We Are Movie Geeks

FURY, the all new David Ayer film, hits theaters this friday. Recently, WAMG was invited to attend the film’s press day where writer/director David Ayer joined stars Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal in a press conference to discuss the accuracy of the film, boot camp, and working with Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf. Check it out below!

FURY takes place in late-war Germany, 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theatre, a battle-hardened army sergeant named Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) commands a Sherman tank and her five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Outnumbered and outgunned, and with a rookie soldier thrust into their platoon, Wardaddy and his men face overwhelming odds in their heroic attempts to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.

The film also stars Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal, Jason Isaacs, and Scott Eastwood.

Logan, I was going to ask you about your character, because he goes through this transformation from somebody who is  just a clerk typist to becoming a die-hard soldier. I was just wondering, for you, did you feel like you were going through a  kind of boot camp yourself in terms of being involved in this? Did you guys hang out beforehand? Did you feel like buddies?

LOGAN LERMAN : Yeah! We had a long, long training period on this film. A lot. David is kind of known for putting his actors through a pretty tough training process. We had, you know, months where we did so many different things to feel comfortable with this world that we were living in, and then also get to know each other. We had a good, solid month where we spent every day fighting each other in the mornings, and learning about the tanks, and our positions in the tanks. Most importantly was that last week. We had a boot camp, and we got to know each other very well, and we did become close in that period of time.

MICHAEL PEÑA : I just wanted… I remember Logan came in, and we started sparring. I think, from my point of view, there’s something that changed in him. I mean, a couple of times we’d beat him up, you know what I mean? Not gonna lie. We had gloves on, and gear, and all that good stuff, but there was, at one point… I don’t even know when it happened… You don’t try to really beat each other up, but you try to get some good shots, and you can tell when you get hurt, or you hurt the other person, and he learned. He’s like “I don’t care if I get hurt. He’s going to hit me once really good.” and that’s the change. Something, because we did end up in the barrage together, and there’s something that happens when you spar. It really does activate this kind of animalistic instinct that you have, and you really get to bond in a weird way. I did it with Jake Gyllenhaal, and I did it with these guys. There’s something that brings out a lot of honesty when you’re getting punched in the face.

LOGAN LERMAN : And it just breaks barriers, you know? Once you feel comfortable with punching someone in the face, you can do anything with them.

MICHAEL PEÑA : Yeah, so David Ayer has that weird, like- You know how, instead of theaters moves, or whatever it is, it’s trust exercises! Yeah!

My question’s for Jon. So, killing zombies or killing nazi’s? What kill is better? It’s a joke question, but… [Laughs] What was your mental preparation for some of you guys for just getting into – you said almost animalistic – for just getting into that zone? 

JON BERNTHAL : Since you asked me a joke question I guess I’ll take it. You know, look, to echo what these guys said I think we were all enormously grateful for the preproduction on this movie. It’s not about putting us through hell, or anything like that. This movie mattered so much to our boss, and it mattered so much to all of us. The level of commitment and the level of investment, you know, three-four months before we started, was there. We were all kind of asked to go outside of our comfort zones, all asked to take steps together that we might have been a little afraid to do on our own, but we all kind of pushed each other and got there. We were constantly being tested, and constantly being pushed. I really feel like we became a unit before we walked on set. I’ll never forget the first time we came out for our screen test. Normally screen test is a kind of serious day on most movies, but I remember this time it was sort of our day to meet the crew, and I think  – and I don’t mean this in a weird way – but I think people were genuinely afraid, you know. We came out there, and…

MICHAEL PEÑA : We also smelled…

JON BERNTHAL : Yeah. We had really been through it by that point. Through the boot camp, through the fighting, through the tank training… Honestly, our rehearsals were really more violent than the fighting… to be honest with you. Anything and everything happened there. Again, I think that part of David’s genius is that he gets you to commit, and gets you to take steps and go way beyond your comfort zone, and this thing was like life and death before we started.

My question is for Logan. Was your character’s relationship with Brad Pitt seems more like a brother relationship, or more of a father relationship? I couldn’t really decide. How do you see it? On the set between takes, what is it like to work with Brad Pitt? 

LOGAN LERMAN : There’s definitely a father-son relationship there, and he is critically, in this very short time of a day, educate his new recruit… this son, on how to survive. Working with him was great. He was really generous with everything that he gives when you’re working with him. He gives a lot and asks for very little. It’s incredible to work with him.

Is he a funny guy?

LOGAN LERMAN : Is he a funny guy?

Did you laugh?

LOGAN LERMAN : We didn’t have many laughs. No. Not a lot of laughs. There wasn’t a lot of levity. He’s a nice person, though. We definitely worked hard together.

I really enjoyed the film guys. Congratulations. David, I thought Shia’s performance was fantastic. I thought he gave a great performance, and it’s much different than what we’re use to seeing him do. Could you talk about casting him, and casting him as that type? 

DAVID AYER : I’m trying to remember how he ended up in my kitchen, but he did. I’m a big believer that there is a right role for the right actor at the right time in their life, and in our conversation, what I got from him was the sense of commitment, and a willingness to commit and transform, and be immersive, and really submerge himself into this role… let the role take over his life. To that end, he did a vast amount of prep work. He embedded himself in a National Guard unit, he shadowed the military chaplain so that he could understand how to minister the troops, and how scripture related to the soldier’s life. He really went deep with it. He understood the time period in a great way. He’s a fantastic actor, and there’s an incredible rawness to him. One thing he did… it’s easy to show up as an actor. You get to set, and you wanna be seen. His goal was to disappear into the fabric of the film, and feel like the mother of this family, and become the emotional center of it… this sort of conscious of the tank. He really did a fantastic job at being that.

David, in preparing for this film, both as writer and director, what type of mental preparation did you do to take on such a project? And with such talent? 

DAVID AYER : Well, it’s interesting. For me, when I’m on set and we’re shooting I tell my director of photography my big joke… we’ll, it’s not really a joke. “Don’t think! Just do!” and for me, it’s kind of the same thing because as a director you’re a  manager. You have this huge amount of resources, this incredible pressure, this timetable… You come up with a series of complex plans that you develop with your department heads. You hope it all works out. You hope the tanks don’t break down. You hope the weather’s favorable. It’s a vastly expensive endeavor, and the world’s watching so it’s really easiest to simply put one foot in front of the other and take it day by day, and to have a vision and to have a goal. The shorthand answer is don’t think.

My question is for David. I was just curious about the logistical aspects. The tanks in this are quite specific to the reality of what happened. I’m curious what kind of help you had? Maybe from the military? Also, if you kind of consulted with any World War II tank vets in getting the authenticity as real as it was? 

DAVID AYER : So, one of the complaints that you see in a lot of movies about World War II is that the armor’s inaccurate. It’s interesting because the film takes place at the end of the war, so you have this sort of admixture of every iteration of the Sherman tank in the film, which is accurate. As far as accuracy goes, you could try to build tanks but it’s never going to be correct. There’s a lot guys out there that are fans of the World War II genre, we call them rivet counters, and they’re gonna wanna look up the foundry marks, and serial numbers on the turrets, and figure out where each tank actually was because all of those records are out there. Every bolt, every detail… is the aircraft gun mount correct? Is that the right shovel in the shovel slot? Is it the post war version? Is it the 1951 British export version? People note these details, so that accuracy is important. We worked with certain European collectors. As we started researching the movie, we started realizing that the movie’s in Europe because a lot of this armor and these vehicles weren’t out during the London lease program during World War II, but it’s actually illegal to re-import any of it. This material that went overseas stayed overseas, and there it is now in the hands of these collectors. It’s interesting in working with a collector…

‘Can we paint your tank?’

‘No.’

‘Can we light it on fire?’

‘No.’

So, it becomes a challenge but fortunately we found people who were really game, and they let us paint their tanks, and modify them, and get them absolutely correct to April, 1945.

David, what do you pinpoint as the toughest day of filming? And Logan, considering the lack of experience and knowledge about what he’s been thrown into, what would you say was the most difficult thing to understand about the character and his situation? 

DAVID AYER : So as far as the toughest day of filming, it’s interesting; one would think that standing in the mud at 3 a.m. with the rain and pyro and explosions and tanks and all sorts of things like that happening would be the toughest day. That’s actually where I’m at my happiest. The toughest day for me was the dinner scene that we shot in the apartment. It’s…nobody came out of there in tact, let’s just say. It was bare-knuckled acting, and it’s the kind of thing where the next day you shuffle over to the actors and look at your feet and [say], ‘Hey, are we…are we still buddies?’ I still don’t know the answer to that.

LOGAN LERMAN : I would say the toughest aspect to working on this film and figuring out how to portray Norman was mapping his arc and his change from afraid to kill to killer. There’s a lot of things that happen to him on this day that this movie takes place, and to make it realistic, you try to have a gradual change and pick the right moments. That was probably the most difficult aspect to portraying Norman.

When you made HARSH TIMES you took a financial risk in mortgaging home. Looking back, was that the best risk you’ve ever made in your career? 

DAVID AYER : Rule #1 in Hollywood is: don’t make a movie with your own money. I’m going to follow that rule in the future, and it’s going to make my wife happy that I do that. It’s still terrifying to think about that and that risk that I took. I’m not a film school grad. I’m sort of a wrong-side-of-the-tracks guy. No one was going to hand me a directing opportunity unless I created it for myself.

Have seen plenty of WWII movies, great tank warfare, and the first I can recall with a Latino in the lead. What kind of research did you find on Latinos in the military? 

MICHAEL PEÑA : It was actually way harder than I thought it was going to be, to be honest with you. It’s good to have a buddy who has written a Latino in every movie he’s had. END OF WATCH was an amazing role, and I had to read it three times to make sure I did have that part. But there’s not a lot on Wikipedia; there’s not a lot just in standalone newspaper clippings. It was shocking, to be honest with you, because there was about half-a-million Latinos that actually fought in World War II. So we just started creating a character, really, and estimating what it would be like. So we made him a zoot suit-er; that’s why he was wearing the chain outside. I had a lot of help on this, because every time he would give me direction, he would speak to me in Spanish and for the cadence, because there’s not a lot of that way of talking in any other movie or in videos that I saw. I started watching some of the older movies – if you guys remember, there’s a top hot [reference], and I thought Gordo probably watches all of these movies and thinks they’re really cool. So I tried to put in a lot of stuff that I think would be cool in ‘30s and ‘40s movies. I think the biggest one is just us talking about this guy, how it was tough at home, because it seemed nobody really liked him at home, and then here he is getting shot by Nazis. So there was a level of depression I try to deal with, with drinking in the film; that’s the way he was coping. It’s hard to imagine somebody being hated on both sides, so that was my crutch in the movie.

You have some funny lines you say in Spanish…in the script or ad libbed?

MICHAEL PEÑA : That’s David going, ‘Hey, say this shit, dude.’ I’m not kidding. But it would be funny.

DAVID AYER : But it’s a little bit sad that Latinos made a huge contribution to the war effort in World War II, not just in uniform; between 250,000-500,000 served and there’s no records, so it’s hard to say. And then obviously on the home front as the white boys went to fight, they had to fill these jobs in the factories, and it was really the first period of franchisement for the Latino community in America because they had jobs, they had money, and they were fighting for their country and their freedom. What people don’t realize is there are 17 Hispanic Medal of Honor winners in World War II that won our nation’s highest honor. It was an incredible contribution. As I looked at the period photographs of these tanks crews, you start to see more and more Latinos. I’d show Mike and [say], ‘Hey, look at this guy!’ and you start to see it once you look for it. You realize how prevalent and how present they were in the war, but unfortunately in a lot of these films they just haven’t shown that aspect; they haven’t shown that diversity.

MICHAEL PEÑA: But also what was interesting…I did End of Watch, and that was a completely different character. I remember reading it and being like, ‘Oh, man,’ I was really excited and was like, ‘Thanks for writing me the part.’ And then I was like, ‘Shit!’ It just seemed like a very difficult part to do because he wasn’t like a – me, Jon Bernthal and Shia would get together and say, Logan’s got a storyline, Brad’s got a storyline, use three have to form Voltron in a way. Shia was like, you’re the head, I’m the – I was like, wait, let’s figure this out. But literally, months and months of that. It was really cool that it wasn’t like anything I’ve seen of Shia. He really didn’t care, shining or not. We basically made a pact – you’re as strong as I am, and I’m as strong as you are – and tried to form that triangle and really help the scenery for the movie and paint the picture of war.

For Michael, I liked the Gordo name, which wasn’t really explained. But considering your contribution to the Latino community, do you have plans for doing a Spanish or Mexican film production? 

MICHAEL PEÑA : Oh, yeah. I worked with Alejandro Ińárritu, and I worked with Diego Luna, and I’d like to keep on working with those guys. I remember growing up and people changing their names and turning their bank on Latin roles, and I just decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to do that, that I wanted to do something for my people and be inspired just like Edward James Olmos did in STAND AND DELIVER. I ended up doing calculus in high school because it was just a strong image in my head that that’s what I wanted to do. But I would love to do movies in Spanish. I might have to get better at Spanish; I’m not too bad. He can tell you how the name Gordo came about.

DAVID AYER : There was a comic strip that came out in 1941 called “Gordo,” and it was one of the actual first positive depictions of Latinos in U.S. media. The author of the strip – I don’t remember his name – actually ended up serving in World War II, but because of that comic strip, it was sort of common for Latinos to be given that nickname, Gordo.

Brad is one of the most famous movie actors, someone people think they know a lot about. During the early bonding period, what was something intriguing, unexpected or fun you learned about his during that? 

JON BERNTHAL : Look, I’ll be honest with you, man – I can’t say enough good about Brad. I understand a lot of people kiss his ass, and I guess if we’re here I’ll just have to kiss it. I felt like he was completely, not only willing, but eager and desperate to dive in every inch as far as the rest of us. At no point did he try to separate himself or hold himself on a pedestal. I respected him immediately for that. And it seemed to me that the colder it got and the wetter it got or the tougher it got, the bigger the smile on his face was. I don’t know what it’s like to be a big movie star and all, but I would imagine that he enjoyed the fact that David in no way let him get away with anything. He was one of the guys and had every bit as much responsibility as we did – that goes for the bootcamp, that goes for the fighting, that goes for the tank training – and he wanted that; he craved that. Any time the chips got down at all in bootcamp or whatever, I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s kind of cool just looking over and being like, ‘Man, that’s Brad Pitt. If he’s doing this shit, I better do it, too!’ You know what I mean? And there’s something to that. He’s a lovely guy, he’s a family man, and I’m proud to call him a friend.

This film has been rated R by the MPAA for strong sequences of war violence, some grisly images, and language throughout.

FOR MORE INFO : www.sonypictures.com/movies/fury

FURY opens in theaters on October 17