STACK NZ Jan-Feb #59

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“And then for Wardaddy there’s the inner
conflict of having to save somebody by
destroying their best nature,” continues Ayer.
“It is really sad and beautiful in that regard and
Brad did a fantastic job of bringing all those
flavours to the screen.”
Pitt is no stranger to the WWII movie, having
already served on Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film
Inglourious Basterds , and Ayer says that he was
an ideal collaborator on Fury, arriving with no
movie star pretensions.
“Brad is a worker,” says Ayer. “He is humble
and you don’t get the movie star baggage. You
don’t get the entourage. He will stand in the mud
and eat the cold sandwich with you. He is smart
and he would challenge me to do my best work
and I would challenge him to do his best work.
You don’t want a rubber stamp and you don’t
want someone who is high maintenance.
“All our mutual effort went into making this
film and making this amazing character, and he
would always force me to ask that question – is
this the best version? Have we done our best?
He is a perfectionist who knows that it can
never be perfect.”
Ayer wrote the screenplay for Denzel
Washington’s Oscar-winner Training Day and
has a reputation for bringing authenticity to the
worlds he creates on screen. This was especially
true of his recent LAPD movie End of Watch,
and he has achieved an equally high degree of
veracity with Fury.
“There are several major battle scenes
and each one has an entirely unique flavour,”
he says of the film, “and these show how fun it
is to be on the winning side and how horrible it
is to be on the losing side. And the film is also
about not giving up, no matter what; fighting
with tenacity and fighting with fury.”
The tank is a character throughout the
movie. It is one of the first and one of the last
things that we see in the film. “It is this family’s
home and you can tell that they love the tank,
that the actors love the tank. But this film is
different,” Ayer continues.
“I tried to be fairly realistic about the
tactics. People who understand military tactics
and armour tactics I think will be pleasantly
surprised by the realism with which these
scenes are executed.”
Bringing realism to the world of American war
movies was part of Ayer’s motivation in making
Fury. He grew up watching the likes of Battle of
the Bulge and The Longest Day , films regarded
as classics but which are not always authentic
in the representation of the conflicts that they
portray. Battle of the Bulge famously used
incorrect tanks for the period.
“I knew I wanted to do something about
WWII, something very contemporary in the
sense of demythologising, and I realised that
no one had done a movie about the tanks,
about the armour experience of WWII,”
says Ayer. “And yet these were the
guys who won the war.
“The 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions were
heavy divisions and they punched through into
Germany and won the war along, obviously,
with a lot of Russians. But no one in detail had
shown a day in the life of these men.”
Fury was shot in England over a 12-week
period, in the fields of Oxfordshire and at
Bovingdon Airfield in Hertfordshire, and it
features a rare array of vintage battle tanks.
“It took a lot of fortune and effort to accumulate
the vehicles and equipment we had,” says Ayer.
“It was a minor miracle getting these
authentic vehicles, getting all the Sherman
tanks, getting the real German vehicles,
like the Tiger, because there is an audience
out there that knows these things.”
The Tiger tank in the film is the only
surviving model that is still operational.
, even though Fury stands as
rious and powerful film, set
ainst a brutal backdrop, WWII
nthusiast Ayer concedes that
rtain moments filled him with
, not least the first day that
Sherman tanks were ready
to roll. The director really was a
general that day.
“The first day when we had
all five Sherman tanks kitted up
exactly as they were in the war,
painted up in camouflage that
was done properly, and they were
all in formation, fully loaded, fully
weaponised, and moving out, it
was awe-inspiring,” he says.
“Everybody just stopped and
looked and you could feel the
ground rumble. It was a sight that
hadn’t been seen for 70 years and
when you see that come alive,
it is a powerful moment.”
I wanted to tell a story of a family
under extreme conditions that lives
inside a war machine.
The Crew of ‘Fury’:
Brad Pitt, Jon Bernthal (behind),
Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña
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