The legend of “Fight Club” now has a new entry, as Courtney Love claims she was fired off of the film when she rejected Brad Pitt’s pitch to make and star in a Kurt Cobain biopic.
Love has long been connected to the role of Marla, eventually played by Helena Bonham Carter in David Fincher’s seminal 1999 Chuck Palahniuk adaptation, but whereas previous reports were that she was merely considered for the role, Love says it was hers. Until it wasn’t.
“I get the role, so the lawyers have called the lawyers – this is my role,” she told Marc Maron on a recent episode of his WTF podcast. “We’d done all these table reads, I’d gone to work privately with David, and I get this phone call and it’s from Gus Van Sant, and Gus is having lunch with Brad Pitt… He goes, ‘Brad really wants to do a movie about music.’”
Love then remembers Pitt and Van Sant pitching a movie about Kurt Cobain.
“It was like the hellmouth opened, oh my God, ‘We wanna do it about Kurt!’ And 22 years later I still kick myself for not having the shark instinct to be like, ‘Sure,’ and f—k ‘em later. I went nuclear. ‘I don’t do Faust, who the f—k do you think you are?!’”
Love was dating Pitt’s “Fight Club” co-star Edward Norton at the time, and says he was upset when he found out.
“Edward gets home, he starts sobbing – his mother had just died, so it was very much allowed – but he was like, ‘I don’t have the power!’”
It was then that Love claims Fincher called and fired her off of the film.
“My landline rang and it was David Fincher. I knew it was gonna be him. By the way, God bless Helena Bonham Carter. She’s a genius. I’ve never seen that film … And yeah, he fired me because I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt.”
Love goes on to say Pitt continued to try to make a movie about Kurt Cobain through his production company Plan B years later, which she declined.
“My friend Cameron Crowe was like – I don’t think he meant it as literally as it’s become – but like, ‘Brad Pitt was put on this earth to stalk you for Kurt,’ which has been going on since ’96.”
Gus Van Sant would eventually make a Kurt Cobain film, kind of. The “Good Will Hunting” director’s 2005 film “Last Days” is ostensibly about Cobain, but gets around the legalities of the issue by changing the character’s name and other details.
A flop when first released, “Fight Club” eventually found the right audience on home video (i.e. people who understood its satire vs. taking the “fight club” at face value) and is now considered by many to be one of the best films of 1999.
Listen to Love’s full episode of WTF below.
