Edward Norton On David Fincher's Theatre Of Cruelty, aka Fight Club

The rules say you’re not meant to talk about it but, 24 years on, the Academy Award-nominee can’t shut up about the anarchist’s epic

Edward Norton is in a thoughtful mood. “You know, Fight Club could have been a very different film. It didn’t need to be a massive, $70 million production. You could have made it on an indie budget. But [director] David Fincher was so inspired by Chuck Palahnuik’s novel, he decided that, to do justice to it, you needed to see the plane crash, you needed to see those buildings collapse, you needed that title sequence. Of course, it cost a lot more money and made the picture a much bigger risk, but watch the finished film and it’s hard to argue it wasn’t worth every penny.”

A mega-budget movie that eviscerates capitalism over the course of 123 minutes, David Fincher’s Fight Club is the sort of film that comes along but once a generation. An apple cart-upsetting event on a part with the Sex Pistols, Fincher’s adaptation of Palahniuk’s incendiary novel-cum-battle cry had cult sensation written all over it. But since the key roles of the nameless narrator and the ‘imaginative’ Tyler Durden were filled by Norton and Brad Pitt respectively, Fight Club didn’t only play well with lovers of radical chic - it both reached and preached to the multiplex millions.