David Fincher Had to Remove The Offensive Line from Fight Club Because The Producer Insisted on It. He Replaced It with An Even Worse One
David Fincher replaced the offensive line in Fight Club with an even worse one, making the producer want to go back to the former. The director, however, didn’t relent.
Fight Club is one of the most lauded films of the 1990s and additionally became one of the cult films. It aroused and continues to arouse some controversy, which is the source of further discussions, thanks to which this title doesn’t cease to descend from the tongues of cinemagoers despite the passage of years. It is also considered one of the most popular violent films of the time, in which the characters definitely didn’t bite their tongues.
And while many bold lines went through the producers and were accepted, there were also some that wasn’t accepted. The director, however, didn’t necessarily want to bend and make his movie more polite, which became the source of an interesting situation. In Chuck Palahniuk's book, which Fight Club adapted, during a bed scene the phrase "I want to have your abortion" falls from Marla's mouth, which producer Laura Ziskin found too offensive and asked the filmmaker to remove the line.
David Fincher didn't want to let go so easily and filmed a scene with this line and later showed the audience a movie with it at a test screening, wanting the audience to judge what they thought about it. The audience reacted to it with laughter, but that still didn't change Ziskin's mind, who once again asked Fincher for a change. This time, the director agreed to her request on the condition that he could choose for himself what he would replace the line with.
This is how was created the scene with the sentence: "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school." It turned out that this line, according to Ziskin, was even worse, so she asked Fincher to go back to the previous version, but the filmmaker, due to their agreement, didn’t agree to it, and eventually the line remained in the film.
Fincher was adamant that he wasn’t going to change his vision for the film, making it more polite at the request of the producers. This resulted in a provocative production that, despite being offensive, was well received by the audience, which means that the director made a good decision by sticking to his decisions.