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journey is universal in that way.
“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
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
“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
ndeed, even though Fury
stands as a serious and
powerful film, set against
a brutal backdrop, WWII
enthusiast Ayer concedes
that certain moments filled
with joy, not least the first
hat five Sherman tanks were
to roll. The director really
a general that day.
he first day when we had
e Sherman tanks kitted up
ly as they were in the war,
d up in camouflage that
one properly, and they were
ormation, fully loaded, fully
nised, and moving out, it was
spiring,” he says.
erybody just stopped and
and you could feel the
rumble. It was a sight that
been seen for 70 years and
ou see that come alive, it is a
ul moment.”
I wanted to tell a story of a family
under extreme conditions that lives
inside a war machine.