Chuck Palahniuk: "I Thought Of Fight Club As A Disco But Fighting"



(image via mentalfloss)

Wrestling is often thought of as a soap opera but with fighting. And just a twist of gay. Cult favorite Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the hyper-violent Fight Club, in an interview with Playboy contributing editor David Sheff, describes his novel that made it to the big screen as closer to disco. "I thought of it as a disco but fighting," he tells David Sheff in the latest issue of Playboy. "You’d ask someone to fight, and they’d say yes or no."

Chuck goes on: "My big defense is if I can think about something, whatever it is –the choking thing, a fight club—a million other people can and probably have too. For example, in Fight Club when Tyler works as a projectionist in a movie theater, he cuts pornography into the films he shows. People in the theater get a glimpse of a penis or some sex act. I wrote it in the original story, and someone said, ‘You can’t write that. Someone will get the idea.’ But someone already had the idea. People were doing it. I’d heard about it from friends. Then when the Fight Club movie went into production, the director, David Fincher, said, ‘I was the projectionist in my high school. I used to do it.’ He sliced porn into movies too. It’s like the stories of Disney animators inserting a frame or two of porn into Disney movies. It’s the same impulse."

Interesting to note that David Fincher's cinematic career as an auteur du cinema began with fresh slices of porn.

And on all those homemade incendiaries in Fight Club: "My brother is an electrical engineer for Chevron. We spent a weekend coming up with these formulas. It was a game to play. Yes, the formulas worked before my publisher got its hands on them. The real recipes made it all the way to typeset, but then somebody freaked out. They asked me to change one ingredient in every recipe to make them useless."

Pygmy, Palahniuk’s latest novel out May 5th. Read the interview in the May issue of Playboy.