David Fincher finally responds to Paul Thomas Anderson wishing testicular cancer on him

Now, 20 years later, Fincher was asked to respond to the jab in a new interview with the magazine. His response, cooled by time, is about as diplomatic as it gets. “Look, I’ve been through cancer with somebody that I love, and I can understand if somebody thought… I didn’t think that we were making fun of cancer survivors or victims,” he said. “I thought what Chuck [Palahniuk, on whose book the film was based] was doing was talking about a therapeutic environment that could be infiltrated or abused. We were talking about empathy vampirism.”

He continued, “Cancer’s rough. It’s a fucking horrible thing. As far as Paul’s quote, I get it. If you’re in a rough emotional state and you’ve just been through something major…My dad died, and it certainly made me feel different about death and suffering.” After a pause, he added, “And my dad probably liked Fight Club even less than Paul did.”

Anderson would likely be a lot more gracious these days. John Krasinski, after all, has a whole story about Anderson urging him to never publicly shit on another’s work. “If it wasn’t for you, that’s fine, but in our business, we’ve all got to support each other,” Anderson reportedly told Krasinski. We’ve all gotta learn sometime.

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