David Ayer has been a busy man lately. The writer/director has turned out End Of Watch, Sabotage and now Fury in little over two action-packed years. Next up is the serious upscale that comes with commandeering DC’s freshly-announced superhero movie, Suicide Squad, and Ayer is ready for the challenge.
“Fury whetted my appetite for a bigger canvas and this idea of world creation,” he told Empire. “You can do amazing things as a filmmaker if you have the proper tools, and those are time and money.”
Money and time he’ll have plenty of – Suicide Squad is scheduled as the second DC behemoth to hit the big screen, following Batman V Superman in two years’ time – and, although he couldn’t say much, his vision for the movie should reassure fans. “I can say that it’s a Dirty Dozen with supervillains,” he said. “Then I can ask the question, ‘Does a movie really need good guys?’”
Maybe not, and on paper at least, Suicide Squad’s bad guys, antipodean asshat Captain Boomerang especially, can be an unsavory bunch. So how do you go about casting an Australian racist? “Like one would cast any other role,” Ayer rebutted. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do what I do in my typical fever dream of directing.”
It may be a departure from the gritty, real-world settings he's delved into so far in his career, but Ayer is relishing the leap into the comic-book galaxy. “I love the passion [comic-book fans] have for these characters and these worlds. I think there’s something incredible about the comic genre and technology has finally caught up with pen and ink to render these fantastic worlds in a way that feels believable and visceral to audiences. It’s a secular religion in that regards. The mythology that these characters represent – the idea of them as fallen gods on Earth – is intriguing to me. I can’t wait to start exploring those corridors.”
Meanwhile the cast, currently rumoured to have Will Smith, Tom Hardy and The Wolf Of Wall Street’s Margot Robbie in talks, could have a Fury-style boot camp ahead. “I have a cookbook of preparation that I like to run actors through,” chuckled Ayer, “so I don’t think I would change [my preparation].”
Fury is out on October 22, with Suicide Squad doing its badass thing from August 5, 2016.