Fight Club

Mr. Ingalls

20th Century Novel and Film

12/09/06

Fight Club in Filming the Book

The film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's book "Fight Club" was very well done and true to the novel. However, the books message is somewhat different and more extreme than the film's.

The director of the film version of Fight Club is David Fincher. Fincher has made himself known as a music video and film director, known for his sometimes dark and stylish portraits of the human experience (Wikipedia). For Fight Club, he worked with the actors Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, and Brad Pitt. Fincher had worked with Brad Pitt previously on the movie Se7en, and it shows with Pitt's awe inspiring ability to hit the character he is portraying perfectly. Fincher creates characters with the perfect amount of charisma and chemistry needed for this book to become a movie. The movie comes off as being stylish, dark, raw, and cool.

Jim Uhls wrote the screenplay for the film. He definitely stayed very close to the book (a good portion of the films dialogue are direct quotes from the book). The books writing style is fragmented and distorted beyond film's ability to capture the same feel. The changes he that he does make takes the books hectic anarchy and gives it a more conservative view. This film still pertains very well to the books very radical and raw feelings, but Uhls made it so it was more viewable to the American public (keeping the movie rated R and not NC-17, a rating it would've definitely got if it had stayed entirely true to the book). For example, in the end of the movie the main character (who has no name, but when referencing to him in an interview Chuck Palahniuk calls him Jack, so lets use that) finds a way to get rid of his alter-ego (by shooting himself in