Singer/actress Courtney Love appeared on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast recently and claims that David Fincher hired her to star opposite Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in 1999’s “Fight Club”.
The “Hole” singer says she, coming off strong reviews for her work in “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” won the role of Marla Singer in the film – a part that actress Helena Bonham Carter played in the final film.
Love says she got fired because she rejected a pitch for a biopic about her deceased husband Kurt Cobain, that came from both Brad Pitt and filmmaker Gus Van Sant.
According to Love, Pitt pitched her on the film during a meeting between the two of them and Gus Van Sant about a possible adaptation of the short story “Brokeback Mountain” – long before Ang Lee adapted it for the screen.
Love says: “I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt. I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the f— do you think are?”. It was after that meeting that Love alleges she was fired with Norton, her romantic partner at the time, being the one to initially break the news with Love saying: “He starts sobbing, and he was like, ‘I don’t have the power!”
Afterwards, Fincher allegedly called Love to confirm that she was out of the film, which Love hasn’t seen to this day. She adds that Pitt allegedly hasn’t stopped trying to get a Kurt Cobain film produced via his Plan B label, and she rejected a pitch as recently as 2020.
She says that she told Pitt: “I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit. They’re really good social justice movies, but if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad.”
Van Sant, meanwhile, eventually made the Cobain-inspired “Last Days” starring Michael Pitt, but Love says that was a completely different project to the one Van Sant and Brad Pitt pitched back in the day.
Love appeared in seven films over her career with her last one being 2002’s thriller “Trapped” starring Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend and Kevin Bacon.
Source: Indiewire
