:36:31,203
out of jealousy, he beats this guy.
He beats this guy's face off.

1082
01:36:31,287 --> 01:36:34,164
I thought it should be a...

1083
01:36:34,248 --> 01:36:37,334
It made audiences very
uncomfortable, but it's supposed to.

1084
01:36:37,418 --> 01:36:42,965
It's supposed to be that scene where you
realize Fight Club isn't the answer.

1085
01:36:43,048 --> 01:36:48,137
Fight Club is... It's gone too far
and it's now become an excuse

1086
01:36:48,220 --> 01:36:53,642
for him to vent his frustration and rage
about all kinds of other things

1087
01:36:53,726 --> 01:36:59,189
on somebody who's not in on the joke.
You know, here's a guy, you know...

1088
01:36:59,273 --> 01:37:04,486
Jared does this great job at the beginning
of playing this kind of youthful, exuberant,

1089
01:37:04,570 --> 01:37:08,532
like, "Let's go. Fight Club.
I've heard a lot about it. It sounds great."

1090
01:37:08,615 --> 01:37:11,368
And Edward just demolishes him.

1091
01:37:11,452 --> 01:37:13,662
So it was funny, you know.

1092
01:37:13,746 --> 01:37:17,541
The censors came back and said,
"It made us uncomfortable."

1093
01:37:17,624 --> 01:37:19,084
"We thought the fighting
went on too long."

1094
01:37:19,168 --> 01:37:22,254
We were, like, "I guess we did our jobs."

1095
01:37:22,379 --> 01:37:25,215
They made us take two shots out
or something.

1096
01:37:25,299 --> 01:37:28,302
Initially there was
a lot more pummeling in it

1097
01:37:28,427 --> 01:37:32,056
and we showed it to people
and they weren't that disturbed.

1098
01:37:32,139 --> 01:37:36,560
Then I felt like we didn't
have enough of the impact

1099
01:37:36,643 --> 01:37:40,064
on the other people around them
so we shot some inserts of guys going...

1100
01:37:40,147 --> 01:37:43,984
You know, where you see he's cheering
and then he turns his head away,

1101
01:37:44,109 --> 01:37:47,863
and you have the crowd
becoming appalled.

1102
01:37:48,322 --> 01:37:51,867
So you had this moment
where people are cheering, then appalled,

1103
01:37:51,950 --> 01:37:55,496
then people stop,
and then they all move to him.

1104
01:37:55,621 --> 01:37:57,873
When we put in
the reactions of the crowd,

1105
01:37:57,956 --> 01:38:02,127
all of a sudden people got
way more disturbed than they had before.

1106
01:38:02,211 --> 01:38:06,715
It was almost like, by giving them the
subtle signposts that said this is wrong,

1107
01:38:06,799 --> 01:38:10,511
it got their sort of moral ire up.

1108
01:38:10,636 --> 01:38:15,349
But it was, you know, one of those scenes
that I think is a powerful scene

1109
01:38:15,432 --> 01:38:18,060
and it isn't supposed to be
likable, you know.

1110
01:38:18,143 --> 01:38:21,063
It's not one of those
where you're supposed to...

1111
01:38:21,146 --> 01:38:25,526
It's not to reaffirm for you
how much you're supposed to like Edward.

1112
01:38:25,651 --> 01:38:30,739
It's supposed to reaffirm... You've always
thought Fight Club was a bit questionable,

1113
01:38:30,823 --> 01:38:36,036
and this is Fight Club
and the rules of Fight Club being abused.

1114
01:38:36,120 --> 01:38:41,542
And the face of a young man
being abused by Edward in his jealousies.

1115
01:38:42,543 --> 01:38:47,047
Yeah, it was amazing to see, you know,
if you just showed carnage and mayhem,

1116
01:38:47,131 --> 01:38:51,427
people weren't as disturbed as when
you put in everybody else being appalled.

1117
01:38:51,510 --> 01:38:56,056
Nothing really changed much, except we
added a couple of faces of people in shock

1118
01:38:56,140 --> 01:39:00,352
and then, all of a sudden,
the audience was up in arms.

1119
01:39:30,424 --> 01:39:33,927
The scene in the car was tricky.
We ended up shooting it on a stage

1120
01:39:34,052 --> 01:39:38,182
because it just had too much coverage
and too much dialogue.

1121
01:39:38,265 --> 01:39:43,437
And I remember doing so many
driving shots in the rain for <i>Se7en,</i>

1122
01:39:43,562 --> 01:39:47,858
we could never get the lighting to match
from one side of the car to the other,

1123
01:39:47,941 --> 01:39:50,819
and it was just such a fucking nightmare.

1124
01:39:50,903 --> 01:39:53,614
So I said, "We're gonna do it
with rear projection,

1125
01:39:53,697 --> 01:39:58,035
and we'll have it rain so we don't get
a clear look at the rear projection."

1126
01:39:58,118 --> 01:40:02,331
It ended up working really well,
but it was night after night after night

1127
01:40:02,414 --> 01:40:06,293
of driving around with a SpaceCam
hanging off the back of an insert car,

1128
01:40:06,376 --> 01:40:10,631
shooting VistaVision plates
of lights going by, oil refineries going by,

1129
01:40:10,756 --> 01:40:12,591
left to right, left to right.

1130
01:40:12,674 --> 01:40:15,886
But it made it so much easier
to shoot on the stage

1131
01:40:15,969 --> 01:40:19,515
because, after a take,
everybody could get out, walk around.

1132
01:40:19,598 --> 01:40:22,226
It wasn't like you had to
rerig the whole car

1133
01:40:22,309 --> 01:40:25,479
and drive five miles
and go back to the start.

1134
01:40:25,562 --> 01:40:28,774
You could just, like,
rewind the film, start over again.

1135
01:40:28,857 --> 01:40:30,359
The crash is something...

1136
01:40:30,442 --> 01:40:33,737
There's a lot of stuff shot on stage
and a lot shot on location.

1137
01:40:33,820 --> 01:40:36,073
I think it matches, really, pretty well.

1138
01:40:36,156 --> 01:40:41,495
I thought Jeff Cronenweth did an
amazing job integrating a lot of stuff.

1139
01:40:41,620 --> 01:40:47,334
And I love the line
that Chuck had in this, which was:

1140
01:40:47,459 --> 01:40:50,504
"We've just had a near-life experience."

1141
01:40:53,298 --> 01:40:57,052
We consciously made a decision
when the valet pulls up,

1142
01:40:57,135 --> 01:41:01,181
the valet is not looking at Brad,
his eye line is looking to Edward.

1143
01:41:01,265 --> 01:41:05,227
Then Edward, of course, demurs to Brad
and says, "After you, Mr. Durden."

1144
01:41:05,310 --> 01:41:08,772
He says, "After you",
and then Brad gets in on the driver's side,

1145
01:41:08,855 --> 01:41:12,609
and you have this whole sequence
with Edward in the passenger seat.

1146
01:41:12,693 --> 01:41:15,028
Then, when the car flips over and it lands,

1147
01:41:15,153 --> 01:41:18,949
you see Brad get out on
the passenger side of the car

1148
01:41:19,032 --> 01:41:20,784
'cause the car's now flipped over.

1149
01:41:20,867 --> 01:41:24,871
So he gets out and comes around
and pulls Edward out of the driver's side.

1150
01:41:24,997 --> 01:41:26,498
I remember when we were

1151
01:41:26,832 --> 01:41:30,419
doing the printmaster up at Skywalker,

1152
01:41:30,502 --> 01:41:34,715
a guy from Dolby was watching the movie
and he goes, "Oh, that's too bad."

1153
01:41:34,798 --> 01:41:39,428
We were, like, "What?" He said, "There's
a continuity problem." I said, "What?"

1154
01:41:39,511 --> 01:41:43,181
He said, "Well, Brad gets out of
the wrong side of the car."

1155
01:41:43,265 --> 01:41:46,476
And I said, "Just wait
a couple more reels."

1156
01:41:46,560 --> 01:41:49,187
"Tell me what you think then."

1157
01:41:52,190 --> 01:41:57,029
Most of the conversations he has, he's by
himself. When he's around other people...

1158
01:41:57,112 --> 01:42:01,575
I mean, they're always separated in
Fight Club and nobody's really clocking.

1159
01:42:01,700 --> 01:42:04,536
It's like when Brad
comes walking around the fight

1160
01:42:04,620 --> 01:42:08,498
where we see the seminarian
and the car salesman fight.

1161
01:42:08,582 --> 01:42:12,127
They're always by themselves
so that's not really an issue.

1162
01:42:12,210 --> 01:42:15,130
I think, definitely, conversations that I...

1163
01:42:15,213 --> 01:42:19,009
I mean, aside from the conversation
in the bar at the beginning,

1164
01:42:19,092 --> 01:42:23,013
which is a guy mumbling to himself
over in the corner having a few beers,

1165
01:42:23,096 --> 01:42:26,600
and the car crash,

1166
01:42:26,725 --> 01:42:30,395
which is dealt with, where the people
overhear what's happening

1167
01:42:30,479 --> 01:42:34,691
and they're sort of clocking each other
like, "This guy's a loon."

1168
01:42:34,775 --> 01:42:39,905
And I don't know whether they're hearing
both sides of it, but they could be.

1169
01:42:39,988 --> 01:42:42,282
I think it checks out.

1170
01:42:42,366 --> 01:42:48,205
I always wanted to have some kind of
reminder back to the human sacrifices,

1171
01:42:48,288 --> 01:42:50,374
so we did this thing with the door.

1172
01:42:50,457 --> 01:42:55,087
On the door, there's a little Dymo label
that says, "Human sacrifices",

1173
01:42:55,212 --> 01:42:58,131
and there's all these drivers'
licences up there,

1174
01:42:58,215 --> 01:43:04,054
like they've really been industrious
in the past couple of months.

1175
01:43:44,886 --> 01:43:49,307
I love the makeup. I love what Rob
Bottin did. He really got this stylized...

1176
01:43:49,433 --> 01:43:53,603
Any time you build up the outside of
somebody's skin instead of taking away,

1177
01:43:53,687 --> 01:43:57,607
which you can't do
to an actor who works a lot,

1178
01:43:57,691 --> 01:43:59,401
you can't be carving away people's skin.

1179
01:43:59,484 --> 01:44:05,031
But he managed to find
this very interesting kind of mid-ground

1180
01:44:05,157 --> 01:44:08,452
between seeing the destruction
on people's faces

1181
01:44:08,535 --> 01:44:10,871
and still being able to recognize them.

1182
01:44:10,996 --> 01:44:17,002
It's difficult because everybody can end up
looking like <i>The Island of Dr Moreau.</i>

1183
01:44:17,085 --> 01:44:19,171
Soon you start building up the lumps.

1184
01:44:19,254 --> 01:44:23,175
Really, in going through research
on what happens to the human face,

1185
01:44:23,258 --> 01:44:27,804
the cadaver shots of people who've been
beaten to death with tire irons and stuff,

1186
01:44:27,888 --> 01:44:31,016
the swelling is kind of amazing,
how it distends.

1187
01:44:31,141 --> 01:44:34,603
You really can't...
It's very difficult to recognize people.

1188
01:44:34,686 --> 01:44:41,234
So we always had to walk that line,
and Bottin is a genius at that.

1189
01:44:42,611 --> 01:44:47,157
There was a problem in trying to find
somebody to play Marla. You never want...

1190
01:44:47,240 --> 01:44:49,242
I don't want people to feel sorry for her.

1191
01:44:49,326 --> 01:44:52,162
I want them to see somebody
who's made choices,

1192
01:44:52,245 --> 01:44:55,081
but is perfectly happy
with the choices she's made,

1193
01:44:55,207 --> 01:44:59,044
you know, however questionable
the behavior may be.

1194
01:44:59,127 --> 01:45:01,630
We're looking at her, saying,

1195
01:45:01,713 --> 01:45:04,758
"Okay, well, she's okay with it
so we should be okay with it."

1196
01:45:04,841 --> 01:45:07,260
And she does that, you know.

1197
01:45:07,719 --> 01:45:10,138
She's a very specific actress.

1198
01:45:10,222 --> 01:45:13,892
Exquisitely so, you know.
Really, like, "What is it about?"

1199
01:45:13,975 --> 01:45:18,772
"What am I playing?"
And she plays it so flawlessly.

1200
01:45:27,739 --> 01:45:32,619
This is an important scene
because it's really the killing of the clown.

1201
01:45:32,744 --> 01:45:37,249
I was watching Cirque du Soleil,
and I've seen all of their shows.

1202
01:45:37,332 --> 01:45:39,417
I was always amazed at the showmanship

1203
01:45:39,543 --> 01:45:45,841
'cause they always had these great kind of
fundamental, dramatic understandings.

1204
01:45:45,924 --> 01:45:49,219
They bring the clown
and you laugh and you laugh,

1205
01:45:49,302 --> 01:45:53,598
and the third time, the clown has
some kind of problem and he can't solve it.

1206
01:45:53,723 --> 01:46:00,063
Then there's this sad moment. Something
happens to the clown, and the audience...

1207
01:46:00,146 --> 01:46:05,443
It's incredibly moving
and I always wondered, "Why does...?"

1208
01:46:05,527 --> 01:46:10,365
If we're gonna kill somebody off,
or kill off Bob, it's gotta mean something.

1209
01:46:10,448 --> 01:46:14,452
He gets shot when they try
to destroy the corporate art.

1210
01:46:14,578 --> 01:46:18,164
But... it was one of those things
where it's like, you know...

1211
01:46:18,248 --> 01:46:21,710
On the set, when, you know,
Edward pulled off the mask

1212
01:46:21,793 --> 01:46:26,131
and everybody saw this incredible likeness
of Meat just lying on the table,

1213
01:46:26,256 --> 01:46:33,013
it was like you, for a second, understood
how poignant this moment could be.

1214
01:46:33,138 --> 01:46:35,515
It was always a scene I was worried about,

1215
01:46:35,640 --> 01:46:39,686
but then, when the mask came off,
it was, like, "Yikes."

1216
01:46:39,811 --> 01:46:42,105
"This is truly horrible."

1217
01:46:43,315 --> 01:46:49,279
And I love the Alexander Haig quality
of Jared in this scene

1218
01:46:49,362 --> 01:46:52,073
where he sort of takes over.

1219
01:46:52,157 --> 01:46:54,284
The Billy Idol.

1220
01:46:54,367 --> 01:46:57,370
He's his second in command.

1221
01:46:57,454 --> 01:47:00,165
I love how, you know,
'cause Tyler's not there,

1222
01:47:00,248 --> 01:47:02,667
they really put Edward on the hot seat.

1223
01:47:02,751 --> 01:47:06,630
They really make him work
to assert his authority.

1224
01:47:06,713 --> 01:47:11,384
And Edward sort of added this line, 'cause
originally he was, like, saying, "What?"

1225
01:47:11,509 --> 01:47:16,222
He started off incredulous,
and he added this thing, "You morons."

1226
01:47:16,348 --> 01:47:18,600
And he did it in this...

1227
01:47:18,683 --> 01:47:22,729
It always made me laugh when we were
watching it 'cause they were morons,

1228
01:47:22,854 --> 01:47:27,067
but he was the person
that just called a spade a spade.

1229
01:47:27,192 --> 01:47:30,487
It's like, "Morons. What are you doing
running around in ski masks,

1230
01:47:30,570 --> 01:47:33,657
"blowing things up?"
What do you think?"

1231
01:48:21,246 --> 01:48:25,709
The scene coming up, we had to
really kind of see this huge montage

1232
01:48:25,792 --> 01:48:29,963
where Edward travels the country
looking for Brad.

1233
01:48:30,046 --> 01:48:32,424
And, as usual, you know,
you end up having

1234
01:48:32,507 --> 01:48:35,135
one day at LAX to shoot all this stuff.

1235
01:48:35,218 --> 01:48:39,973
Conrad Hall Jr. came in and shot a lot of
the plane stuff and did an amazing job

1236
01:48:40,056 --> 01:48:42,684
just, you know, collecting material.

1237
01:48:42,767 --> 01:48:46,896
I mean, in one day,
he got these planes going back and forth.

1238
01:48:46,980 --> 01:48:50,358
We didn't want to end up
doing <i>When Harry Met Sally,</i>

1239
01:48:50,442 --> 01:48:53,945
the little animated plane
going back and forth,

1240
01:48:54,029 --> 01:49:00,118
but it had to be photorealistic, but,
basically, give you the same information.

1241
01:49:00,201 --> 01:49:04,748
It's not a scene I was ever happy with,
my part of it. The other stuff is great,

1242
01:49:04,831 --> 01:49:09,335
but I always felt
I kind of didn't have a handle on it.

1243
01:49:48,708 --> 01:49:51,086
I started to wonder
if we'd made a mistake.

1244
01:49:51,169 --> 01:49:55,006
Everywhere he goes, he finds people
who are not particularly bright

1245
01:49:55,090 --> 01:50:00,261
or not particularly listening to what
he's asking. I always liked that idea

1246
01:50:00,345 --> 01:50:03,681
that everybody who's part of
the whole kind of conspiracy is just...

1247
01:50:03,765 --> 01:50:06,434
They're not the brightest bulbs
on the tree.

1248
01:50:06,518 --> 01:50:09,729
But I started wondering,
when we got into testing,

1249
01:50:09,854 --> 01:50:12,232
whether or not we'd overplayed our hand

1250
01:50:12,357 --> 01:50:17,654
because, you know, you end up going,
"None of these idiots know anything."

1251
01:50:17,737 --> 01:50:20,115
"How is he ever gonna find this guy?"

1252
01:50:20,198 --> 01:50:24,828
But I love the connection being,
you know, these guys saying the chant:

1253
01:50:24,911 --> 01:50:27,539
"His name is Robert Paulsen."

1254
01:50:31,042 --> 01:50:34,254
<i>His name is Robert Paulsen...</i>

1255
01:50:35,004 --> 01:50:37,674
This is something
that Bottin and I talked about.

1256
01:50:38,383 --> 01:50:40,802
When he finally meets the bartender,

1257
01:50:40,885 --> 01:50:45,014
we wanted the bartender
to be pretty fucked up.

1258
01:50:45,098 --> 01:50:47,475
And I always love...

1259
01:50:47,559 --> 01:50:49,769
I always love those haloes. I love the...

1260
01:50:49,894 --> 01:50:54,691
I mean, not love, but, you know,
there's something so extreme about them,

1261
01:50:54,774 --> 01:50:58,611
and the idea of a guy going,
"Remember? You scarred me on the hand."

1262
01:50:58,695 --> 01:51:02,657
But the scar on his hand has to be,
like, the least of his worries.

1263
01:51:02,740 --> 01:51:06,703
It also does a funny thing. When he sits up
straight, you hear a squeak.

1264
01:51:06,786 --> 01:51:11,249
Ren Klyce put this little <i>(squeaks)</i>
as he straightens himself.

1265
01:51:11,332 --> 01:51:14,752
You don't know whether
he's been in a plane crash

1266
01:51:14,836 --> 01:51:17,547
or gone through a meat grinder or what,

1267
01:51:17,630 --> 01:51:22,093
and he's talking about
this little scar on his hand.

1268
01:51:32,896 --> 01:51:34,814
The scene where
Marla answers the phone,

1269
01:51:34,898 --> 01:51:38,401
we had shot where
she pops up into frame,

1270
01:51:38,484 --> 01:51:42,197
then she did one where
she couldn't get the phone off the cradle.

1271
01:51:42,280 --> 01:51:44,991
She was kicking it around.
We ended up using that,

1272
01:51:45,116 --> 01:51:48,828
'cause I loved the idea that there's
this tense moment that he's saying:

1273
01:51:48,953 --> 01:51:53,583
"Quick. Pick up. I gotta ask you this
question." She's like kick, kick, klumpf.

1274
01:51:53,666 --> 01:51:56,461
There's all this ruckus
underneath the frame

1275
01:51:56,544 --> 01:51:58,630
and then she finds
the phone and stands up.

1276
01:51:58,713 --> 01:52:02,091
You're not really quite
sure who he's calling.

1277
01:52:22,820 --> 01:52:27,242
We talked a long time about what
Tyler should be like when he reappears.

1278
01:52:27,325 --> 01:52:33,248
We talked about him looking like
this buffed out, shaved-headed monster,

1279
01:52:33,331 --> 01:52:36,793
this kind of World Wrestling Federation...

1280
01:52:36,876 --> 01:52:39,254
And then we kind of hit on this.

1281
01:52:39,337 --> 01:52:42,048
Michael Kaplan
brought this coat in that was...

1282
01:52:42,131 --> 01:52:45,093
It looked like something
from an INXS video,

1283
01:52:45,176 --> 01:52:48,638
and we got the idea
of Tyler as rock star, you know,

1284
01:52:48,721 --> 01:52:52,058
that Tyler comes back
with glacier glasses and the fur coat,

1285
01:52:52,141 --> 01:52:58,189
and this is his new incarnation.

1286
01:52:58,314 --> 01:53:01,150
And I loved that idea.

1287
01:53:01,234 --> 01:53:04,112
I found it so amusing
that he comes back as,

1288
01:53:04,195 --> 01:53:06,864
you know, Michael Hutchence
or something.

1289
01:53:23,756 --> 01:53:25,633
We rehearsed this scene a lot.

1290
01:53:25,717 --> 01:53:28,636
There are a lot of different ways
you could go with this,

1291
01:53:28,720 --> 01:53:33,224
where Tyler spells it out for him,
"Listen, dummy. Here's what the deal is."

1292
01:53:33,349 --> 01:53:39,272
But Brad hit on this great
even keel of, like, "Okay."

1293
01:53:39,397 --> 01:53:42,859
Being patient because
he still looks down his nose at him.

1294
01:53:42,942 --> 01:53:47,238
"Okay, let me explain this to you."
And I love the simplicity of that.

1295
01:53:47,322 --> 01:53:51,659
Edward came up with this idea.
We were wrapping that day of shooting

1296
01:53:51,743 --> 01:53:55,872
and Edward came up to me and he said,
"What if you shot a version of the shot,

1297
01:53:55,955 --> 01:54:00,710
the profile of Brad and me, and I was
leaning forward, but Brad wasn't there,

1298
01:54:00,793 --> 01:54:02,962
so you really saw how crazy I was?"

1299
01:54:03,046 --> 01:54:07,133
So we set the lights back up
and went in and shot this version

1300
01:54:07,216 --> 01:54:11,721
of Edward just leaning on the bed,
talking to no one.

1301
01:54:33,785 --> 01:54:38,664
Jim Haygood, who cut the movie, came up
with this little flutter-cutting thing

1302
01:54:38,748 --> 01:54:41,042
as the key for the flashbacks

1303
01:54:41,125 --> 01:54:43,252
so that you understood you were
looking at a flashback

1304
01:54:43,336 --> 01:54:48,716
from some alternate point of view because
of this little, like, jerking...

1305
01:54:48,800 --> 01:54:51,135
He took frames out of this and out of that

1306
01:54:51,219 --> 01:54:54,263
so it had this kind of
little spastic quality to it.

1307
01:54:54,347 --> 01:54:57,850
I loved that. It just had such a creepiness.

1308
01:54:58,309 --> 01:55:04,899
You know, there is nothing
kind of beautiful or smooth about reality.

1309
01:55:04,982 --> 01:55:09,487
Reality was this sort of jarring
kind of feel to it.

1310
01:55:14,492 --> 01:55:17,662
The ubiquitous Pepsi machine.
We got these...

1311
01:55:17,745 --> 01:55:19,914
We had this product tie-in with Pepsi

1312
01:55:19,997 --> 01:55:24,377
and we decided to make Pepsi
part of the whole consumer society,

1313
01:55:24,502 --> 01:55:29,507
so everywhere we go,
there's a Pepsi machine in the background.

1314
01:55:32,009 --> 01:55:35,596
And the numbers, when they
point at the numbers on the bill,

1315
01:55:35,680 --> 01:55:38,599
he's been calling CAA all night long.

1316
01:55:38,683 --> 01:55:41,269
He figured they wouldn't sue us.

1317
01:55:41,352 --> 01:55:46,023
And if they did,
they'd have to sue themselves for 10%.

1318
01:56:00,788 --> 01:56:03,666
In the background,
on the steps out to the backyard,

1319
01:56:03,749 --> 01:56:07,044
there's a home-made shooting gallery
with concrete stairs

1320
01:56:07,128 --> 01:56:11,048
and then these little clip-on targets
that are all shot up.

1321
01:56:11,132 --> 01:56:14,469
And, because the stairs
are concrete behind it,

1322
01:56:14,552 --> 01:56:17,597
there's also these boxes of Band-Aids,

1323
01:56:17,722 --> 01:56:21,601
like the full-metal-jacket shells
were ricocheting off this thing

1324
01:56:21,726 --> 01:56:25,396
and there's all these Band-Aids
on the steps right next to it,

1325
01:56:25,480 --> 01:56:29,025
like these guys are constantly being hit
by fragments of bullets

1326
01:56:29,108 --> 01:56:35,406
and they just Band-Aid themselves
and continue their shooting practice.

1327
01:57:00,848 --> 01:57:04,602
Ed Kowalczyk from Live,
he's the lead singer of Live,

1328
01:57:04,685 --> 01:57:07,980
he came in on a casting session

1329
01:57:08,064 --> 01:57:11,817
and said he had read the book
and wanted to be in the movie.

1330
01:57:11,943 --> 01:57:15,404
And so... I'm a huge fan
and I was incredibly flattered.

1331
01:57:15,488 --> 01:57:19,617
I said, "We don't have..." 'Cause he was
on tour and he only had a couple of days.

1332
01:57:19,700 --> 01:57:22,328
So, as it turned out,
the couple of days that

1333
01:57:22,411 --> 01:57:24,705
he had were when we were
shooting this scene

1334
01:57:24,789 --> 01:57:28,543
so we asked him if he wanted to be
the waiter and he said, "Sure."

1335
01:57:28,626 --> 01:57:32,421
So he came in and we shot with him.

1336
01:57:32,505 --> 01:57:35,716
Of course, you only see him
for that one shot,

1337
01:57:35,800 --> 01:57:39,428
and it cuts his face in half
when he leans over to talk to Edward.

1338
01:57:39,512 --> 01:57:43,933
Then we ended up reshooting the scene
so he ended up having to come back in.

1339
01:57:44,016 --> 01:57:49,522
He was an incredibly good sport about it,
but I was, like, "I'm sure he will hate me."

1340
01:57:49,647 --> 01:57:52,191
It was one those things.
"Oh, it will be a lark."

1341
01:57:52,275 --> 01:57:54,485
Then it ends up being a six-month curse

1342
01:57:54,569 --> 01:57:59,073
and you have to come back in
to do some little cameo.

1343
01:58:24,473 --> 01:58:27,643
Initially, it was written a little coy.

1344
01:58:27,727 --> 01:58:32,815
He kind of comes back and he whines
and tries to ingratiate himself to her,

1345
01:58:32,898 --> 01:58:37,445
and I just thought he just had to be
right on this, like, "You don't understand."

1346
01:58:37,528 --> 01:58:42,408
"This is what's going on." It had to have
a little bit more of a drive to it.

1347
01:58:42,491 --> 01:58:46,162
And I think Edward agreed with me,
and we got Fox to give us the money

1348
01:58:46,245 --> 01:58:48,414
and we went back and reshot it.

1349
01:58:48,539 --> 01:58:51,959
We put in things that we ended up pulling
because of the length,

1350
01:58:52,043 --> 01:58:57,673
but it was much better in the reshoot.
It just had more of a kind of intensity.

1351
01:58:57,757 --> 01:59:00,384
But I do think it's the kind of thing,
like...

1352
01:59:00,468 --> 01:59:06,015
It probably shouldn't have been
them stopping and talking.

1353
01:59:06,098 --> 01:59:11,562
But I love what he does. I love that they're
coming from completely different places.

1354
01:59:11,646 --> 01:59:14,231
He knows he's been a schmuck.

1355
01:59:14,315 --> 01:59:17,068
He fucked up and there's no reason
she should believe him,

1356
01:59:17,151 --> 01:59:22,490
and yet he is hellbent on
getting what he wants out of it.

1357
01:59:22,573 --> 01:59:25,618
And she just thinks
he is a fucking lunatic by now

1358
01:59:25,701 --> 01:59:28,954
and is wondering why
she ever let him into her life.

1359
01:59:29,038 --> 01:59:32,917
And I thought that she played that so well.

1360
01:59:37,755 --> 01:59:39,882
I wanted this at
the beginning of the scene.

1361
01:59:39,965 --> 01:59:42,551
When they're having their argument,

1362
01:59:42,635 --> 01:59:45,930
you see <i>Seven Years in Tibet</i>
on one of the marquees.

1363
01:59:46,013 --> 01:59:49,600
There were three marquees
in the wide shot.

1364
01:59:49,684 --> 01:59:51,644
You never see them
'cause the bus is in the way,

1365
01:59:51,727 --> 01:59:55,398
but, in the background,
there's a marquee for <i>Wings of the Dove,</i>

1366
01:59:55,481 --> 01:59:57,775
and <i>The People vs. Larry Flynt.</i>

1367
01:59:57,900 --> 02:00:02,988
We had them all look like real marquees
where they don't have all the letters.

1368
02:00:03,114 --> 02:00:08,869
So it was <i>People vs. Larry Flyn,
Seven Year in Tibe,</i> and <i>Wing of Dove.</i>

1369
02:00:08,953 --> 02:00:12,248
So it has that sort of broken English,
video-cassette,

1370
02:00:12,331 --> 02:00:17,420
VCR-instruction-manual
kind of broken English vibe to it.

1371
02:00:32,351 --> 02:00:35,062
You can kind of see it just...
No, you can't.

1372
02:00:36,856 --> 02:00:39,817
You never see it,
but it's in the far back.

1373
02:00:59,211 --> 02:01:02,047
We had to shoot
the interrogation scene in one day,

1374
02:01:02,131 --> 02:01:04,633
move into a location and shoot it.

1375
02:01:04,717 --> 02:01:11,515
So we didn't quite end up doing it
the justice that I always wanted to do it,

1376
02:01:11,599 --> 02:01:14,685
but it turned out pretty good.

1377
02:01:16,896 --> 02:01:20,816
I love the cops.
They really look like cops to me.

1378
02:01:51,222 --> 02:01:53,766
There was an idea for a scene in the script

1379
02:01:53,891 --> 02:02:00,981
where, as Edward goes running
to the 1888 building to find the bombs,

1380
02:02:01,065 --> 02:02:04,985
as he's running along,
Brad ends up running beside him saying:

1381
02:02:05,069 --> 02:02:11,283
"Hey, where are you going?", so it's got
a real kind of <i>Looney Tunes</i> feel to it.

1382
02:02:11,408 --> 02:02:14,537
But we ended up cutting that out
and just going with the...

1383
02:02:14,620 --> 02:02:18,374
We just didn't have time
to shoot it and stage it.

1384
02:02:18,457 --> 02:02:23,254
You know, it would've required
insert cars with cameras on them.

1385
02:02:23,337 --> 02:02:29,677
So we ended just having him run
and have Brad appear outside the building

1386
02:02:29,760 --> 02:02:31,804
as he's trying to break in.

1387
02:02:52,950 --> 02:02:58,080
It was tough to get the audience to sort of
buy that all these people were in on it.

1388
02:02:58,163 --> 02:03:01,584
It's one of those things.
We wanted to get as quickly from this,

1389
02:03:01,667 --> 02:03:05,504
from the castration scene,
to the bomb as we possibly could.

1390
02:03:05,629 --> 02:03:10,759
But I love the idea of Edward Norton
as a thinking man's action hero,

1391
02:03:10,843 --> 02:03:12,720
this guy in underwear,

1392
02:03:12,803 --> 02:03:17,141
running around with a folder
in the middle of the night, and a.45.

1393
02:03:47,630 --> 02:03:50,507
There's an absurdist level to this movie

1394
02:03:50,633 --> 02:03:54,887
that was very difficult
to get audiences to kind of accept.

1395
02:03:55,012 --> 02:03:57,598
We've spent the last 20 years
in movies trying to...

1396
02:03:57,681 --> 02:04:00,559
Because we came upon
special-effects technology

1397
02:04:00,684 --> 02:04:04,980
that would allow us
to make anything look real,

1398
02:04:05,064 --> 02:04:08,484
so, when you do stuff that's metaphoric,

1399
02:04:08,567 --> 02:04:12,071
or you do stuff that's absurdist-based,
it's very...

1400
02:04:12,196 --> 02:04:15,866
Especially if it's photographed
in a realistic manner,

1401
02:04:15,950 --> 02:04:18,619
it's hard to get people
to understand the tone.

1402
02:04:18,702 --> 02:04:21,455
That was always a problem
with this material,

1403
02:04:21,538 --> 02:04:28,003
but, you know, I always felt that it was
more important to try and tell this tale

1404
02:04:28,087 --> 02:04:31,757
than it was to accept
defeat initially and go:

1405
02:04:31,840 --> 02:04:38,597
"We'll never get people to understand
the whole <i>Dr Strangelove</i> of it all."

1406
02:05:00,160 --> 02:05:02,329
Edward was a great sport about this.

1407
02:05:02,413 --> 02:05:06,166
I mean, there was never a moment
where you'd say to him:

1408
02:05:06,250 --> 02:05:10,129
"Okay, you're gonna be thrown down
the steps in your underwear."

1409
02:05:10,212 --> 02:05:12,923
You know, he was just, like,
"Okay. And then what?"

1410
02:05:13,007 --> 02:05:15,467
"He's gonna drag you by your hair."
"Okay."

1411
02:05:15,592 --> 02:05:18,345
"Then you crawl under the car
and he drags you out

1412
02:05:18,429 --> 02:05:20,305
and takes your shoe and beats you."

1413
02:05:20,389 --> 02:05:22,266
He's, like, "Okay, fine."

1414
02:05:22,391 --> 02:05:25,436
We ended up having
sort of a study in sadomasochism

1415
02:05:25,519 --> 02:05:29,565
because we would dream up things for him
and he would go along with it.

1416
02:05:29,648 --> 02:05:35,112
"All right. I have to crawl through
broken glass on my knees. All right. Fine."

1417
02:05:48,250 --> 02:05:52,212
We wanted to pay homage
to the World Trade Center bombing

1418
02:05:52,296 --> 02:05:55,507
by having this be a Budget rent-a-truck,

1419
02:05:55,966 --> 02:06:01,138
but Budget wouldn't give us their little
stickers to put on the keys and stuff.

1420
02:06:01,221 --> 02:06:04,141
They thought it was in bad taste.

1421
02:06:32,044 --> 02:06:33,754
After we'd assembled this scene,

1422
02:06:33,837 --> 02:06:38,634
we tried to time it out to
make it as explicit as possible.

1423
02:06:38,717 --> 02:06:42,096
You know, they had
a very measured kind of dialogue

1424
02:06:42,179 --> 02:06:48,060
so that we could have the timer really be
ticking down and have it in continuity.

1425
02:06:48,185 --> 02:06:53,273
But when we went to shoot the inserts, we
didn't have Edward, didn't have his hands.

1426
02:06:53,357 --> 02:06:56,401
So we ended up shooting
a lot of stuff out of continuity

1427
02:06:56,527 --> 02:07:00,280
to get the hands where we wanted them,
and then we matted the clock in

1428
02:07:00,364 --> 02:07:04,284
so that if you actually ran a clock
on the videotape of this,

1429
02:07:04,368 --> 02:07:09,998
you would find out that the clock
is exactly right where it's supposed to be.

1430
02:07:10,082 --> 02:07:13,836
So we just split-screened
the LEDs back in.

1431
02:07:24,638 --> 02:07:30,018
Definitely, the car being stolen at
the beginning is a complete flight of fancy.

1432
02:07:30,102 --> 02:07:32,229
There's no way that that can happen.

1433
02:07:32,312 --> 02:07:37,067
But, basically,
everything else is pretty bulletproof.

1434
02:07:37,151 --> 02:07:41,613
But it is a different movie
the second time you see it, you know.

1435
02:07:45,993 --> 02:07:47,244
<i>Okay.</i>

1436
02:07:47,327 --> 02:07:50,372
<i>You are now firing a gun
at your imaginary friend.</i>

1437
02:07:50,455 --> 02:07:56,336
I love the idea of your alternate
personality, this creation of yours,

1438
02:07:56,420 --> 02:07:59,006
that gets fed up with you
at a certain point.

1439
02:07:59,089 --> 02:08:02,384
He's just sick to death of you
and your weakness.

1440
02:08:02,467 --> 02:08:05,762
And he has to take over, he has to, like...

1441
02:08:05,888 --> 02:08:08,265
And, originally, this fight scene

1442
02:08:08,348 --> 02:08:11,810
that took place in the building
was very <i>Dr Strangelove.</i>

1443
02:08:11,935 --> 02:08:14,521
It was very much like this alien presence.

1444
02:08:14,605 --> 02:08:18,984
They were gonna have a whole shoot-out,
rushing around, firing at each other.

1445
02:08:19,109 --> 02:08:21,820
We were gonna try to do this whole
<i>Die Hard</i> thing

1446
02:08:21,945 --> 02:08:24,198
where he's trying to find Tyler

1447
02:08:24,281 --> 02:08:27,075
and Tyler can appear
at any moment and beat him up.

1448
02:08:27,159 --> 02:08:31,663
But it ended up being very funny-funny,
you know, kind of goofy-funny,

1449
02:08:31,788 --> 02:08:36,627
so we finally kind of, you know, about
two weeks before we had to shoot this,

1450
02:08:36,752 --> 02:08:39,379
we sat down and said,
"This should be brutal."

1451
02:08:39,463 --> 02:08:42,341
"He should beat the living shit
out of this guy."

1452
02:08:42,466 --> 02:08:45,219
So, when we walked in,
we had the whole thing staged

1453
02:08:45,302 --> 02:08:48,138
and the stunt guys were
there, and they were,

1454
02:08:48,222 --> 02:08:50,015
like, "Okay, then what
do you want us to do?"

1455
02:08:50,140 --> 02:08:54,061
"You throw him through this window."
They were, like, "He's in shorts?"

1456
02:08:54,144 --> 02:08:57,064
I said, "Yeah."
"Then he comes here and he does what?"

1457
02:08:57,147 --> 02:09:00,859
"You drag him from under the car,
then you get into this fight here,

1458
02:09:00,984 --> 02:09:03,403
then he throws him
down the side of the car

1459
02:09:03,487 --> 02:09:06,073
"and he breaks the little side-view mirror."

1460
02:09:06,156 --> 02:09:09,409
And he said, "With what?"
I said, "With his face. What else?"

1461
02:09:09,493 --> 02:09:12,663
And they were going,
"Oh, my God. And then what happens?"

1462
02:09:12,746 --> 02:09:15,832
"Then he drags him
and throws him down the stairs."

1463
02:09:15,958 --> 02:09:19,920
And the guy who actually did this stunt
was truly amazing.

1464
02:09:20,003 --> 02:09:22,756
I mean, we probably did 11 takes of it.

1465
02:09:22,839 --> 02:09:26,927
We threw him down three flights of stairs
with no pads on

1466
02:09:27,010 --> 02:09:30,847
and he did it amazingly.

1467
02:09:51,201 --> 02:09:54,454
We added this joke,
where Tyler says, "What? I'm sorry?"

1468
02:09:54,538 --> 02:09:57,207
And he says,
"I still can't think of anything."

1469
02:09:57,291 --> 02:09:59,793
And then Tyler says,
"Oh, flashback humor."

1470
02:09:59,876 --> 02:10:03,797
We added that one
for people who were paying attention.

1471
02:10:07,592 --> 02:10:09,928
But, again, the thing, you know...

1472
02:10:10,053 --> 02:10:15,934
I love the negotiation with the insane,

1473
02:10:16,059 --> 02:10:20,022
you know, hyperstylized,
masculine side of yourself.

1474
02:10:20,105 --> 02:10:24,776
I love the idea of him trying to...
He's trying to reason with him now.

1475
02:10:24,860 --> 02:10:29,197
His ankle's fucked up, he's been thrown
down the stairs, his face is cut up,

1476
02:10:29,281 --> 02:10:31,992
and he's still trying to kind of get through.

1477
02:10:32,075 --> 02:10:36,246
He's trying to get through to him,
but he's obviously not powerful enough.

1478
02:10:36,330 --> 02:10:39,875
He's not physically powerful enough
to overcome Tyler.

1479
02:10:39,958 --> 02:10:46,256
But his mind is still working. He's still
trying. He's looking for some way out.

1480
02:10:54,514 --> 02:10:57,517
And we had this idea
as we were rehearsing this,

1481
02:10:57,601 --> 02:11:01,563
that Tyler should address this idea that...

1482
02:11:02,773 --> 02:11:04,900
<i>- Why can't I get rid of you?
- You need me.</i>

1483
02:11:04,983 --> 02:11:07,069
<i>No. I don't. I really don't any more.</i>

1484
02:11:07,152 --> 02:11:11,031
You know, "Look at all this I've done
for you, you ungrateful fuck."

1485
02:11:11,114 --> 02:11:15,535
And also that he calls him on it,
says, "Take some responsibility for it."

1486
02:11:15,619 --> 02:11:21,458
And I always loved that, the notion
of this very intellectual argument

1487
02:11:21,541 --> 02:11:23,210
coming down to...

1488
02:11:23,293 --> 02:11:29,424
You know, some of the more salient points
are brought up by the truly insane person.

1489
02:11:29,508 --> 02:11:33,762
The truly insane character in the room
is the one who goes, "Hey."

1490
02:11:33,845 --> 02:11:38,934
"I didn't dream you up.
You dreamt me up. This is your mess."

1491
02:12:08,422 --> 02:12:13,468
When we... when we started
cutting the trailers for the movie,

1492
02:12:13,552 --> 02:12:17,639
there was, you know,
a couple of scenes of Brad in this...

1493
02:12:17,722 --> 02:12:21,226
He's wearing this tank top.
I think it says "Black Sugar" on it.

1494
02:12:21,351 --> 02:12:23,770
And it's basically,

1495
02:12:23,854 --> 02:12:28,483
like, a photo collage of pornography.

1496
02:12:28,567 --> 02:12:32,654
It's just, like, all these naked women,
you know, with their legs spread.

1497
02:12:32,737 --> 02:12:36,491
And it has stars over all the offending bits,

1498
02:12:36,575 --> 02:12:39,786
but it's still just
covered with pornography.

1499
02:12:39,870 --> 02:12:41,496
These shirts were made for the movie.

1500
02:12:41,580 --> 02:12:44,541
They found this fabric
and had these shirts made.

1501
02:12:44,624 --> 02:12:48,670
Brad loved them, and that was the shirt
Tyler was gonna wear at the end.

1502
02:12:48,753 --> 02:12:52,924
We'd finally finished cutting the trailer
and we'd gotten it past the MPAA,

1503
02:12:53,049 --> 02:12:57,053
who was loaded for bear. They were skeet
shooting this entire movie.

1504
02:12:57,137 --> 02:13:01,266
Everything we would send them, they
would go through it with a microscope.

1505
02:13:01,391 --> 02:13:03,435
We finally sent the final trailer,

1506
02:13:03,560 --> 02:13:07,856
and they approved it on the basis of
a three-quarter-inch dub of an Avid output.

1507
02:13:07,939 --> 02:13:11,902
But, I mean, when he goes, "Whoa, whoa,
whoa" at the end of the trailer,

1508
02:13:12,027 --> 02:13:15,363
he's standing there in this shirt
covered with pornography.

1509
02:13:15,447 --> 02:13:21,077
I remember finishing the trailer at the last
possible second that it could be finished

1510
02:13:21,203 --> 02:13:25,165
and sent to the theatres
in order to get it on <i>Star Wars,</i> I guess.

1511
02:13:25,248 --> 02:13:27,626
It was for the big <i>Star Wars.</i>

1512
02:13:27,959 --> 02:13:29,211
<i>(laughs)</i>

1513
02:13:30,253 --> 02:13:33,924
I was, like, "I never thought this shirt
would get past the MPAA."

1514
02:13:34,007 --> 02:13:36,301
And one of the guys
from Fox said, "What?"

1515
02:13:36,426 --> 02:13:39,387
I said, "That shirt's
covered with pornography."

1516
02:13:39,471 --> 02:13:41,973
And they were, like, "Oh!" Sweating it.

1517
02:13:42,098 --> 02:13:45,727
"Oh, my God. It's covered with
pornography. What are we gonna do?"

1518
02:13:45,810 --> 02:13:47,896
"We're gonna have to fuzz it out,

1519
02:13:47,979 --> 02:13:50,524
or do what they do on rap videos on MTV

1520
02:13:50,607 --> 02:13:53,235
where they put that
mosaic over everything."

1521
02:13:53,318 --> 02:13:57,822
It just got to be... The whole, you know,
censorship issue on a movie like this

1522
02:13:57,948 --> 02:14:02,118
just gets to be so hilarious.

1523
02:14:18,969 --> 02:14:21,930
We looped all of Edward's lines here,
at the end,

1524
02:14:22,013 --> 02:14:24,766
and he actually put rock
candy in his mouth

1525
02:14:24,849 --> 02:14:29,604
so he has things in the back of his teeth
and they're actually clattering around.

1526
02:14:29,688 --> 02:14:31,940
It's like the gun has gone off

1527
02:14:32,023 --> 02:14:35,402
and blown one of his
back-left molars out the side of his face.

1528
02:14:35,485 --> 02:14:40,949
But he's still, "I'm okay, I'm okay.
Everything is okay. Let her go."

1529
02:14:41,032 --> 02:14:44,160
I always thought, before we looped it,

1530
02:14:44,244 --> 02:14:47,038
people were just appalled
by this final scene.

1531
02:14:47,163 --> 02:14:49,499
When we finally looped it so he could...

1532
02:14:49,624 --> 02:14:51,751
He had a different voice
throughout this thing

1533
02:14:51,835 --> 02:14:54,129
'cause we shot it over two or three days,

1534
02:14:54,212 --> 02:14:57,173
and so in some of the close-ups
he's, like, "Ow, ow, ow",

1535
02:14:57,257 --> 02:15:01,636
and in others his voice was clear.
And so, when we finally put it all together

1536
02:15:01,720 --> 02:15:06,391
with this voice that was kind of fucked up,
people just started cracking up.

1537
02:15:06,516 --> 02:15:10,103
And that's what they should be doing.

1538
02:15:10,186 --> 02:15:12,647
That's my feeling about
what they should be doing.

1539
02:15:12,731 --> 02:15:17,611
I love the idea of her coming up there to
go, "You fucker. I don't ever want to see..."

1540
02:15:17,694 --> 02:15:22,032
"Oh, my God.
What is wrong with your face?"

1541
02:15:22,782 --> 02:15:25,619
I wanted to do an effect
where she goes into her purse

1542
02:15:25,702 --> 02:15:28,955
and pulls out some wad of tissue
that she's sneezed in,

1543
02:15:29,039 --> 02:15:31,750
and she tucks it in the hole in his cheek.

1544
02:15:31,833 --> 02:15:34,794
But we could never figure out
a way to do that.

1545
02:15:34,878 --> 02:15:37,255
He, at first, doesn't want her to do it,

1546
02:15:37,339 --> 02:15:40,342
"Oh, no, that's okay.
That's all right. I'm all right."

1547
02:15:48,141 --> 02:15:50,393
The buildings coming down at the end...

1548
02:15:53,980 --> 02:15:57,275
Doc Baily, the CG artist who created all
these buildings, he worked on <i>The Game</i>

1549
02:15:57,400 --> 02:16:01,488
when Michael Douglas
crashes through the ceiling

1550
02:16:01,571 --> 02:16:03,657
and all the little pieces of glass fall.

1551
02:16:03,740 --> 02:16:06,785
So we called him and said,
"Boy, have we got a job for you."

1552
02:16:06,868 --> 02:16:09,704
And we told him about
this final shot and he said,

1553
02:16:09,788 --> 02:16:12,332
"Well, how much time do you have?"

1554
02:16:12,415 --> 02:16:15,502
I said, "As far as
I'm concerned you can start,

1555
02:16:15,585 --> 02:16:18,546
because we have to get a translight made,

1556
02:16:18,630 --> 02:16:22,509
and we're not shooting it for six months."

1557
02:16:22,592 --> 02:16:26,805
"You can have a year. You can have
a year and two months if you want it."

1558
02:16:26,888 --> 02:16:28,848
He said, "Okay." He took this job

1559
02:16:28,932 --> 02:16:32,977
and all he did for one whole year
was work on the final shot,

1560
02:16:33,103 --> 02:16:37,732
making all these little falling bits of
building and breaking these buildings up.

1561
02:16:37,816 --> 02:16:40,402
It was amazing,
you know, 'cause you would go...

1562
02:16:40,485 --> 02:16:43,571
Every two or three weeks,
you would see what he was up to,

1563
02:16:43,655 --> 02:16:48,326
and he was on building number three, "I've
got the glass to blow in building three."

1564
02:16:48,410 --> 02:16:52,205
I was always wondering about,
if our cellphones were tapped,

1565
02:16:52,288 --> 02:16:55,250
what the CIA would be thinking.
"How's it coming?"

1566
02:16:55,333 --> 02:16:58,253
"Building three
is gonna go down really easily."

1567
02:16:58,336 --> 02:17:02,215
"That's not a problem. I'm worried
about the blasts on building four

1568
02:17:02,298 --> 02:17:07,095
because if the glass goes too far out, it
would be killing everybody in the street."

1569
02:17:07,178 --> 02:17:10,265
These conversations
would go on and on and on

1570
02:17:10,348 --> 02:17:12,475
about what destruction we should wreak.

1571
02:17:12,559 --> 02:17:18,273
All the building are based on photographs
of buildings that we took in and around LA,

1572
02:17:18,356 --> 02:17:22,485
so we were referring to a building
in Century City or a building downtown,

1573
02:17:22,569 --> 02:17:26,906
and, you know, we would call them
the Time Warner building or whatever.

1574
02:17:26,990 --> 02:17:30,785
The Fox Tower is one of the ones
that goes down in the foreground.

1575
02:17:30,869 --> 02:17:33,538
And, of course,
all of our conversations were:

1576
02:17:33,621 --> 02:17:37,500
"Okay, so if you blow up the Fox Tower
before you blow up the other one..."

1577
02:17:37,584 --> 02:17:40,545
But he did an amazing, amazing job.

1578
02:17:40,670 --> 02:17:42,881
It was literally a frame at a time.

1579
02:17:43,006 --> 02:17:45,550
And in the end, you know, he was saying:

1580
02:17:45,675 --> 02:17:51,431
"We're probably gonna have, like,
8-900,000 separate bits of falling stuff."

1581
02:17:51,514 --> 02:17:53,349
In the end it was millions.

1582
02:17:53,433 --> 02:17:57,187
It was three or four million
little separate pieces that were falling.

1583
02:17:57,312 --> 02:18:02,066
The glass that blows out of the towers in
the background and the smoke elements,

1584
02:18:02,192 --> 02:18:06,654
I mean, it was millions.
It took weeks and weeks and weeks

1585
02:18:06,738 --> 02:18:10,658
to laser-record all the stuff out.

1586
02:18:16,998 --> 02:18:19,626
There he is, Richard "Dr" Baily.

1587
02:19:05,088 --> 02:19:06,089
English - US - SDH

1587
02:19:07,305 --> 02:20:07,845
5 days of Hacking / Camping / Lectures
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