Brad Pitt and Edward Norton got high before attending a disastrous Fight Club screening early on in their careers, making the experience a whole lot funnier. With a plethora of films and awards under their belts, the two prolific actors are considered to be some of the best in Hollywood. However, their success wasn’t always a certainty — Fight Club, for example, now one of the pair’s most notable films, was initially a failure.
When David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club novel was released in 1999, it was not well-received. People were appalled by its overtly dark humor, themes, and excessive violence, and it ultimately became a failure at the box office. Before the film even became available to mainstream audiences, it carried the weight of bad reviews and poor reactions from early screenings. Fight Club’s stars witnessed this negativity firsthand at the Venice International Film Festival over two decades ago.
On Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast earlier this month, Pitt told a story in which he and co-star, Edward Norton attended an early screening of Fight Club in Venice. According to Pitt, the film didn’t land with audiences at all. Pitt and Norton’s reaction to that reaction was one of irreverence, not because they inherently knew Fight Club was ahead of its time, although maybe they did, but because they did something very specific before going to the midnight screening. During the podcast, Pitt said:
For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to smoke a joint before... We go in and they put you up in the balcony. You sit next to the guy who runs the festival. Everyone’s looking at you, they clap, you sit down. It’s very formal. The first joke comes up and it’s just crickets. It’s dead silence. And another joke and it’s just dead silence. This thing is not translating. Subtitles, it is NOT translating at all. The more that happened, the funnier it got to Edward [Norton] and I and we just start laughing. So, we’re the assholes in the back laughing at our own jokes. The only ones.
Pitt goes on to explain that when to the point in the film where Helena Bonham Carter’s character says “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school,” one of the festival attendants, who had been noticeably uncomfortable for 30 minutes, just got up and left without saying a word — causing Pitt and Norton to laugh even harder. In retrospect, the two were laughing their way into the history books, as Fight Club went on to become one of the most controversial and memorable films of the 90's.
The silver lining of Pitt's story is, of course, that Fight Club is now considered to be a cult classic. Some critics who bashed it have even since taken back what they said about the film — praising it for condemning the things they once thought it was promoting. That all being said, the story of Pitt and Norton's experience at the Venice Film Festival seems to reflect their confidence in Fight Club, and they were right to just relax and enjoy the experience as it was, since their time in the spotlight was soon to come.
Source: WTF Podcast
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