We’d take his meals to him and he’d eat in the tank. “By the end of the shoot Brad could run up it like a gazelle. “You first see this tank and – oh my God – you can’t even climb up it,” he says. Ayer describes driving to set early in the morning and taking comfort in seeing the tank there. Ayer is sceptical about Hollywood films that lust over hardware, but says in this case it’s important to see the tank as sanctuary as well as a weapon. The unit becomes a family, making home in the tank. The rookie gives himself away to become part of a unit. The problem, says Ayer, is that the soldier needs acceptance as much as the system needs him to assimilate. Norman stumbles off bleating about his clean conscience, but he’s in. He doesn’t need Norman to think, he needs him to kill. Norman won’t, so Wardaddy slaps the gun in his hand, pulls his arm into a firing position and forces his finger down on the trigger. He tells the new recruit to shoot him in the back. When the fighting is over, Wardaddy pulls a surrendering German up in front of the squad. During the tank crew’s first attack together, Norman can’t pull the trigger. It plays out this transformation as violent tragedy. It’s that change and the effects of that change that are fascinating to me.”įury is a character study of an innocent who is coerced into becoming a hardened killer. Your personal problems are transcended by the needs of the unit, the needs of the mission. It’s a very unsentimental environment, where your feelings don’t matter. It’s incredibly intimidating, but it’s also incredibly lonely. “You could make a mistake that could kill people, so you won’t be trusted until you are tested. “It’s very difficult to show up as a new guy because you don’t have a job, you don’t know the equipment and you’re training for life and death,” he says. In navy parlance he was a NUB – a Non-Useful Body. He arrived on the sub, nice and shiny from school, but he didn’t know the ropes and it was hard to fit in. In the late 80s he served as a sonar technician on a nuclear submarine, the USS Haddo. For him it’s losing yourself to a system. Photograph: Scott Garfield/Studio CanalĮvery director has issues they are working through, says Ayer. Michael Peña and Jake Gyllenhaal in End of Watch, another story of innocence corrupted, written by Ayer. The people may be bad, but it’s the system that made them that way. Still, the individual is rarely at fault. In each case the institution co-opts a rookie and batters a veteran into moral submission. The hero cops of End of Watch come a cropper through their loyalty to the badge. The dodgy DEA unit of Sabotage lose their humanity by sticking together. In Training Day – which he wrote, but was directed by Antoine Fuqua – a rookie narcotics detective’s idealism is shattered after a primer in police corruption from his senior officer. That someone can make a sacrifice with such a world-changing outcome, and never know that it had value.”Īyer has made a career of tough, stylised stories about men losing their innocence to the institution. There’s something heartbreaking about that. Often times, when there was a major battle, even if they won, they didn’t know they’d won. “They didn’t understand how what they were doing on any given day was of any value. “Individual soldiers often didn’t know why they were fighting,” Ayer says. There is no glorious war, just frightened people losing sight of a common goal. The crew’s morals are mutable, their triumphs ephemeral. In fact, honour and glory are in short supply in Fury. It’s good propaganda: twisting the truth for the war effort. The words “Honour”, “Glory” and “War” are emblazoned above their heads. The posters for the film show off the handsome cast (Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña and Scott Eastwood with Pitt and Lerman) perched on the tank, all muddied and sexy. His vision is grim, exhilarating and depressing. He says he wanted to offer “an emotionally different take” on the conflict – a drama that honours bravery, but recognises that heroism is easily compromised. Both of his grandfathers fought in the war. His answers are clipped, eye contact is minimal. They were forced into horrible situations, just like any military person of this generation.”Īyer, a US navy veteran, talks like a military man. We forget that our grandfathers as young men were confused and scared. “You don’t think about the individual – cold and hungry and being shot at. “There’s a convention in the genre where there’s a bit of sepia patina on it,” says Ayer of second world war movies. David Ayer poses in a jeep at Bovington Tank museum.
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