david yesterday

David Ayer was born in Champaign (Illinois) in 1968. He lived with his parents in Minnesota and Maryland, but the relationship should not be easy, since he was not a good student and they encouraged him to leave home to earn a living, so he left to live with a cousin in Los Angeles, in the troubled area of ​​South Central, which would end up inspiring the stories he has written and directed for the movies, almost all related to the criminal and police world.

At the age of 18, he enlisted in the Navy, and learned what life was like on board a submarine dealing with sonar, which would lead him to start writing a script entitled Squids , which would end up becoming U-571 , film directed and co-scripted by Jonathan Mostow that introduced some modifications that he was not satisfied with, since his initial idea was a fantastic story. In any case, he liked writing-he said he learned by reading Syd Field’s manuals, and he made a good contact, the screenwriter Wesley Strickto start analyzing and correcting other people’s scripts- and had made a good start in Hollywood, and very soon after his name was linked to an adrenaline-pumping film that became a saga, Full Throttle .

He begins to carve out his prestige as a writer of police stories with the libretto for Training (Training Day) (2001), where the wide-sleeved policeman who has to carry a rookie was a treat for any actor, and Denzel Washington , who would be the one who in the end he would interpret it, he won a well-deserved Oscar. The danger of being typecast was undoubted, but Ayer moved like a fish in water with stories about law enforcement officers – “I have the detective writer gene”, he has come to affirm -, to the point that he co-wrote with the prestigious novelist of the genre James Ellroy Dark Blue (2002), film starring Kurt Russellwhich was inspired by the authentic case of a black man beaten by the Los Angeles police, a fact that generated powerful riots. With such a good background, it was considered that he was also the ideal writer to write the script for the big screen transition of the famous series of Harrelson’s men in SWAT: Harrelson’s men (2003) .

The ground was ripe for Ayer to add to his work as a screenwriter that of director, so he made his debut in this second section in 2005 with Harsh Times , where a couple of friends ( Christian Bale and Freddy Rodríguez ), one of them a veteran of the War of the Golfo, they are taking the tests to join the police force. The film was more than worthy, but three years pass until the filmmaker directs again, and once again we have Los Angeles police and corruption situations in Dueños de la calle, in which an agent is blackmailed for having exposed himself to a compromising situation, linked to the death of a colleague who was speaking with internal affairs. As in the other films, there are well-drawn male characters, and conflicts of interest.

Although Ayer had commented and demonstrated in his previous films that the best starting element for his stories was police corruption, he changed his mind when his plot for Sin trugua (2012) came to mind, which he wrote in six days, about police officers. normal, honest guys trying to do a good job, survive and have a family: “These people see violence, killing, they deal with psychologically destructive situations, and then they have to go home and work on their relationship. Someone capable of doing that successfully, in my opinion, is a fascinating person.” Certainly No Truce is Ayer’s most mature film, with a masculine camaraderie between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peñavery well drawn, as well as the efforts of both to establish and raise a family, while risking their lives daily in a highly conflictive neighborhood. The family question once again draws from the experience of the filmmaker, married with children. An idea of ​​the reliable and almost documentary way in which the daily work of a policeman is collected is the comment made by Jaime FitzSimons, a former Los Angeles police officer and adviser to the film: “I think that, because of the way the film is shot and because of as David has written it, that both the police officers and the people of the community will go to see it and think: ‘Finally, finally someone shows both sides of the coin: what it is to live in a community like this and what What does it mean for two agents who are like brothers to patrol in a community like this’”.

At present, Ayer is shooting for the first time a foreign script, although again about police forces, Sabotage , a story in the world of drug trafficking starring Arnold Schwarzenegger .