Clark Gregg and Chuck Palahniuk on the set of Choke Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Q&A: Choke Star Sam Rockwell
Q&A: Choke Director Clark Gregg
Choke Review

Speaking to author Chuck Palahniuk is a bit disconcerting. Here is a man who is most famous for writing violent, subversive, and occasionally sexy books like Fight Club and Choke that have a vast following. His books dissect consumerism, loneliness, sex, intimacy, addiction, and pop culture, leaving blood and chaos in their wake. But face to face, he's gentle; he speaks clearly and somewhat softly and he smiles often. He signs books and sends his fans packages in the mail. Chuck Palahniuk is a nice guy.

Premiere met with Palahniuk to talk about the movie based on his book Choke, opening September 26th, which stars Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, and Brad William Henke. It's a bizarre story about a sex addict who pays for his grifter mom's hospital bills by working in a colonial theme park and pretending to choke in restaurants. He also might be a descendent of Jesus. Under the direction of Clark Gregg (who also has a rather memorable part in the movie), the book has been transformed into a pervy romantic comedy with an award-winning cast. In this interview, Palahniuk discusses romantic fatalism, Harold and Maude, real-life fight clubs, and electroshock therapy.

Choke the movie was a lot sweeter than the book, to me.
[laughs]

How did you feel when you saw your characters brought to life?
I think they are sweeter and sympathetic and a big part of that is Kelly Macdonald, especially in her last speech — makes me really regret how she is in the book. That she should not have been as crazy ultimately as she was in the book, but I'm just not very good at making sympathetic, vulnerable characters. It's much easier to sort of make them crazy.

But they are, in their own way, if you peel away the outsides, very vulnerable and relatable. In some ways. Deeper down.
[laughs] Right, if you're gonna take the effort to peel away those outsides. It really takes a lot of effort to get past all that defensiveness, all that sort of masked nature of who they are. The movie [Choke] only lasts two hours; you can't really show them forever.

Despite that, a lot of readers are so drawn to your work and they're really willing to be close to these characters who might not be very likeable but are interesting nonetheless. Why do you think that is?
The characters are always based on things that I find remarkable about real people. Things that people are doing that may not be completely legal or noble but are interesting because they're just so bright, they're so crafty, so clever, and so in a way I want to document them and record them. Because they are such bright, compelling bits of action. And I think another element that people respond to is that the characters are always taking action. They never really contemplate. They never really sit. And they tend to be characters moving from isolation into community, and when people are sitting with a book they've forgone community to be by themselves. And I think that they enjoy a story about people finding community because they're alone and they want a sense of being with people.

Themes in your book are sort of the micro and the macro. You have the groups and people who don't want to be parts of the group. You have Victor dealing with, is he part of the sex addict group? Is he not? Are they reconciling their desire to be part of something bigger than themselves?
I think in a way they're recognizing their only salvation lies in interacting with other people. It just seems like so much of our culture is about achieving a dream of isolation, that if we can be by ourselves in a penthouse or in a castle or a big mansion somewhere in the country, then that will make us happy. And then once we achieve that kind of Howard Hughes isolation it actually destroys us. It makes us that crazy person who spirals down into misery and dies, and my characters are kind of recognizing that they've achieved a kind of isolation based on being so attractive that they're inapproachable, or they're physically isolated where they live but they achieve this isolation, and they recognize it's gonna kill them unless they destroy what they've achieved and sort of throw themselves back into community.