Stoned Brad Pitt and Edward Norton giggled throughout Fight Club's disastrous premiere
While it is now universally agreed that Fight Club is one of the best made films of the last 25 years, it turns out that it got off to a very inauspicious start at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Brad Pitt, who portrayed Tyler Durden in the cult classic alongside Ed Norton, made this admission himself during a recent interview with Marc Maron on his WTF Podcast.
But rather than being mortified by the fact that the Italian audience just didn’t connect or even get the humour of Fight Club, Pitt admits that he and Norton were so stoned that they giggled throughout the disastrous screening.
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“It was the Venice Film Festival and it was a midnight screening,” Pitt recalled during the interview, which he conducted alongside his Once Upon A Time In Hollywood co-star Leonardo DiCaprio.
“For some reason we thought it would be a good idea to smoke a joint before. They put you up in a balcony next to the festival head, it’s very formal. The movie starts. First joke comes up, and it’s crickets. It’s dead silence.”
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“Another joke, and it’s just dead silent. You know it’s in subtitles, and this thing is just not translating at all.
The more it happened, the funnier it got to Edward and I. So we just start laughing. We’re the a**holes in the back laughing at our own jokes. The only ones laughing.”
While Fight Club returned over $100 million at the box office, and was met with mostly positive reviews, its reputation has only enhanced over the years, with many citing it as one of director David Fincher’s best films, and, arguably, Pitt’s most iconic performance, too.
