David Ayer has carved out quite a niche for himself as the police corruption guy. He wrote Training Day and Dark Blue, wrote and directed Harsh Times and directed Street Kings. In the spirit of love and good humor, Ayer agreed that he may have said all he has to say about corrupt cops.
Director David Ayer Talks Street Kings
"Boy, I hope so," he said. "Who knows what revelations there will be in the future involving law enforcement corruption? At the end of the day I'm a developing director. I did Harsh Times. I'm not going to claim that I have the strength or sea legs of a director that tackles totally unfamiliar territory. The maxim in writing is 'Write what you know' so I wanted to direct what I knew. I know the city. I know law enforcement. I know cops. I know the L.A. streets. I know the gangs. And that sort of gives me the confidence I need to really explore performance within that arena. Having said that, I'm absolutely up for some science fiction or something like that."
For the drama of Street Kings, Ayer still deferred to the professionals for the nitty gritty details. "I brought in some really good technical advisers. There are two levels to authenticity. There's the training and the immediate sort of tactical level, getting the uniforms right and how do you hold a gun, that kind of stuff. Then there's the emotional reality of it. Law enforcement is a close brotherhood, a closed community. It's really difficult to find a cop that's going to talk non-law enforcement with you and about their emotional life. I was fortunate to find guys willing to talk about the effect on their soul of policing and going out on the streets and dealing with what they deal with and impart that soul-wisdom in Keanu, so you see his character through their eyes emotionally as opposed to just walking and talking like a cop."
Street Kings is still a movie so there are exciting gunfights and chases. Ayer strove to keep them realistic while entertaining. "I sort of went for a naturalistic execution of the action. Nowadays you get a lot of 3-D interactive camera and God's eyes view, the point of view through the gun barrel or bullet time or that sort of thing, and I wanted to go for a more '70s less stylized sort of organic action feel with this. There's a car crash in the movie and we actually put the actors into cars and smashed them together instead of stunt doubles. That made the producers a little nervous. Keanu did all of his own stunts which is amazing. He's very physically generous with his time. A lot of actors would've said, there's no way I'm going to do this. Pretty much every actor did their own stunts which I believe helps the reality of the movie."
With years of cop films under his belt, Ayer is well known to the LAPD. "You have to look at it two ways: the institutional PR version of how they'd like to be portrayed and then there's on the individual level, guys are actually out there. One-on-one, I've got a lot of friends that are in law enforcement. I've got really good relationships with cops. I absolutely support the police but at the same time everybody loves a good detective yarn, everybody loves a good mystery, everybody loves a good cop story, so you have to be able to separate out the fiction element from the fact element. It's taking a fictional story and putting it in a very realistic wrapper. This is a James Ellroy story and he's definitely held in high regard by the LAPD and hosted the Jack Webb awards this year. We got Daryl Gates in the movie which was interesting. He said he saw this as a story of redemption and he could really understand that so that's why he said yes. Again, the police tactical advisers we had are all successful LAPD officers. Some are career retired people who had a career in the department. Everyone wanted to cooperate in getting those aspects right. Again, it's a good old-fashioned detective story. It's film noir redux is what it is."
Add to Heffee!
