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As Fight Club marks its 30th anniversary this month, we celebrated its legacy with original author Chuck Palahniuk in Avilés, where we also discussed prophetic writing, asking difficult questions, and the enduring tradition of storytelling aloud.
"Hi, Gamereactor friends, I'm in Avilés, Asturias, Spain, for the Celsius 232, and today I have the pleasure to be joined by Chuck, who wrote one of your and my favorite stories ever, which is Fight Club, of course."
"Thank you so much for joining us, Chuck.
First of all, before talking Fight Club, I wanted to ask you about your latest book (Shock Induction), which is now released in more languages.
So what can you tell fans of your previous work about this new book?
This new book is a thriller in which a young woman is given the option of either becoming someone fantastically famous that she does not want to be, or just doing what she wants to with her own life."
"The idea is, what if you could have anything, anything in the world, except for the thing you most really want? Would you take it?
That's a big premise. Where did you draw inspiration from for that one?
Is it a real character you know?
It's really all my friends who have college-age students, college-age children, and right now they're having to choose between whether they want a degree and a future doing something that earns money or something that they will love to do."
"That's one of the biggest questions in life for everybody, I guess.
All right, let me ask you about Fight Club.
It's almost 30 years since it was first published, if I'm correct?
Next month is 30 years."
"Do you think readers nowadays misunderstand it even more than when it was first published?
No, I think people have gone through a lot of different phases.
And I think they appreciate it now because it is kind of a legacy book.
It's a classic. It's on its way to becoming a classic."
"All right. Many of your works feel prophetic.
Did you ever write satire only to find out that reality caught up?
History always repeats itself.
So the way to be prophetic is to look at what has not happened in 20 years and then write about something that happened 20 years ago and it will be just about to happen again and they will think that you're a prophet."
"Probably, yeah, of course, yeah.
And also you always try to make readers uncomfortable, I guess, on purpose.
Do you think that is more difficult nowadays?
They're more difficult to shock or there's always ways to find, as you just said with being prophetic, it's kind of a cycle."
"It's not about making readers uncomfortable.
It's about making myself uncomfortable.
I have to charm myself into going to a place that I would not normally choose to go.
And in doing so, I'm hoping to charm the readers to that same place."
"But no, it's really about challenging myself.
All right.
Which subjects would you say are still difficult to write about?
The subjects that should be written about."
"The best fiction comes from finding a metaphor that allows us to write about something that people cannot bring themselves to talk about openly.
So my favorite example is always Rosemary's Baby.
And I knew the author Ira Levin."
"And I always asked him if Rosemary's Baby wasn't a metaphor for birth defects caused by thalidomide.
And he was always very secret.
But more or less, Rosemary's Baby allowed the entire world to mourn and to feel the horror that they could not openly express around thalidomide."
"And that's where the enormous energy of that story comes from.
So if you can find the thing that people cannot bring themselves to talk about because it's still too fresh, that's the thing to write about.
Many of your stories read like they've been told out loud."
"Does oral storytelling, is it part of your creative process?
Do you start the oral storytelling and then put that into words on the book?
Or do you act like that?
Before I started writing, the kind of storytelling I loved the most was stand-up comedians that would have a one-person show, typically on Broadway."
"There were people like Lily Tomlin with The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.
Whoopi Goldberg had a show.
Spalding Gray had several shows.
But there were shows in which a single person told a series of stories, some of which were funny and some of which were just heartbreaking."
"And so that kind of oral storytelling was always my favorite.
And combine that with in my youth, all the popular songs were ballads.
So I grew up during the folk singing era where every song on the radio was a song that told a story.
And so my childhood full of hearing ballads and my adulthood really admiring people like Whoopi Goldberg who could hold a one-person show and make people laugh and then horrify them."
"That completely shaped my work.
Is this an exercise you do when you start writing?
You do it and you try to feel how it sounds in your own voice?
And you get that feedback from your own voice?
In my own voice, but more importantly, in a voice that makes complete sense."
"It has a clarity to it.
For a long time, I worked for radio.
And when you write copy for the radio announcer, you have to read it out loud as you write it.
Because if it is garbled, if it's difficult to read, then your on-air person is going to hate you."
"So I also grew up in a newsroom where we had to read out loud everything we wrote.
And that was also part of my work.
And you guys can tell with the musicality and the tone you keep with your voice that you have a very trained and very nice voice.
I guess you're trained with that as well, of course."
"Coming back to the Fight Club, it got sequels in book form, but not in adaptations and movies.
I guess you get this question a lot and you get fans asking you about, are those going to be adapted?
Do you want them to be adapted?
And also, what can fans expect to find in the sequels that they only know about the first chapter?
The legacy of Fight Club is very complicated because it was financed by New Regency."
"And New Regency fell apart because so much of their money came from illegal munition sales.
And it was produced by 20th Century Fox, which has since been bought by Walt Disney.
And Disney has no idea what to do with something as dark as Fight Club.
So New Regency owns part of the copyright."
"Disney owns part of the copyright.
And everyone is battling.
So right now it's headed to become a play in the West End in London.
That's probably the next iteration."
"But only if Disney and New Regency say it's okay.
Yeah, complicated.
Have you seen the memes with Edward Norton in the World Cup?
Yes."
"Speaking alone?
I saw those memes.
They came from everyone I knew.
You like them?
I can't believe that 25 years later it's still a thing."
"It became very viral.
So it really is still a thing.
It's amazing.
Many people were repeating the same joke.
So it's like everywhere."
"That's amazing.
This fall there's supposed to be an enormous book out that the director, David Fincher, has been producing.
The book is called The First Rule Is...
And it is probably 800 pages of interviews with everyone who put the movie together and an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes photography."
"So that is a book that is going to land on a lot of coffee tables.
It's going to be a gigantic book.
Great.
I didn't know about that one, so looking forward to that one."
"Finally, talking about adaptations, and of course that story became huge back in the day and as we just said remains very interesting for many people.
Is there any of your works, perhaps your latest book, that you would like to see adapted or you prefer to protect them from that treatment?
I always think that I want to write books."
"And so I want my books to do the things that only books can do.
And for the first couple of years Fight Club was out, movie people said it would be impossible to make a movie out of.
So my goal is always to write a book that would be impossible to make a movie out of."
"And that is still my goal, sadly.
Perhaps the chance comes where it's fantastically adapted, same as with the Fight Club.
Thank you so much for your time, Chuck.
Enjoy the rest of the Celsius."
"And you have the longest eyelashes I have ever seen.
Thank you so much.
These are my mom's and I cannot help it.
There you are."
