David Ayer Biography

David Ayer (born January 18, 1968) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is best known for being the writer of Training Day (2001), and the director and writer of Harsh Times (2005), Street Kings (2008), End of Watch (2012), Sabotage (2014), and Fury (2014). In September 2014, Ayer was announced as both the writer and director for the DC Comics film Suicide Squad, scheduled for release in 2016.

Early life and education

Ayer was born in Champaign, Illinois, on January 18, 1968, and grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, and Bethesda, Maryland, where he was kicked out of his house by his parents as a teenager. Ayer then lived with his cousin in Los Angeles, California, where his experiences in South Central Los Angeles became the inspiration for many of his films. Ayer then enlisted in the United States Navy as a submariner. According to Shia LaBeouf, who starred in Ayer's film Fury, Ayer is "a full subscriber to Christianity."

Career

Ayer's screenplay, Squids, was based on his experiences as a U.S. Navy Submarine sailor, and he also integrated those experiences from his service in the U.S. Navy into rewrites of the submarine thriller U-571. Ayer collaborated on the screenplay for The Fast and the Furious in 2001. Ayer wrote the screenplay for crime drama Dark Blue, and it was his research into the Los Angeles Police Department that led to his most prominent screenplay, Training Day. Ayer signed a contract to write a screenplay for S.W.A.T., which was based on his original story pitch. The film was directed by Clark Johnson and released in 2003.

Ayer's directorial debut was with the film Harsh Times, a drama set on the streets of South Central Los Angeles, showing how drug use and past military experiences affects people's attempts to lead normal lives. He then went on to direct the crime thriller Street Kings, which was released in 2008.

Ayer later wrote and directed End of Watch, a drama about the daily lives of two South Central Los Angeles policemen, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pea. The film was released in the fall of 2012 to profitable box-office returns and favorable reception from critics, with Roger Ebert naming it as the fourth best film of 2012, hailing it as "one of the best police movies in recent years".

Ayer's next film was the crime thriller Sabotage, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; the film was released on March 28, 2014. He wrote and directed the World War II-set film, Fury, starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf and Logan Lerman; the film was released in October 2014.

He wrote and directed the film adaption of the comic book Suicide Squad, set to be released in August 2016.

He is set to direct "a contemporary cop thriller, but with fantastical elements" titled Bright, which is set to star Will Smith and Joel Edgerton with a script penned by Max Landis that Ayer himself rewrote.

Controversy

Ayer wrote the submarine thriller U-571, a fictionalized account of the capture of the German Enigma machines during WWII. The film depicts the effort as being led by United States forces when in reality the bulk of the Enigma work, vital to Allied victory, was done by members of the United Kingdom military. The furor that surrounded the film's release led British Prime Minister Tony Blair to claim that it was an "affront to the memories" of those involved and U.S. President Bill Clinton to write a letter emphasizing the film's fictional nature.

Ayer has said that U-571 distorted history by this assertion and that he would not do it again. "It was a distortion", he said, "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 II, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achievements."

Filmography

Year	Film	Functioned as			Notes
		Director	Writer	Producer
2000	U-571
2001	Training Day				Cameo as a Russian Mafia hitman
2001	The Fast and the Furious
2002	Dark Blue
2003	S.W.A.T.
2005	Harsh Times
2008	Street Kings				Cameo as gang member prisoner in L.A. County Jail
2012	End of Watch
2014	Sabotage				Reworked original screenplay by Skip Woods.
2014	Fury
2016	Suicide Squad
TBA	Bright