STACK #123 Jan 2015

I wanted to tell a story of a family under extreme conditions that lives inside a war machine.

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 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.

Indeed, even though Fury stands as a serious and powerful film, set against a brutal backdrop, WWII enthusiast Ayer concedes that certain moments filled him with joy, not least the first day that five 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.”

• Fury is out on Jan 22

The Crew of ‘Fury’: Brad Pitt, Jon Bernthal (behind), Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña

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