film: commentary

> WORDS WITH CHUCK:
My interview with Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and the upcoming Choke

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Chuck: It's funny, I heard and I saw a lot of takes, and it breaks my heart because when I see the movie I see the things that weren't used.

Like the part where Brad's riding the bicycle around and hits the wall and goes over, he did like, I don't know how many… the first thirty takes of that with no pants on, so when he goes over the handlebars, for one second, you see Brad Pitt's testicles hanging there. And you see this thirty times, and the executives watching the dailies the next day were like "can't use it, can't use it" and maybe in like take thirty-two he is finally wearing boxers, and they were like "thank god".

And the other one where he throws the door open and he is wearing sweatpants, but they're really low. They framed the shot so low that it showed pubic hair, and so they sat there in the Fox offices going "can't use it, can't use it, pubic hair, pubic hair" until finally they framed it up just a little higher… there was so much of that stuff that got thrown away.

John: Ah, the censors…
Chuck: Yeah, I think they really knew that they were going to meet so much resistance with the movie.

John: The thing that I remember reading, that they had a lot of resistance to, was the scene when Ed Norton's beating the tar out of…
Chuck: Jared Leto. Yeah, they cut that back, and David actually cut more to the action shots; he shows almost exclusively the crowd now.

John: Which almost makes it worse, viewing it, because you can see by the other people's faces, that he is really beating the shit out of this guy.
Chuck: That's what David felt too, eventually; he felt it was a stronger scene that way. So it's funny how, you know, I never get too angry at my editor because even if he's wrong, just the fact that he has thrown an obstacle in my way, means that I am going to be forced to create something better, it's just not the thing I originally wanted. You recognize those things as sort of gifts.

John: One thing that I think is just hilarious and fascinating, especially in Survivor, Tender is always talking about different ways to clean things and throwing in all these facts, is this more of you just listening to your friend's conversations, are these actual facts, or do you just make this stuff up?
Chuck: It's funny because, with the money from Fight Club I was able to buy a house, and as part of the terms of getting this house they had to clean the carpets. So I was there, and I met the carpet cleaners and they were these two guys who just smelled like dope and they were so stoned…and it was like "Bill and Ted's Carpet Cleaning Adventure" and I was thinking, there is nothing that I'm going to learn from these guys, what a waste of my time. Then they start finding these spots in the carpet, and they are like "dude what is this?" "this is like blood, like menstrual blood, or this is bilious blood" and they start talking about all these different kinds of organic stains, and then they start comparing cleaning hints. Suddenly it was like being trapped in this really strange Martha Stewart special, whether to use talcum powder or baking soda, and taking blood and brains and stains out of everything. I realized that these guys were going to write a whole chapter for me, and I said, "Can you just shut up while I go and get paper" and they just talked and I just wrote it down. It was great, and they cleaned the carpets.

John: So it's probably all true…
Chuck: Yeah, it works for them. I think they were too stoned to lie. It's funny, there's even more stuff in Choke…

Chuck: I thought, if people are going to be offended about a dark comedy about violence, I thought how about a dark comedy about sex. And I can't write sex scenes. In Invisible Monsters they talk about sex in really clinical terms, in Survivor there's a sex scene but it lasts one second long, Fight Club all the sex is off stage, you just hear it. Because I knew writing about sex is like writing about nature, it never does it justice. It's always sort of clunky and stupid. So, I thought it terrifies me, the thought of having to write sex scenes, so this is exactly what I should do. Force myself to figure out a way to reinvent this, by reinventing the language of it.

So I just wrote this dark comedy about this guy that goes to sexaholics anonymous in order to pick up women.

John: Nice! [We both laugh.]
Chuck: I went for six months…

John: Oh really, wow!
Chuck: I went to Tuesday nights and Friday nights. So at my Friday night group there's this whole contingent of people who were released from jail for three hours to come to this meeting. The first one I noticed was this really good-looking guy sitting next to me and he had a blue form and I thought damn, he is just my friend's type, I've got to some how introduce her to this guy. He had to get the group leader to sign his blue form before he left, and I later found out that he was a child molester, and he has to get this form signed to prove that that is where he was. That he wasn't out diddling kids. My friend is a fifth-grade teacher and I'm like, nah, I don't think this is gonna work…

John: Well, they would have had things in common…
Chuck: Well, yeah, they are both interested in kids. [sick laughter]

There was also a fairly large number of prostitutes, who would be release from jail to come to this meeting, and they too would have to have their forms signed. It was just the scope of people, and their stories at these meetings. It was just breathtaking. It was heartbreaking. It was better than any TV or any movie; I would just sit there dumbfounded. One guy would always bring this big canister of M&M's. And he would pass it around the big table and everyone would take some out. It came to me and I took a bunch out and put them down and passed it on, and then I was just about to eat and then I thought, forty sexaholics have just touched these M&M's. [We laugh.] And I thought, oh god, and I can't not eat them. So I ended up pouring them into my lap - milk chocolate that melts in your lap. At the end of the meeting, I had these big candy-colored stains all over my lap.

John: With Fight Club, did you research also? Did you go to the groups and all that?
Chuck: Yeah, because that is when I was working as a volunteer at a hospice. I didn't have any skills, like nursing skills, so I just worked as what they call an escort, and I would drive people to and from their support groups and I would have to sit with them in their groups so I could drive them back to the hospice. And there is just no nice way that you can let everybody know, "Oh, by the way, I don't have tuberculosis, but I'm just gonna sit here, ok". So I would just sit there and people would assume that I had whatever everyone had. I started fantasizing about a guy who did this just to feel better about his life. And the next step is some day he's going to see somebody else in the group doing the exact same thing, and it's going to spoil it, because it's going to point out his lack of integrity.

John: What's your take on the ending that was used for the movie? Were they struggling with the ideas at the end?
Chuck: The ending of the book makes it a lot more apparent that he doesn't kill off Tyler; Tyler will continue to exist in some form. It's more a gesture. It's more of a willingness to die, to resolve the issue, than it is actually dying to resolve the issue. It's knowing that you're going to die.

John: So in his mind, he's taking control back…
Chuck: Right, in his mind he's killing himself, and Tyler's in his mind so it doesn't matter if he actually dies.

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