Ayer was inspired by his military family background and his airman grandfather, who flew 35 missions over Germany, to make a World War II movie to show what it actually might have felt like to be there. And that not all American soldiers were decent Tom Hanks types. It's very much a tank movie and shows what life and death was like inside a Sherman.
You served on a sub, which no doubt informed the writing U-571. But this is even more cramped. Do you have the reverse of claustrophobia or something?
It's a great way to take five guys and force them to get to know each other -- put them in a steel box. That's what the movie is. It's a portrait of a family. It's a portrait of these brothers in the love-hate of family. It's a family which happens to live in a tank and kill people.
This doesn't seem to be a Band of Brothers or "Greatest Generation" movie, like the ones we've had in recent times. These guys are rougher and morally compromised ...
I think it is. I have talked to a lot of veterans ... it's an interesting generation in that I think they don't want anybody to know who they were overseas or to bring that identity home. But when you do get them talking and do hear those stories they are just as ribald and normal as any today.
But there's no sepia tint to how you depict the war.
That's the thing. The movie is brutal, but how can I show how a man's heart reacts to that unless I let the audience in a little bit? The brutality of the film is nothing to what these men experienced in the war. I mean it is a study in live PTSD. Why didn't these guys talk about it? I wanted to show why they didn't talk about it.
David Ayer was inspired by his family's background to make a movie about real life and death in the war.
It's a movie of sensory overload, too. If it's not the tank noise, you've got a soundtrack that seems to be Wagner all the way up to 11. Is that because you're heading into Nazi Germany's death throes?
"It's all of that. It's Gotter-dammerung. It's Twilight of the Gods. For the Nazis it was the apocalypse. They had an almost religious world view that was being destroyed. It was the end of the world. And the US military are the invaders. They are going into people's homes as opposed to being the liberators. It's a morally murky environment as anything that is going on in Iraq or Afghanistan today. It's an epic film. I felt it needed a big score, a big sound.
Tanks are funny - they bring out a boyish excitement in those who have never been to war. And I see Fury is already featured in a tank battle game. But the film is an educational reality check.
Keep in mind that we had one of the most epic tank battles in history in 2003 during the fall of Baghdad. Just when you think the tank is anachronistic on the battlefield it comes back and proves itself. The movie is about what it's like to live in one. I mean, take your family and move into a tank. I hope people can understand that this is not about some World War II movie that is about a mission and a battle. It's about people just trying to stay human in horrible conditions. The other thing was that I discovered that there had never really been a Hollywood tank movie and hopefully this can become that classic tank movie.
Talking of which, you used one of the last German Tiger tanks in the world. How cool was that?
Yeah, it's the last runner. It was the biggest diva on that set. It took a lot of negotiation to obtain the vehicle and a lot of insurance. But it was a piece of history. It's been 70 years since a Tiger and a Sherman tank have jousted. I tried to show the tactics. I tried to show the chess game and take the audience into that so they knew what was going on. So many war movies it's just guy shooting left, guy shooting right and it blows up. I wanted this to be more of military procedural.
We know what the movie looks like and sounds like - what did it smell like?
Fortunately, we didn't have rotting corpses for real. To darken the mud we would mix in organic matter. You had five actors in a tank who were very competitive and masculine and it was interesting. This isn't one of these movies which hands you everything. You meet these guys and learn about what they do and they don't have the navel-gazing psychological issues of so many modern characters. It's very much about men of that generation enduring, surviving and bonding in hell.
- TimeOut
