one person once asked me what's the most important part of a first draft and I said the most important words for the first draft are the end hey everyone I recently interviewed Jim moles the screenwriter of David Fincher's Fight Club about his expert insight into the writing process today we're listening to a few excerpts from the hour-long discussion I had with him and if you want to hear the full interview as well as much more go to behind-the-curtain film comm enjoy what is it one of the things that cause both me and David Fincher a
certain amount of grief is he said you gotta do this I gotta do it take a marker and go through the book and Mark out everything that's not it's not gonna be in the film because it was impossible to put the whole book in the film and then the book is written in fact Chuck Palahniuk told me that he started it as a monologue that an actor would deliver about going to Fight Club and he started the book that way and it sort of kept going that way it's told through first-person which is a normal
category of literary style but it's it's pretty heavy with that and what the challenge to me was turning things in his scenes more of a scene than they perhaps were in the book in talking to Fincher we were having conversations about how it was very important that Tyler Durden fully appeared to be a complete human being with his own motivations and sort of at least being able to feel a backstory with him like imagining him as having run away from his parents if he didn't kill them or you know coming from a divorced family and
ditching in whichever parent had it was whatever it was it that he had to be a character it couldn't be like he's a fantastical projection of you know a form of schizophrenia and a hallucination that's not that's not a part you can play so I did do interviews with all of the three major characters now as a character of you what you want to happen is there's only one ground rule and this is you know as if there were a divine power and you're really interviewing another a real human being but the divine power says
you have to answer the question that's the rule now it doesn't mean immediately so what I do is I warm up with some cursory stuff might even be boring then I try to get into you know it's the worst moment what's the best moment when did you feel the most embarrassed wouldn't you feel the proudest would you feel the most ashamed who did you hurt and why who did you help and why who do you envy or who did you formerly envy and now you feel you've surpassed and get into all these kind of things
also you know what what is your sex life like and how good are you or how bad are your where are you bad where are you good anything go now the character can deflect and evade and make jokes and all that they don't have to answer immediately they just have to answer eventually and the reason that that's good is you start to get an interplay that's kind of like a scene between you and the character oh wait a minute that's not really the real answer to that question of course it's not as being sarcastic you
[ __ ] you know and so it starts turning into the scene and it feels like it's a real person one of the things you can feel with source material a lot the thing that is expected of you once your your your Center off go write it you know we know what the book is we've heard your take on it whatever it is that just go off and write it you know what they want when you come back they want to film they don't give up and you can believe me on that about a novel
they want a film the stars want to play the parts and a director wants to direct so that's why you'd better come back with so being faithful to the source material is only useful to you in terms of it gives you some material to use but you better come back with a screenplay and you've been the only way it's going to be good is if you've made it your own so a lot of people say well what's the difference between an adaptation original and I think what you and you you're questioning that said the possible
the people who think that adaptation is easier well writing the screenplay that everybody wants to do is not easy and it doesn't matter where it came from a lot of times a novel structure can throw you off and you think well I've got the structure or you don't it has to be a film story structure even if it's nonlinear it has to flow as a film I guess what I'm saying is you're always coming back to them with an original scrap Jim thank you so much for talking with me today about Fight Club and your
writing process well thank you for having me I really appreciate it if you want to get access to the full hour-long discussion with Jim olds sign up for the behind the curtain membership at behind the curtain film comm inside the membership you'll get access to exclusive screenwriter interviews or we dive deep into the writing process as well as many more features join today at behind the curtain film comm [Music]
