Autumn 2001. Manhattan, New York. The air is thick with smoke. People are screaming, crying, looking horrified at the sky. The second plane smashes into the second tower. The world has changed.

“Fight Club was never meant to be, ‘Watch out or this will happen!’” says Fincher, reflecting on the link between the film’s skyscraper-smashing conclusion and the attack on the World Trade Center of two years later. 

“For me it goes back to the Monty Python routine where Graham Chapman says, ‘Who can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn’t set fire to some great public building?’

For me it was more deeply rooted in Monty Python than it was in, you know, Fail-Safe. It was a very oblique look at where some of this could take us. Chuck Palahniuk is a prescient guy.”

“Yeah,” says Norton. “I think that you can carry it too far and yet I agree. I don’t think that what’s being explored in Fight Club is deeply interrelated with, you know, those kinds of events, but on the other hand certainly there’s something in there, when you’re talking about the kind of furious compulsion to tear down, like, everything that’s oppressive about modern consumer material society."

"You have to be careful,  because there’s nothing positive or valid in those real-world actions, but there may be something in the psychology of it that has echoes to the kind of frustrations that are being expressed in that film...”    

Next: Chuck Palahniuk