David Ayer Quotes

[If] you want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic.

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. So if you get in my face, I'm going to fight you.

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more.

I like to do stuff real and practical and in camera, as much as possible. I like old school filmmaking.

To operate а tank as a crew, it's not about five individuals. It has to be one organism, composed of five people.

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.

Every movie is different. Every movie requires its own sort of photographic voice.

The worst part of directing is always seeing the first assembly. It's devastating. It really is. It's like going into the delivery room and you can't wait to see your baby, and it's a crocodile.

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.

I think great acting is about inhabiting a skin and transforming yourself.

Stories of friendship are very interesting to me. Artificial families are something I like to explore. Whether it's a bunch of guys or a bunch of ladies, there's something interesting about that.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

Even the scrutiny is good because it lets you know the world cares about your movie, and there is interest in it.

When I make a movie, it's almost a relief to get shooting 'cause the hell is over, or part of the hell is over.

If you want to know somebody, fight 'em. Have a fistfight with them.

As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.

The hardest thing, as a director, is that it's never right. Nothing you do is ever right. It's never exactly how you envision it. Making a movie is about making it better.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

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.

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.

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.

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 most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper.

My mantra is "Better is better".

I'm one of those big believers that the movie comes together in the way it's supposed to be and that movies are fated to become what they become.

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.

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.

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