Fight Club is a cinematic time machine. The film captured the essence of 1999, and, 25 years later, filmmaker David Fincher‘s vision for Chuck Palahniuk‘s novel continues to resonate, cranking up its unsettling relevance in a commercialized and violent world.
The movie hits just as hard today as it did back then.
Fight Club remains as overwhelming as the narrator’s life. The sound is relentless; the world almost never quiets down. It’s a controlled yet unrelenting experience for the eyes and ears. Much of the credit goes to sound designer Ren Klyce, who is once again working on the film, remastering it with Fincher & Co. Before attending MPSE Presents: Fight Club 25th Anniversary Screening, Klyce spoke with Immersive Media about his past and present experiences with Fight Club.
Thanks for making the time. I revisited the movie last night to take some notes, and even after having seen it many times, I had to put my notes down. I was too engrossed.
Thank you so much. We are actually working on a re-mastered version of the sound-track for the 25th anniversary. We’re not changing much, but David Fincher is remastering the film image to a higher resolution. I am working with the original stems and am currently going through each track separately and fixing minor issues that we would have fixed had we had more time. Today I am going through Edward Norton’s voiceover, making minor touch ups to EQ and fixing any noise or the usual clicks and pops that end up on dialog.
Are there any moments though where it’s like, this might’ve been a mistake, but maybe this mistake is special and must stay?
Yes, in fact, David Parker (who mixed the dialog on the original mix) was visiting me a few days ago, and we were reviewing some of the dialog channels. We found a few minor errors as we were soloing the stems. For example, we found some reverb from the Foley stem somehow got printed to the VO stem in a few places accidentally. These sounds while subtle, are the types of sounds that might be best to leave alone as they add to the sonic experience. We also realized how ‘narrow’ our original stem layout was, and how few stems we made in 1999, versus many we make now.
How so?
For example, with sound effect, we now have as many as 3 stems: Ambience, Hard Effects and Objects. But when we did the Fight Club mix we only made 1 single FX stem. Back then we had a limited number of tracks we could record to. This was due mostly to the number of outputs we had on the Neve Capricorn Console at the time, and also the number of recorder channels we could print to.
Back then, all of the sounds got combined in a single stem due to this limitation. As technology progresses, the number of outputs and tracks we can record to is constantly increasing, which is helpful in giving more flexibility to remixes in the future.
When you revisit a project, you often discover mistakes. Discovering these mistakes can be stressful, so the challenge is to not feel the need to always correct them. I’m one of those types of people that likes to leave the mistakes, because that’s what it was that we made and perhaps all those little mistakes add up to making the listening experience more edgy for example.
It is very easy to think, “now that you’ve got all of this technology, let’s make the movie come from the ceiling in ATMOS”. This might work if we had everything separate and could assign sounds like wind the ATMOS ceiling channels. The problem is when you don’t have the wind separate then you are stuck wishing you did — but now it is combined with a door slamming, and that door slamming won’t sound right coming from the ceiling. In these cases, it can get complicated, and that is when you have to step back and leave things alone they way they were.
Are you feeling a nice sense of nostalgia working on Fight Club again? What memories do you find coming back to you?
There is an absolutely nostalgic feeling. It is always the big moments in our lives that we seem to remember; when someone gets married, when a loved one dies, or when a family member gets married. What’s so wonderful about working on films, particularly films that you enjoy working on, is that it marks your life. Re-visiting Fight Club is like a time machine and makes me remember details of my life that I would have otherwise have forgotten. I remember being with David Fincher during the early edit of the film. One night we decided to take a break and watch “Harold and Maude”. Halfway through Fincher said, “This film is kind of like Fight Club”. That memory would have been lost had I not revisited the film.
How’d you want to reinforce the intimacy through sound in the film?
There’s a lot of intimacy in Fight Club and we tried to convey this intimacy through sound in the back-ground. There is a scene where Jack confronts Marla in one of the 12 step group meetings.“I’ve been watching you I’ve seen you” Jack says to Marla, to which Marla replies, “I’ve seen you practicing this… telling me off…. Is it going as well as you hoped?”
In that scene while they are hugging and pretending to cry, we introduce the sound of many layered intimate conversations in the background. If you listen, you can hear a woman say, “I lost my daughter when he was only 13”. These textures of intimacy were layered to create a sort or ‘cradle’ to which our main characters would exist within; exposing their lies and creating contrast to an otherwise heartbreaking scene.
There’s a shot in Marla’s introduction. There’s a push-in, slow-motion, and Marla breathes smoke. There’s a sound like dynamite. What is that sound?
That sound when she’s lighting a cigarette with a disposable lighter, there’s a deep drum sound that was added to the click sound of the lighter. The layering of this drum sound when added to the real click of the lighter gives a sense of drama to her character in this moment. The idea of that sound was to say to the audience, “Look out, here comes a trouble-maker”. The sound of this moment was in a way ridiculous as it was almost like an explosion of sorts, but hopefully the crafting made it feel impressionistic, and helped pull the audience in a bit to Marla’s introduction.
For the 10th anniversary, you said in interviews David Fincher really wanted realism, but what were some other moments where you both wanted to get really expressionsitic with sound?
We were just coming off a film called The Game. In that film, the sound was a different idea. It was very stately and sparse. The film was a bit reserved in terms of the storytelling, and David wanted the mystery of the lead character to come out in the realism of the sonic space. When we went to Fight Club, we wanted to get away from the sound we created in The Game. For example, the Nicholas Van Orton character in The Game was a wealthy, insulated millionaire. Everything was quiet in his home, and we felt his isolation through sound. In Fight Club, by contrast, Edward Norton’s character is living in an apartment building with thin walls.
When he later moves to Tyler Durden’s Paper Street house, everything is creaky, leaky, dirty and falling apart. To feel these dirty, cheap places, we became obsessed with filling in every single tiny moment in-between dialogue with a sound that meant something. The hope was to craft the idea that you’re in these really busy places with these characters hearing what they are hearing. This was the big contrast to The Game; and the first idea that Fincher and I wanted to explore. These little sounds that were placed in between Dialog lines I like to call, ‘Specifics’. Strange little noises that find their way into your recordings when you are trying to capture something.
You can be recording a subway for example, trying to record a train entering a station. During the recording, a little child might run past the microphone and laugh. This laughing child sound might have no purpose to the sound-track initially — but as a sound editor the job is to remember that little sound, and try to find a home for it someplace in the film.
Then there are moments in Fight Club where real sounds meet abstract sounds. An example of this is during a scene we call the “Kudzu Vine” speech. Tyler is talking about his apocalyptic vision of the future, describing to Jack how he wants to reset the planet by blowing up the banks and setting debt free. Tyler talks about the world he hopes to see where giant elk stalk the empty cities, and how corn will grow along old abandoned super-highways.
In the original version of the soundtrack, we had the sounds of the Paper Street House during the rain, where water drops were leaking from the roof into the room and onto the floor. This worked nicely, as we felt the environment and it seemed to serve the film well.
But as we were working on it, Fincher started to experiment with the edit with Jim Haygood and introduced a pulsing visual fade in and fade of to black during Tyler’s dialog. This created a hypnotic visual effect; a sort of visual pulse.
Later when we were mixing the scene, Fincher and I thought: what if we started to hear sounds that were part of Tyler’s imagination…the sounds of his vision? What Edward is hearing is the rain, but what Tyler is hearing is the soundtrack of his vision? The Elk, the abandoned super highways. That led to layering two concepts at once: What Jack hears vs what Tyler hears. This then fed into what later we learn: that Jack and Tyler are both the same person.
How’d the narrator’s insomnia influence your choices?
The sound choices are all keyed from the rhythm and sound of the Voice-Over. For example, in the beginning where Jack introduces himself and describes his insomnia. His line, “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep.” Was repeated rhythmically — almost like an echo. This then made the scene introduce Tyler Durden for the first time subliminally with one frame shots of Tyler in various places within Jack’s reality insomnia state. We see Jack’s Starbucks cup come across a Xerox machine, and then the one frame of Brad Pitt’ character visible behind the cup. Nobody sees it usually, but once you discover it, it is fun to find the places Fincher does this. As that one frame image of Tyler happens, a lot of things start being introduced.
We hear Jack’s Voice-Over talk about the future — where someday it will be the corporations that own everything: the Microsoft Galaxy…. Planet Starbucks. As we hear him describe this, Fincher has the camera flying out of a garbage can past a soiled Starbucks cup. At that moment we hear what sounds like something like sonar beep from an office submarine… This then changes into a telephone ring as we leave Jack’s insomnia rant and are back at work. Discovering this idea of impressionistic dream sound crossing into ‘real’ sound was something we got very excited about.
Since you talked about introducing Tyler Durden, how about destroying him? What did you want to achieve with the gunshot?
Fincher had a great idea which was, “what if we made the gunshot sound as if we’re hearing it through the ears of Jack/Tyler? Like our ears were ringing? That then led to a layer of several high pitched tones being added right after the gunshot where Jack shoots himself. When Marla comes in with the space monkeys, Jack’s character finally changes into Tyler Durden. Brad Pitt disappears and we finally see Edward Norton finally in the role.
So many of the choices you made let the imagination run wild. For example, as horrifying as the destruction of Angel Face is, I remember the camera showing way more than it does. The sound, in my memory, made the beating feel more visually graphic.
That is interesting you say that. Fincher didn’t want the sound to be too over the top. My instinct was to hear blood dripping to draw attention to the visuals with sound. Fincher didn’t want that. “You see the blood, we don’t need to hear it.” Fincher said.
With chickens and walnuts, right?
Chest hits, walnuts inside chicken cavities, hitting chuck roast with our fists. The big hits were recorded in the basement at Skywalker Sound. Andrè Fenley and Doug Winningham recorded those during the premix. In the original recording Andre is hitting a piece of meat and then finally caves at the end and exclaims, “That’s it! I can’t do this anymore!”
I must find that recording and play for Andre as I don’t think he remembers it. All to say, we put a lot into the anger and violence of that scene, and I’m glad you felt it was violent as that was our intention.
