TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
Stars of ‘Fury’ bonded while filming in close quarters
Brad Pitt can be real a spitfire when it comes to, well — spit.
He snapped at costar Scott Eastwood while shooting writer-director David Ayer’s World War II action-drama “Fury,” opening Friday. Eastwood, 28, had been hacking up saliva during a scene inside a tank that also housed Pitt.
But Eastwood didn’t fight back, perhaps thanks to some advice he once got from his famous father. One of the most important professional lessons he learned from legendary dad Clint, is, “Shut up and listen to others — don’t think you know it all,” Eastwood tells the Daily News.
Co-stars Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, Logan Lerman and Jon Bernthal were also in the tank during Pitt’s outburst.
“We were driving down the road, I’m in the turret, Shia is at the other turret, and Scott is on the back, spitting juice,” Pitt told GQ magazine. “I’m starting to get pissed off,” because, true to his character, Wardaddy, Pitt felt like the tank was his and his co-stars’ “home.”
So Pitt demanded Eastwood clean up the mess. Pitt didn’t know during filming, as he admits in the article, that Eastwood was just taking direction from Ayer.
“When you put a bunch of guys with testosterone in a high-intensity setting, like a World War II film, you’re gonna have disagreements” like that, Eastwood says.
“In the end, it was sort of a funny misunderstanding,” he adds. “We laugh about it now. We were all just trying to make the best movie we could.”
There were other challenges to making an authentic WWII movie. According to Bernthal, 38, life inside the tank took more than a little getting used to.
“There’s a turret that moves, and if your arm’s in a place where it’s not supposed to be, it can get snapped off in an instant,” Bernthal says. “[But] after a few months of being out there, that was one of the most comfortable places in the world to me.”
Much of “Fury” is spent inside the tank with the weathered soldiers, who are part of a battalion rolling into a dangerous, desperate area of Germany in the last months of World War II.
Lerman, 22, recalls one of Ayer’s methods for building a bond between the actors.
“We sparred every day,” he says. “There’s no better way to break barriers than by punching each other in the face.”
The feeling of brotherhood was important, Peña, 38, says.
“War instills an interesting apathy, where you almost don’t care what happens,” he says. “But it’s the kind of thing where you definitely have to bond together.”
Producer John Lesher says the behind-the-scenes effort from Ayer, Pitt and the cast helped add grittiness.
“This script felt like a WWII movie I hadn’t seen before,” he says. “You really feel what it’s like to be in the tank with these men. You’re with these guys in the mud and the dirt and the ground and the tank.
“We may have been ridding the world of Nazi fascism, but for the men, if you were a soldier in the war, it was just like any war — it was cold and miserable and your friends were dying,” Lesher adds.
Eastwood came to set with some movie-war experience, having undergone boot camp for his dad’s film “Flags of Our Fathers” (2006).
For Ayer, whom Eastwood likens to his dad Clint, it all comes down to the characters. To quote Bernthal, “Fury” is as much “a family drama” as it is a war movie. And at the head of that family was Pitt.
“The colder it got, the wetter it got, the bigger Brad’s smile was,” Bernthal says.
Adds Peña, “As far as taking orders from Brad, I didn’t really feel like that was the case. He felt more like a big brother than a commander.”