Not surprisingly, Palahniuk sees it more archetypically - as a generational thing. “We are the middle children of history,” he writes, “raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t.”

Norton, the 30-year-old Yale-educated movie star who has scored two Oscar nominations (for Best Supporting Actor in Primal Fear and Best Actor in American History X) from a mere six screen appearances, sees it in much the same terms. “Fight Club has a generational energy to it, a protest energy,” he told Premiere’s Johanna Schneller. “So much of what’s been represented about my generation has been done by the baby boomers. They dismiss us: the word slacker, the oversimplification of the Gen-X mentality as one of hesitancy or negativity. It isn’t just aimlessness we feel: it’s deep scepticism. It’s not slackerdom: it’s profound cynicism, even despair, even paralysis, in the face of an onslaught of information and technology. We’re much more intensely informed at a much younger age than our parents were.”

Norton plays Jack, the narrator of Fight Club, who finds himself sitting next to Pitt’s Tyler Durden on a plane. Jack is fed up with his life, despite all the comforts it has supposedly bought him, and feels a strange affinity to Tyler.

“What do you do?” he asks him.

“I make and sell soap,” is the unexpected reply. “Did you know,” he continues, “if you add nitric acid to the soap-making process, you get nitroglycerin? With enough soap, one could blow up just about anything.”

It is Tyler who introduces Jack to the world of Fight Club - which Palahniuk claims he made up but versions of which are rumoured to exist in Newark, London, Warsaw... anywhere where you aren’t when you speak of the rumour. The point of Fight Club is to annihilate your previous existence in violence - a process which leads on to a wider programme of insurrection and revolution, just as accepting the challenge in Seven or agreeing to play in The Game took those films’ central characters into another sort of existence.

“In Buddhism,” Norton told Schneller, “there’s Nirvana, and then there’s Samsara, the world of confusion and disharmony. That world is our testing ground, where we have the experiences that help us become enlightened. I’m not saying that Fight Club is The Book of Living and Dying, but it was kind of that idea: you’re challenging yourself to break out of the world.”

Fox 2000 president Laura Ziskin acquired Fight Club when it was still in manuscript, but didn’t put it forward as a Fox project until Jim Uhls, a young UCLA graduate making his feature debut, had written a screenplay and Fincher was attached. Pitt, Norton and Bonham Carter followed soon after, the last-named playing Marla, a chain-smoking drop-out with whom both men fall in love.

All three reckon Fincher is the only director who could have made the movie. “Picking up where Kubrick left off,” is how Pitt puts it. “I’m gonna leave that one up to the scholars, but that’s what I think.” It’s an intriguing analogy: because Kubrick had the same meticulous vision of an unlovely world; because Kubrick never gave up until he had got exactly what he wanted on screen (“Fincher’s mediocrity is everybody else’s perfection” is Bonham Carter’s take); and because Kubrick’s critically acclaimed films took a while to become classics (except for 2001, which was critically lambasted but became a classic almost overnight).

Likewise, Fight Club is a challenge to an audience lulled into the world of the aforementioned romantic comedies, wanting their excitement in the form of the instantly gratifying bite-size chunks of the action blockbusters.

“Every movie you take on makes you nervous,” concludes Ziskin. “But if you’re going to really examine society, you can’t be bogus: you’ve got to be authentic.”