Development
In 1996, a galley proof of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club was sent by a 20th Century Fox book scout to creative executive Kevin McCormick. A studio reader wrote coverage for the book that discouraged a film adaptation of the material, but McCormick passed the proof on to producers Lawrence Bender and Art Linson. Bender and Linson rejected it, and producers Josh Donen and Ross Bell expressed interest in the project. They arranged unpaid screen readings with actors to determine the length of a script from the book, which initially lasted 6 hours. After cutting out sections to reduce the running time and recording the dialogue, Bell sent the book on tape to Laura Ziskin, head of the division Fox 2000. After hearing the tape, she purchased the rights to Fight Club for $10,000.[1]

To adapt the story into a screenplay, Ziskin initially considered hiring Buck Henry. Ziskin thought that Fight Club was similar to The Graduate, which had been adapted by Henry. A new screenwriter, Jim Uhls, began lobbying Donen and Bell to be hired to write the adapted screenplay, and the producers chose Uhls over Henry. Bell began seeking directors, of which he had four in mind: Peter Jackson, Bryan Singer, Danny Boyle, and David Fincher. Bell, considering Jackson the best choice, contacted the director, but Jackson was too busy filming The Frighteners (1996) in New Zealand. Singer received the book, but did not read it. Boyle met Bell and read the book, but he pursued another project. Fincher was approached, and the director expressed interest in Fight Club. Fincher, though, was hesitant to work with the studio again after the failure of Alien? (1992). The director met with Ziskin and studio head Bill Mechanic, restoring his relationship with the studio. Mechanic and Ziskin initially planned to finance the film with a $23 million budget.[1] In August 1997, Twentieth Century Fox announced that Fincher would helm the film adaptation of the novel.[2]

Casting
Producer Ross Bell met with actor Russell Crowe as a candidate to portray Tyler Durden, while at the same time producer Art Linson, later brought on board, was negotiating with Brad Pitt for the same role. Due to Linson's seniority, Pitt was cast over Crowe.[1] Pitt, who sought a new project after the failure of his previous film, Meet Joe Black (1998), was hired with a salary of $17.5 million by the studio, who believed that Fight Club would be more commercially successful with a major star.[3] Fincher also sought to cast Edward Norton as the narrator based on the actor's performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996),[4] though the studio desired a "sexier marquee name" like Matt Damon to improve the film's visibility. Sean Penn was another candidate for the role of the narrator. Norton had also been approached by other studios for leading roles in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Man on the Moon (1999). Norton temporarily pursued Runaway Jury (2003), but the project fell apart. Fox offered Norton a salary of $2.5 million to lure him away from the other projects. Before Norton could accept, he owed Paramount Pictures a film. To be legally released to film Fight Club, Norton signed a new contract with Paramount for a lesser salary, eventually and unwillingly being cast in The Italian Job (2003).[3] In January 1998, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton officially joined the project to portray Tyler Durden and the nameless narrator, respectively.[5]

Actresses Courtney Love and Winona Ryder were considered to portray Marla Singer.[6] The studio desired to cast Reese Witherspoon, but Fincher considered the actress too young.[3] Ultimately, Helena Bonham Carter was cast into the role based on her performance in The Wings of the Dove (1997).[7]

Norton and Pitt took lessons in boxing, taekwondo, and grappling to prepare for their roles.[8] The actors also took soapmaking classes from boutique company owner Auntie Godmother.[9] For his role, Pitt voluntarily visited a dentist to have pieces of his front teeth chipped off, and the teeth were restored after filming concluded.[10]

Writing
Producer Ross Bell had a first draft from which screenwriter Jim Uhls worked. The draft lacked a voice-over due to the industry's perspective at the time that the technique was "hackneyed and trite". When Fincher joined the project, he disagreed with the approach, believing that the film's humor came from the narrator's voice.[3] Fincher described the film without the technique as seemingly "sad and pathetic".[11] The director and Uhls developed the script for six to seven months, creating a third draft by 1997 that reordered the story and left out several major elements. When Pitt came on board, the actor expressed concern that Tyler Durden was too one-dimensional. Fincher sought the advice of writer-director Cameron Crowe, who suggested giving the character more ambiguity. Fincher also hired screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker to rewrite the script. Fincher and Walker invited Pitt and Edward Norton to collaborate on the script, which was completed after a year of work and five resulting drafts.[3] The narrator was written to be nameless in the film, though he is identified in the script as Jack. The narrator's choices of names for his aliases in the support groups that he attends were based on characters from Planet of the Apes and Robert De Niro roles of the '70s.[12]

Author Chuck Palahniuk expressed praise for the faithful film adaptation of his novel Fight Club and applauded how the film's plot was more streamlined than the book. Palahniuk also described how there was contention over the believability of the novel's plot twist for film audiences. Director David Fincher kept the twist and said, "If they accept everything up to this point, they'll accept the plot twist. If they're still in the theater, they'll stay with it." Palahniuk was annoyed by the change of a single ingredient in the film's explanation of making napalm to render the recipe useless, since the author had researched the components extensively.[13] Palahniuk's novel also contained homoerotic overtones, which the director purposely included in the film as part of his plan to make audiences uncomfortable and thereby surprised by the film's twists and turns.[14] The scene in which Tyler Durden bathes next to the narrator is an example of the overtones, though Durden's insight in the scene, "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need," was meant to suggest personal responsibility rather than homosexuality.[15]

At the end of the novel, the narrator is placed in a mental institution.[16] In the film's ending, the narrator instead finds redemption in rejecting Tyler Durden's dialectic. Norton described the film's redemptive parallel to The Graduate, as the protagonists of both films find a middle ground between the division of two selves.[17] The director also considered the novel more infatuated with Tyler Durden and altered the ending to pull away from him. "I wanted people to love Tyler, but I also wanted them to be OK with his vanquishing," Fincher said.[16]

Filming
When production first began, the budget escalated from $50 million, half of which was paid by New Regency, to a peak of $67 million. New Regency's head and Fight Club executive producer Arnon Milchan petitioned for Fincher to reduce the budget by at least $5 million, but the director refused to reduce costs. Milchan contacted studio head Bill Mechanic saying that he would back out. To bring back Milchan's support, Mechanic sent him tapes of dailies. After three weeks of shooting, Milchan returned his support, financing half of the production budget.[18]

Filming lasted 138 days,[19] during which Fincher shot over 1,500 rolls of film, three times the average for a Hollywood film.[8] Filming locations were in and around Los Angeles and on sets built at the studio's location in Century City.[19] Production designer Alex McDowell constructed over seventy sets.[8] The exterior of Tyler Durden's home on Paper Street was built in San Pedro, California, while the interiors were built on a sound stage at the studio's location. The interiors were designed to possess a sense of decay that reflected the deconstructed world of the characters.[19] Marla's apartment was based on photographs taken at the Rosalind Apartments in downtown L.A.[11]

Makeup artist Julie Pearce, who collaborated with the director on The Game, worked on the actors in Fight Club. For her tasks, Pearce studied mixed martial arts and pay-per-view boxing. She also designed an extra to have a chunk missing from his ear, for which she cited Mike Tyson's bite as inspiration.[20] To create sweat on cue, two methods were devised: spraying Evian water over a coat of Vaseline, and using straight Evian for "wet sweat". Meat Loaf, who plays Bob, a character that has "bitch tits", wore a 90-pound fat harness that gave him large breasts for the role.[8] He also wore 8-inch lifts in his scenes with Norton, being shorter than the lead actor.[15]

Cinematography
To perform the cinematography for Fight Club, director David Fincher hired Jeff Cronenweth, the son of the late cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, with whom Fincher had collaborated for Alien? (1992). Fincher and Cronenweth drew from elements of the visual styles that Fincher had begun exploring with Se7en and The Game. For the narrator's scenes without Tyler Durden, the look was purposely bland and realistic. For scenes with Tyler, Fincher chose a look that was "more hyper-real in a torn-down, deconstructed sense - a visual metaphor of what [the narrator's] heading into." Heavily desaturated colors were used in the costuming, makeup, and art direction, and the crew took advantage of as much natural and practical light at filming locations as possible. The film was shot in the Super 35 format to give the director maximum flexibility in composing shots. The director also took various approaches to take advantage of lighting situations in the film's scenes. Several practical locations were chosen due to the city lights' effects on the shots' backgrounds. Fluorescent lighting at practical locations was also embraced to maintain an element of reality and to light the prosthetics of the characters' injuries appropriately.[19] Fincher also ensured that scenes were darkened enough to reduce the visibility of the characters' eyes, citing cinematographer Gordon Willis's technique as the influence.[15]

The majority of Fight Club was filmed at night, with daytime shots taking place in purposely shadowed locations. For scenes in Lou's basement, which hosted the first indoor fight club, the area was lit by $2 work lamps from Home Depot to create a background glow. The director also chose to film fight scenes in the basement from a more objective view, purposely avoiding stylish camerawork and placing the camera in a fixed position. As the fight scenes in the film progressed, the camera moved from a distant observer to the point of view of the fighter.[19]

Scenes of Tyler Durden were staged to conceal the film's twist. The character was not filmed in two shots with a group of people, nor was he included in any over the shoulder shots. Durden also appeared in single frames of the narrator's scenes before the narrator actually meets Durden.[11] Regarding these subliminal frames, Fincher explained, "Our hero is creating Tyler Durden in his own mind, so at this point he exists only on the periphery of the narrator's consciousness."[21] In addition, Durden was often captured in the background and out of focus, like a "little devil on the shoulder."[15]

Visual effects
Director David Fincher hired visual effects supervisor Tod Haug, who had collaborated with him for The Game. Fincher chose to illustrate the nameless narrator's perspective with a "mind's eye" view and to create a myopic framework for the film's audience. Haug divided the visual effects work among several facilities, choosing to have them separately address the CG modeling, animation, compositing, and scanning. According to Haug, "We selected the best people for each aspect of the effects work, then coordinated their efforts. In this way. we never had to play to a facility's weakness." Fincher previewed Pixel Liberaton Front's previsualized footage of challenging main-unit shots and visual effects shots. The director considered the preview a problem-solving technique to avoid mistakes from being made during actual filming.[21]

Fincher chose to design a ninety-second pullback scene from the fear center of the narrator's brain as the title sequence to represent the thought processes initiated by the narrator's fear impulse.[11] The sequence was designed on a separate budget from the film, but the studio later paid for the sequence based on Fincher's expert direction of the film.[15] For the visual effects of the sequence, Fincher hired Digital Domain and its visual effects supervisor Kevin Mack, who had won an Academy Award for Visual Effects for What Dreams May Come (1998). The computer-generated brain was mapped using an L-system,[22] and the design was detailed using renderings by medical illustrator Kathryn Jones. The passage through the brain included the presence of action potentials and a hair follicle as the shot drew out from within the skull. Haug explained Fincher's artistic licensing with the shot, "While he wanted to keep the brain passage looking like electron microscope photography, that look had to be coupled with the feel of a night dive - wet, scary, and with a low depth of field." The depth of field was accomplished with the process of ray tracing.[21]

One of the beginning scenes in which the camera surveys the destructive equipment of Project Mayhem in the streets and building parking lots was a 3D composition of nearly a hundred photographs of Los Angeles and Century City by photographer Michael Douglas Middleton. The final scene of the buildings being demolished was designed by Richard Baily of Image Savant, who worked on the scene for over fourteen months.[21]

The director pursued a lurid style to influence the color palette of the film, choosing to make people "sort of shiny", such as Helena Bonham Carter wearing opalescent makeup for her character to create a "smack-fiend patina" that would portray her romantic nihilistic character best. The director and his cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, were also influenced by American Graffiti (1973), which applied a mundane look to nighttime exteriors while simultaneously including a variety of colors. When Fight Club was processed, several techniques were applied to alter the footage. The contrast was stretched to be purposely ugly, the print was adjusted to be underexposed, resilvering (lower-scale enhancement) was used to increase density, and high-contrast print socks were stepped all over the print to create a dirty patina.[11]

Fincher included the cue mark sequence in which Durden points out the "cigarette burn" flash to serve as a thematic element. The director described the film's initial progression as a "fairly subjective reality" for audiences, with the sequence foreshadowing the coming break in which the reality is subverted. "Suddenly it's as though the projectionist missed the changeover, the viewers have to start looking at the movie in a whole new way," explained Fincher.[21

Musical score
See also: Fight Club (soundtrack)
The director sought to find a band who would perform film music for the first time, out of the concern that bands who had experience performing film music would be unable to tie the film's themes together. Radiohead was pursued as a possible band,[15] but the alternative rock producer duo Dust Brothers was ultimately chosen to score the film. The Dust Brothers created a post-modern score that included drum loops, electronic scratches, and computerized samples. According to Dust Brothers performer Michael Simpson, "Fincher wanted to break new ground with everything about the movie, and a nontraditional score helped achieve that."[23]