Movies - TV
David Fincher Directed Fight Club Because David O. Russell 'Didn't Get It'
By CHRISTIAN GAINEY
In Brian Raftery’s book "Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen," filmmaker David O. Russell admitted that after he read Chuck Palahniuk’s novel for “Fight Club” he just "didn't get it." However, director David Fincher connected with the ideas in the story and thought it spoke to his jaded, disaffected generation.
Fincher explained in the Raftery book, "I was in my late thirties, and I saw that book as a rallying cry. Chuck was talking about a very specific kind of anger that was engendered by a kind of malaise: 'We've been inert so long, we need to sprint into our next evolution of ourselves.' And it was easy to get swept away in just the sheer juiciness of it."
Rather than creating an emotional connection between the characters and the audience as David O. Russell often does, Fincher focused on making his characters' beliefs relatable. In “Fight Club,” it was essential that audiences connected to Durden's belief that modern society lacked purpose and was lost in consumerism, which made Fincher's directing style a great fit.