20 Things You Didn't Know About Fight Club
4. All The Guys Had A Hand In The Script
Although Jim Uhls has sole credit for the screenplay, he wasn’t the only person to have input into the writing of the movie.
While the project was in the later stages of development, Fincher, Norton and Pitt made frequent trips to meet with Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of Fincher’s Seven a few years earlier, who provided uncredited revisions here and there. Walker plays down his influence on the final product:
He [Uhls] made this amazing chair, and I came and sanded some of the edges and maybe put the little things that protect the floor on the bottom.
WGA rules state that uncredited means uncredited - they couldn’t even include a thank you to Walker. As a gesture, Fincher named the three detectives in the last third of the movie after him.
But those meetings with Walker were more than just hangout sessions. The two actors, the writer and the director were engaged in frantic brainstorming, meeting at Pitt’s place or a nearby office to talk about and around Fight Club and its themes for hours at a time, days on end, breaking the dialogue into pieces and examining it for authenticity and value.
All four men provided ideas that became a monologue they nicknamed the ‘Mamet rant’, inspired by quotes from Palahniuk’s novel and the spirit of playwright and filmmaker David Mamet and his epic meditations on masculinity.