20 Things You Didn't Know About Fight Club
17. Bonham Carter Understood Her Character, But Not The Film
Helena Bonham Carter’s been in a lot of weird movies now, but people forget that twenty years ago, Fincher cast her against type. She was better known for working in period dramas - for being a pretty young sophisticate in a corset.
Fight Club changed that: her performance is the strongest in the film. Following discussion with costume designer Michael Kaplan, she based it on the troubled Judy Garland’s final years, leading to Fincher actually calling her ‘Judy’ while on set. She also insisted on the film’s make-up artists applying her make-up with their off hand, believing that Marla wouldn’t care enough.
However, those huge, impractical platform boots were ironically actually a practical choice. Bonham Carter is just over five foot in height, while Norton is nearly a foot taller: for scenes requiring them to be in the same shot they needed to be closer in height.
It was the smoking where things went too far. Fincher is notorious for demanding take after take after take, and needed Marla to smoke in every scene. By the time shooting wrapped after five months or so, Bonham Carter was on sixty a day and had bronchitis, making sure to pointedly give Fincher a copy of her lung x-ray as a parting gift.
Helena Bonham Carter had all that down: yet she didn’t really ‘get’ Fight Club as a movie, commenting years later that she worried that the male empowerment aspect of the film was a shallow message, and might result in copycat fight clubs cropping up.