“In the end, they would hose out the blood, slap on some paint, and grab some cooks and clerks to crew up the vehicle again,” David Ayer tells Michael Cieply at the New York Times, referring to his new film Fury, which several Oscar pundits were much higher on than I was initially, but this new editorial has me singing a different tune.
As much as I loved Ayer’s End of Watch (it made my top ten in 2012), his films have never been Oscar fodder. Even Training Day, which AYer wrote and Antoine Fuqua directed, saw Denzel Washington win an Oscar and Ethan Hawke also nominated. It didn’t, however, earn a Best Picture or screenplay nomination. Add to that the dismal reaction to Ayer’s Sabotage earlier this year from critics and audiences alike (I’ve still yet to see it) and it just appears he’s a filmmaker with a touch outside the Oscar realm.
Enter Fury, starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal and Jason Isaacs, a World War II film centered a battle-hardened army sergeant named Wardaddy (Pitt) as he commands a Sherman tank and her five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines and it sounds every bit as nasty as you’d expect.
“Piercing his brainpan with a CRACK,” is how Mr. Ayer’s screenplay describes the move. (In Dolby Digital sound, it will be a very loud crack.) Mr. Pitt, our hero, then calmly wipes his blade clean on the German’s uniform […]
As the movie opens, they are preparing to scrape the remains of a headless buddy from the bow gunner’s seat. “I sure didn’t keep him alive,” Mr. Pitt mutters.
‘Fury,’ Starring Brad Pitt, a Raw Look at Warfare
LOS ANGELES — In the first minutes of the writer-director David Ayer’s “Fury,” about American soldiers slogging through Europe in the final days of World War II, Brad Pitt, as the tanker Don Collier, slides his knife behind the eye of a German lieutenant.
“Piercing his brainpan with a CRACK,” is how Mr. Ayer’s screenplay describes the move. (In Dolby Digital sound, it will be a very loud crack.) Mr. Pitt, our hero, then calmly wipes his blade clean on the German’s uniform.
The Good War this is not.
In what promises to be one of the most daring studio movies in an awards season that will bring several World War II films, Mr. Ayer, Mr. Pitt and a band of producers backed by Sony Pictures Entertainment are poised to deliver what the popular culture has rarely seen. That is, a relentlessly authentic portrayal — one stuntman was run through with a bayonet on the set — of the extremes endured, and inflicted, by Allied troops who entered Germany in the spring of 1945.
Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” which also starred Mr. Pitt, was brutal but surreal. Few believed that a real-life counterpart to his blood-crazed Lt. Aldo Raine had collected Nazi scalps by the hundred.
The first 20 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” came much closer to what Mr. Ayer calls the war’s “ground truth.” But little in its portrayal of slaughter at Normandy hinted at what some American soldiers would do less than a year later in their final push to victory — yes, they executed prisoners and killed armed children.
Mr. Ayer, a studio writer (“Training Day”) and indie film director (“End of Watch”), had been meditating for years on the “Fury” screenplay, but he wrote it in a burst about 18 months ago. “It sort of exploded out,” he said. “I wrote it for me.”
The resulting movie, Mr. Ayer said, was intended both as a personal journey and as a correction to the pop cultural record.
On the personal front, “Fury” is meant to unlock the psychology of Mr. Ayer’s older relations, who fought but seldom spoke of it. And the film trades on his own military experience as a sonar operator on an attack submarine in the 1980s.
BP Gallery Update
• x001 Cadillac – Promo.
• x160 February 05 – LAX Airport – Los Angeles, CA.
• x082 June 14 – Airport – London, England.
• x006 June 28 – Ago Restaurant – Los Angeles, CA.
• x012 July 03 – Beverly Hills, CA.
• x001 Fury – Stills.
Thanks Vaska & Yukko.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Wrote Love Letters to Each Other While Apart
Handwritten love letters from Brad Pitt? Only one woman is that lucky.
Angelina Jolie, 39, revealed to Australia’s TV Week magazine that she and Pitt, 50, sent handwritten letters to each other while they were filming on opposite sides of the world.
The actress and human rights activist was directing Unbroken, a biopic about World War II hero Louis Zamperini, in Australia, while Pitt was in London filming Fury, about a tank crew fighting the Nazis.
“He was supportive from a distance, and it was quite romantic in a way,” she says.
“We decided to be of that time, when we could imagine he was in the European theater and I was in the Pacific theater, and we wrote handwritten letters to each other that were very connecting for us, thinking of the people that were separated for months, if not years, at a time back then.”
