David Ayer Quotes

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

David Ayer

#2. Ideals are peaceful, history is violent.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#4. 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.

David Ayer

#5. 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.

David Ayer

#6. 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.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#8. 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.

David Ayer

#9. 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.

David Ayer

#10. '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.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#12. 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.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#18. 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.

David Ayer

#19. The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#22. 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.

David Ayer

#23. 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.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#26. 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.

David Ayer

#27. 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.

David Ayer

#28. 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.

David Ayer

#29. 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.

David Ayer

#30. [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.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#32. 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.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer

#34. 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.

David Ayer

#35. 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.

David Ayer

#36. 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.

David Ayer

#37. 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.

David Ayer

#38. 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.

David Ayer

#39. 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.

David Ayer

#40. My mantra is "Better is better".

David Ayer

#41. 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.

David Ayer

#42. 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.

David Ayer

#43. '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.

David Ayer

#44. 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.

David Ayer

#45. 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.

David Ayer

#46. 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.

David Ayer

#47. 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.

David Ayer

#48. 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.

David Ayer

#49. 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.

David Ayer

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

David Ayer