Fight the good fight

Four feature films down the line, David Fincher knows he's not making friends. "Listen," he says, "I've been just as trashed for Fight Club as I was for The Game; as I was for Seven; certainly as I was for Alien3. It comes with the territory."

As a director who deals so remorselessly with the bleak and tortured regions of the human psyche, Fincher, even at the relatively tender age of 37, has had time to become thoroughly accustomed to the sound of flying brickbats. "Every time," he continues, "you make a product that's designed to be consumed by 20 million people - let us all hope - you're opening yourself up to other people's interpretations, and other people's feelings. In choosing to go in and say, I'm the guy to make this into a movie, and here's what I see; in choosing to muster that enthusiasm and push that rock up a hill... you've made your bed, basically."

Fight Club, though, is something special, even for someone with Fincher's record of critic-riling. Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's satirical novel of yuppie disillusion, Fight Club has become the latest plaything of self-appointed guardians of America's moral conscience, who have accused the film of everything from glamourising fascism to encouraging the production of home-made napalm.

"I didn't expect people to take it so seriously. I didn't expect people to be so offended. Listen, I like Fight Club like I like Peter Pan. I read Chuck's book, and it just fundamentally reorientated my shit. Chuck is a pinball machine of ideas, there were things bouncing around, and stuff lighting up. If you're going to make a film that has that many ideas in it, you don't really have total control over it. But I never saw anything fascist about it. I never understood that as a criticism, when people say it is fascist entertainment. How can a movie that is a proponent of no solution whatsoever be labelled as fascist? It's just fundamentally opposed to the idea of fascism."

"Listen, I knew [LA Times film critic] Kenneth Turan would hate it, but that's not reason enough not to make a movie. But I didn't expect some of what happened. I walked out of the premiere in LA, and overheard two women who work at CAA - my agency - just going off, saying, 'This shouldn't have been made, who do these people think they are? This is socially irresponsible, this is exactly what's wrong.' It reminded me of the moment in The Rocky Horror Picture Show when Susan Sarandon is looking at the monster and says, 'Too many muscles.' Tim Curry turns to her, and says, 'We didn't make it for you.' "

Hate it the influential Turan certainly did, describing Fight Club as a "witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophising and bone-crunching violence", and calling Fincher "one of cinema's premier brutalisers". Other critics have weighed in too, on both sides of the Atlantic - Rex Reed, in the New York Observer, critiqued Fight Club as "a load of rancid depressing swill from start to finish", while in the UK, London Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker declared, "The movie is not only anti-capitalism but anti-society, and, indeed, anti-God."

In person, however, Fincher is disarmingly ordinary-looking - a far cry from the sharp-suited style merchant his track record might suggest. He wears a grubby black T-shirt, a well-worn baseball cap, and a stubbly young-Spielberg beard - an only slightly grown-up version of the student film-makers in The Blair Witch Project.

It's hardly surprising, then, that Fincher should feel such affinity for Palahniuk's novel, and use it as the basis for his first assault in the territory of the message movie. Fight Club pairs Edward Norton, as a beleaguered corporate drone, with Brad Pitt, his anarchic, nihilistic antithesis, Tyler Durden. As he delineates Fight Club's central thesis, Fincher begins to get animated: "It's a tale of maturity," he insists. "It's about someone who says, 'I followed my pre-programming, I've opened my desktop, and it's not for me, I need something else - I'm looking for some other specific software that will make me feel alive. The stuff I was given, that came with the package, just doesn't cut it.' "

"To me," he continues, "the story is more like The Graduate than anything else. But instead of it being 1967, with a guy in his twenties and a world of opportunities ahead of him, it's 1999, he's 30 years old, and he's a guy who has bought into the whole thing, and he's looking to kindle some kind of passion. It isn't about having a world of opportunities, it's about having no opportunity; and someone comes along and says here's the other path. You know, Tyler's Mrs Robinson - the catalyst that allows you to see your own destiny."

Fight Club also taps into a virulent skein of rage that's been dominating American protest politics for years - the dehumanising effect of an all-pervading corporate culture. "I don't have anything against Starbucks, per se," Fincher says, deadpan, "because finally there's good coffee in LA - but do we need three on every corner? Should there be corners that have something other than Starbucks? But, to me, the material is so far away from being political; it's way more about the DNA's need for defining itself, and making itself singular. Tyler takes it too far, yes, but he's filling a need for these people. There's a lot of lost people out there."

As you'd expect, Fincher has nothing but outspoken praise for his cast. Norton, veteran of American History X and The People vs Larry Flynt, is genuinely exceptional in the pivotal role - "his contribution is that he's exactly that guy; you can believe he is overthinking his whole situation, and creating this whole problem for himself" - while Pitt does his best work since Seven, his last collaboration with Fincher.

"Brad," according to his director, "doesn't want to burn himself out; doesn't want to over-analyse stuff. He's an intuitive - he's like a reactive chess player. You make your move, he's going to see what it is, what you're doing, and he's going to make his move. He's not one of these guys who come in with a fucking game plan; his whole process is all about creating a happy accident, fucking it up to a point where there's a little moment where the truth comes through."

Helena Bonham Carter, too, excels, and seems finally to have cast off her increasingly oppressive Merchant Ivory tag. "We called her agent," explains Fincher of his approach. "Her agent in LA said, 'Fantastic', her English agent I think was appalled. Anyway, I met her and she was perfect: she chain-smoked, she's a total neurotic, she's exquisite to look at, she was very caustic and funny."

But it's one thing to talk the talk; it's another to walk the walk. Fincher's reputation doesn't merely rest on the unrelieved gloom and restless paranoia that has infected all his films to date; he's also demonstrated a cinematic ability of stunning audacity and imagination, and his films are littered with visual set-pieces of unparalleled brilliance.

Ripley's slow-motion suicide dive in Alien3, for example, more than offsets the confused plotting and awkward characterisation - a legacy of well-documented behind-the-scenes interference. Seven floats from one hellish vision to another in its nightmarish descent into urban foulness. The Game treads with exquisite skill along a knife-edge of plausibility. Fight Club, too, offers its battery of stylistic triumphs: from the soon-to-be-legendary sequence when Edward Norton steps into a living Ikea catalogue, Brad Pitt's projection-room lecture, illuminated by a single moment of self-reflexive hilarity.

Fincher's beautifully crafted title sequences are another key indicator of his dedication. Seven's opening credits are justly renowned, while Fight Club's computer-generated vision of neural pathways in the cerebral cortex ("the movie is about thought - the deterioration of thought, the organisation of thought - so it seemed right to start the movie in his brain") are equally praiseworthy.

"Listen," he says, "you're dealing with the most plastic medium there is. Now there are computers that can make anything look real, and make anything happen, so you have to be very careful about what you show an audience. I think the first rule of cinema is that a movie has to teach an audience how to watch it. That's what the first act is, showing the audience the things they have to take seriously, the characterisation and technique, laying the groundwork for point of view, and how you will or won't betray it.

"It's all about bringing the audience to realisations at the same time as the characters - it's impossible to do it perfectly. Oh, maybe it's been done perfectly two times, Rear Window being one of them. You watch Rear Window, you think, fuck, that's it, can't be done much better."

Despite Fincher's obvious film-making panache - honed through an apprenticeship of high-profile music promos (Madonna, Aerosmith) and commercials (Nike) - he's unnervingly uncertain of his own gifts. By the time Seven was finished, he says, "I never thought it was scary at all. I turned to the editor and said, 'My God, what have we done? We've totally let people down in the fucking terror department; we need to go shoot some dismembered bodies. Go and see if you can get someone from a morgue and chop 'em up.' "

The same process repeated itself on Fight Club. "Right up to when we finished, I just didn't think it was violent enough. I was like, 'We've got a movie called Fight Club, we might as well call it Glee Club.' I still don't understand all this most-violent-movie-ever stuff. My biggest worry when we previewed the movie was that everybody would say, 'What's this? There's not enough fighting.' "

"I find," he explains, "when I read interviews with directors I love, that they often say, 'I had the whole movie in my head.' Well my hat's off to you, pal, because I don't know how the fuck you do that. I can barely keep four and a half seconds of screen time in my head at any given time. At the start, there's the excitement of all the possibilities; then as you define it, you crush all the life out of it. You're picking paint samples and deciding where the stains on the ceiling are, you're working on minutiae; then you go shoot the fucking life out of it; and then you cut it and say, 'Oh, that's not what it's supposed to be.' You eventually get to a point when you're simply relying on technique - relying on truisms. Like, if in doubt, hold on to the business card, so the audience can really read the guy's name."

Upstairs, it seems, Fincher is working on an adaptation of James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia ("I can't get a script that's under 300 pages"). What Fincher, with his acute eye for human wretchedness, will make of Ellroy's 40s-set tale of obsession is enough to set the nerves jangling already.

Whatever emerges, Fincher's talents are restless enough to ensure that he'll never be content simply to mark time. "The thing is," he concludes, "if I ever put a tape of Seven on, I'll just be, 'Oh God, you fucking idiot, what were you thinking?' You never have the perspective to truly assess what it is you've done until it's too late."

• Fight Club is released on November 12.