David Ayer Quotations

World War II was just as dirty and brutal as Vietnam, just as confusing.

My father died when I was really young, on Christmas Day.

'Fury' whetted my appetite for a bigger canvas and this idea of world creation. You can do amazing things as a filmmaker if you have the proper tools, and those are time and money.

Every movie is different. Every movie requires its own sort of photographic voice.

I'm a Veteran. I was in the Navy, in the submarine corps. I come from a military family. Both of my grandparents were in World War II and retired as officers. One fought in the Pacific and one fought in Europe. The whole family was in the war. I grew up exposed to it and hearing the stories, but the stories I heard weren't kind of the whole "Rah, rah, rah! We saved the world!" They were about the personal price and the emotional price.

You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different and critics say we [directors] make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different and you get kicked in the gut for it.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

The hardest thing, as a director, is that it's never right. Nothing you do is ever right. It's never exactly how you envision it. Making a movie is about making it better.

The worst part of directing is always seeing the first assembly. It's devastating. It really is. It's like going into the delivery room and you can't wait to see your baby, and it's a crocodile.

It's important for me to take very famous, well-known people and not have them play themselves and not have them be seen as themselves.

Stories of friendship are very interesting to me. Artificial families are something I like to explore. Whether it's a bunch of guys or a bunch of ladies, there's something interesting about that.

For me, I like to show what guys are like when no one is looking and how we really are, and that we can be emotional and have these emotional lives. I think it would be great to do a film where we see some females and what's going on there when we're not around.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.

As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.

You don't want to get too far ahead of the audience and you don't want the audience to be ahead of you. So, that balance is difficult and it takes a lot of work and tuning in the edit, to get the right balance.

When I make a movie, it's almost a relief to get shooting 'cause the hell is over, or part of the hell is over.

You never know what you have until you put it in front of an audience. That's the truth. That's the truth of filmmaking and that's why you make movies, for an audience to, hopefully, enjoy it.

When you put a movie together, you're continually screening it for yourself and you're screening it for other people. It's like a video game power meter. When the power bar starts going down, you've gotta look at what's going on.

You can't go back. Once it's done, it's done. I'm sure there will be things that I would love to change, in the future, but each movie is a snapshot of its time and the resources, and you do your best on it.

You make a movie and it's like convincing people to go on an expedition with you. You think you know where it's going to end up, and you're hoping and guessing. But, when people trust you and get involved, based on that trust, it's a really nice feeling to be able to have everything pay off.

I think a good director can embrace any genre and it's the kind of thing where you always want to do something different. You always want to challenge yourself.

When you talk to people who have been in combat, there's a sensory overload that happens. The color becomes vivid. Sounds become more pronounced. People talk about how, for them, the war was technicolor and real life was black and white after the war.

My mantra is "Better is better".

If you want to know somebody, fight 'em. Have a fistfight with them.

That's the world of policing. I've met some bad-ass female cops, who are very cool people.

The most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper.

For me, directing is like writing with meat. I can write live, in real time, and change things and be confident that I'm helping the movie.

The movie has to be going somewhere. Other than that, you want it to be entertaining, but people usually disagree on what entertaining is and everybody has different tastes.

I'm not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. So if you get in my face, I'm going to fight you.

Actors are insanely competitive and they hold back on each other. They are like magicians and none of them want to show their tricks.

I think great acting is about inhabiting a skin and transforming yourself.

To operate а tank as a crew, it's not about five individuals. It has to be one organism, composed of five people.

I like to do stuff real and practical and in camera, as much as possible. I like old school filmmaking.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more.

Actors are like kids, they need to play a little bit. And that's the nature of their job, they need to shake off some energy and then you as the director get them back on track. When you do loosen up the reins, you get some amazing things, but you have to wring out the performances for every last good drop.

I'm a veteran, and I come from a family of veterans and people who served in that war. And the stories that I heard were a hell of a lot different than the movies that I was seeing, so I wanted to make a movie about the people that were really there.

[If] you want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic.

It was a distortion, a mercenary decision to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience, Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achieve.

I'm all about real drama, real performance, and real people, so my twist on this is: I'm creating a family, a brotherhood here. I'm creating a very real chemistry and I have this incredible ensemble of actors led by Will Smith, who are basically playing dimensional characters with lives and souls.

You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different, and critics say we make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different, and you get kicked in the gut for it.

Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achievements.

I've been in the game long enough to know what elements you have to package together to get a movie into production.

'Sabotage' was a work for hire. It wasn't my original idea or script or anything.

'Sabotage' was an opportunity. That was journeyman work, but the irony is I learned more off that movie on what filmmaking is and isn't than everything else combined. A lot of lessons, and it will impact me for the rest of my career.

Actors want to act. I think a lot of times what happens is that they're expected to bring it all. Probably because I'm a writer, I'm not telling them what to do. I just provide them with as much as I can.

Actors are like magicians. They'll sit there and do all their tricks to each other. It's very competitive, and the goal is to get them bonding, to get them to know the real person as quickly as possible.

I'm a big fan of Italian neo-realism and all of that stuff.

I think nothing has been filmed as much as World War II.

Genre expectations can kill creativity. If you do something different, it will get hated. The best filmmakers can do everything on the approval list and knock it out of the park. For me, I have a hard time being creative when I have to color in between the lines.

'Colors' is pretty good. It takes you inside the cop car bit. I like reality myself. I like reality-based kind of movies.

A movie is a certain thing by definition. There's nothing wrong with knocking out a good genre picture.