David Ayer talks about his WWII movie 'Fury'
The writer of Training Day says he made Fury to describe and honor the brutal reality of sacrifices of American tank crews in WWII.
DAVID AYER - who researched, wrote and directed "Fury" as a way to understand the experiences of relatives who served in World War II - describes it as a family drama.
Of a sort.
"It's a slice of life. It's a day in the life of a family, and it's a family that happens to live in a tank and kill people."
His hyperviolent film stars Brad Pitt as a tank commander who's pledged to bring his crew (Michael Pena, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal) through the war alive, a promise that's grimly revealed to be dubious as the bloody story unfolds.
The violence, Ayer said, is a product of his research - tank crews in World War II suffered attrition rates that made their service borderline suicidal.
"The average survival period of an American tank crew was something like six weeks. One division has a 580 percent casualty rate on the tanks themselves. Which means that by the end of the war, every tank in service had been rebuilt like five times.
Sometimes with parts of partially destroyed vehicles - something you could not do with the more expendable soldiers.
Ayer wanted to depict the horrific nature of this sacrifice and also the importance of it, in part because it's something Hollywood has neglected to do.
"So many of the World War II films you see are about these specialized units like rangers or paratroopers. When you study the war, what you realize is that the units that really won the war were the armored units. When you look at a map and track the advance of the Allies across Europe, you see it's the armor that liberated it. The 2nd and 3rd Armored [divisions] were the guys that punched through into enemy territory and were out there, very often, alone," Ayer said.
"But as far as movies and tanks, there's not a lot there. You've got Telly Savalas in 'The Battle of the Bulge,' but that's not a movie that was really equipped to show what tank combat was really like."
Ayer, who wrote the script for "Training Day" and directed the cop movie "End of Watch," wanted his script to reflect the forces that were shaping tank crews at the tail end of the war, when "Fury" takes place.
He cast Lerman as a typist reassigned to tank duty in the waning days of the fight inside Germany.
"At the end of the war, the Allies were running out of trained people. They'd stopped specialized training pretty early, thinking the war would be over quickly. People don't understand - we were running out of manpower at the end. We were sending middle-aged fathers and kids with college deferment. They were taking clerk typists and sticking them in tanks."
It's the job of Pitt's character to take these disparate elements and forge them (sometimes with brute force) into what Ayer describes again as "family" - a group ready to kill, to die for each other.
"You get closer than brothers in the service, in part because the circumstances create that closeness. You're asked to fight and you have to fight no matter what the outcome, or when it's pretty clear the outcome is not going to be in your favor. That's what makes what people in the military do so unique, and so amazing."