nytimes
‘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.
“Looking
back into World War II, I could see the same family I was serving
with,” Mr. Ayer said. “But what they experienced was really
incomprehensible to me.”
The
time also seemed right for an honest look at those who were fighting
and dying in ferocious encounters even as the German surrender was
imminent, he said. “There is a lot of contemporary parallel here,” Mr.
Ayer said, referring to soldiers who confront death in Afghanistan, for instance, even as American engagement there is supposed to be ending.
Their
problem is that of Mr. Pitt’s character, known as Wardaddy, and the
four tankers — portrayed by Logan Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña and
Jon Bernthal — whom he has pledged to keep alive, Mr. Ayer said.
“Nobody wants to be the last man to die in the war.”
American tank casualties during the war in Europe were horrific.
The Third Armored Division landed at Normandy with 232 M4 Sherman medium tanks, the Army’s primary armored weapon. But it had 648 tanks completely destroyed, and another 700 knocked out, as replacements and those repaired were repeatedly hit.
The
armor was too thin, and the tanks were prone to burn when hit even by a
hand-held panzerfaust anti-tank weapon. Crews were incinerated, and
often listed as missing, not killed, because they left no remains.
Commanders, peering from atop the turrets, were routinely shot in the
head.
“Henry
Ford built the Sherman, Ferdinand Porsche built the Tiger,” the
better-armored German tank, said Bill Block, a producer whose QED
International assembled and financed “Fury” while selling distribution
rights to Sony, which will open the film in the United States on Nov.
14.
Many
tankers, assured of the Sherman’s strength in training, only learned
otherwise in combat. “Seeing our mounting tank losses made me realize
that our armored forces had been the victims of a great deceit,” Belton
Y. Cooper, a veteran of the tank war, wrote in the book “Death Traps,”
one of many sources Mr. Ayer consulted for his script.
In
Mr. Ayer’s story, the crew of a tank called Fury, one of about 10 real
Shermans used in the film, have fought their way from Africa, to
Normandy, across the Rhine and into Germany.
Ragged,
worried, and, in the case of Mr. Peña’s Trini Garcia, almost always
drunk, they can see the war’s end. But they can’t quite reach it.
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.
Much
of what his Wardaddy does may shock viewers who have watched American
soldiers behave brutally in Vietnam War films at least since “Apocalypse
Now,” but have rarely seen ugliness in the heroes of World War II.
In
his harsh initiation of a new gunner, Mr. Pitt’s character crosses
lines, both legal and moral. Not even Lee Marvin’s Sergeant Possum in
Samuel Fuller’s “The Big Red One,” another knife killer, went quite so
far.
Don
Evans, a World War II tank gunner who advised Mr. Ayer, now cautions
that some scenes in “Fury” are more extreme than what he witnessed in 28
months overseas. “I don’t recall anyone having to kill a buddy,” Mr.
Evans said in a phone interview.
Surprisingly,
Mr. Evans, who has read the script, said he was wary of the film’s
thrust, adding, “I am not looking forward to seeing it.”
Yet
the portrayal is grounded in years of research that left the back
corners of Mr. Ayer’s office crammed with books and war memorabilia.
“He
had every type of camouflage, and weapons, and uniforms,” said John
Lesher, another of the film’s producers, recalling a trip to Mr. Ayer’s
man cave in the Silverlake district of Los Angeles.
Through
all of it, Mr. Ayer, whose grandfather was serving on a submarine at
Pearl Harbor at the time of its attack and whose uncle flew B-17
missions in Europe, learned what some who had made a deep study of the
so-called “Greatest Generation” already knew: American fighters were not
saints.
Tom
Brokaw, who wrote a book by that title, remembers being told by one
veteran of the war, “After the Germans killed my brother, I never took
another P.O.W. alive.”
“Remember, they were fighting a hardened enemy that glorified the SS,” Mr. Brokaw wrote in a recent email.
“It
was a long, brutal war, up close and personal,” he added. “A number of
veterans I interviewed alluded to behavior they weren’t proud of, but
neither did they apologize.”
In
the last few weeks, Mr. Ayer has been tidying up “Fury,” dropping in
the last of his special effects shots and filming some brief inserts.
Mainly,
the film, which cost about $80 million, was shot in Britain. Access to
tanks was a prime consideration. Vintage Shermans were more readily
available there. Plus, the production was permitted to use a rare,
working Tiger tank, lent by the Tank Museum in Bovington.
The
fetish for authenticity extended to uniforms. Most were tailor made,
and battered, to avoid falling back on rentals that might be familiar to
those who had seen them in films stretching back to “Battle of the
Bulge” (1965), but which had little connection to the real tankers’
weathered gear, or to the surprisingly sophisticated camouflage worn by
the Germans.
According
to Kevin Vance, a former member of the Navy SEALs who consulted on the
film and appears in it, the bayonet accident occurred when a combat
scene got too real. An actor stabbed a stuntman, he explained, mistaken
for a dummy lying on the ground.
“When
you think about the upper chest and what that bayonet missed, it’s
pretty incredible,” Mr. Vance said of a wound that proved less serious
than it might have been. (The stuntman survived.)
The
principal actors were considerably roughed up before filming began.
Pushed by the military consultants, they spent a week on a bivouac in
England — no shaves, no showers, no plumbing — learning to handle the
grimy side of soldiering.
“Part of my job was to get them miserable, wet and tired,” said Mr. Vance, who supervised the boot camp.
Mr.
Lerman said long sessions with Mr. Evans and other veterans brought the
war’s reality home. “It was incredible to sit down with them and hear
their stories directly,” he said by email.
The cast, Mr. Bernthal added, was pushed by Mr. Ayer to behave as if “this was the last movie you were ever going to make.”
Mr.
Pitt’s decision to take the role of Wardaddy was a sudden one. Early
last year, he read the script during a quick trip to Europe, and, on
returning, immediately jumped in.
Apparently,
it mattered not that Mr. Pitt’s partner, Angelina Jolie, is directing a
very different World War II story, Universal’s prisoner-of-war drama
“Unbroken,” which will soon be competing with “Fury” on the awards
circuit. A third drama set during the war, “The Imitation Game,”
starring Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch, is also expected to
set an awards push from the Weinstein Company. And Sony has already
released “The Monuments Men,” a more lighthearted wartime caper, that
opened in February.
Fortuitously
for Mr. Ayer, “Fury” was born before another of his films, “Sabotage,”
ran into a wall of resistance from audience and critics alike.
An
independently financed action movie, which Mr. Ayer directed and helped
write, “Sabotage” starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the leader of
corrupted drug enforcement agents who begin falling to an unknown
assassin. It took in just $10.5 million at the domestic box office after
Open Road Films released it in March. “ ‘Sabotage’ isn’t any good,” Manohla Dargis wrote, reviewing it for The New York Times.
Albert
S. Ruddy, among the executive producers of “Sabotage,” said it was
still too soon to know whether Mr. Ayer would have a place with
guts-and-glory greats like Sam Peckinpah, whose “Cross of Iron” was
about Germans on the Russian front, or Fuller, with whom Mr. Ruddy
worked.
“I’d have to know David a little while longer to compare him to Sam Fuller,” Mr. Ruddy said in a phone interview.
Mr.
Ayer maintains that failure, and the experience of working on an
expansive picture with a star as prominent as Mr. Schwarzenegger, made
him better.
“I wouldn’t have been able to make ‘Fury’ without making ‘Sabotage,’ ” he said. “It taught me a lot about me.”
In
any case, Mr. Block, whose company backed “Sabotage,” instantly
purchased the “Fury” script when Mr. Ayer showed it last year to a small
handful of associates, including Mr. Block and Mr. Lesher, who was a
producer of “End of Watch.”
What
followed was an unusual frenzy that found Mr. Block camped for three
days at the Creative Artists Agency, which represents Mr. Ayer, Mr. Pitt
and other actors on the film. “Almost everybody involved is a client
here,” noted Bryan Lourd, a principal partner in the agency.
With
Mr. Pitt on board, Universal, Paramount Pictures and New Regency
Pictures fought for the project. But Sony made the first bid, and closed
the deal when its president for business affairs, Andrew Gumpert,
showed up, uninvited, at the agency to insist on having the last word.
One
near hitch in the deal making: QED, which is backed by the Russian
investors Sasha Shapiro and Anton Lessine, initially found it difficult
to sell rights in Russia. Distributors there were wary of a project that
portrayed Americans on a push toward Berlin, which, after all, was
taken by Soviet troops.
For
Amy Pascal, the chief executive of Sony’s film group, “Fury” becomes
the latest in a bold series of Oscar season bids that in recent years
have included “The Social Network,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “American
Hustle,” “Captain Phillips” and, with Mr. Pitt, “Moneyball.”
Each,
in its way, was a tough-minded film that pushed to the edge of its
particular genre. None captured the big prize, a best-picture Oscar.
But
all did what Mr. Ayer may do with “Fury”: jolt viewers into a fresh,
and fractious, conversation about the movies and ground truth.
This time around, the subject will be those damaged tanker-heroes.
“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,” Mr. Ayer said, in
an email crammed with explanations and afterthoughts.
“Sorry about the wall of text,” he added. “But this is something I’m passionate about.”
