Quotes from David Ayer

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

'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.

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.

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

'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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.