Harsh Times Watch the trailer for David Ayer's drama, starring Christian Bale and Eva Longoria.

Hard-hitting crime drama Training Day won Denzel Washington an Oscar in 2002, but despite critical and commercial success, screenwriter David Ayer was left curiously unsatisfied. His script wasn't tampered with, he says, it's just that "when you write something you have a vision in your head, and when you give it to other parents to raise up these babies, it never comes out quite the way you envisioned it. I just wanted control over something, of my own writing.

"I actually intended to direct Training Day myself, independently," he adds, "but it never panned out so I wrote Harsh Times and said, 'OK, this one I'm going to direct.'" Ayer describes the films as "companion pieces", and thematically they're very similar. His directorial debut follows Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez as long-time pals who live outside the law even as Bale's character pursues a career in law enforcement. It is, however, much more uncompromising than Training Day. As Ayer puts it, "It takes place in a very different moral universe than most Hollywood movies take place in. That made the studios uncomfortable."

Even with the afterglow of Training Day and a tidy list of other hit scripts under his belt (The Fast And The Furious, S.W.A.T.), Ayer was shown red lights all over town. That's when he decided to break the first rule of filmmaking – never dip into your own pocket. He re-mortgaged his house and took personal loans to bankroll production, something he vows he'll never do again. "Eventually I'll make my money back," he says, "but it's a very scary thing. I have kids and, when we were filming, I walked into their bedroom one day and looked around and started wondering if the new owners of my house would paint over the nursery. It was just utterly terrifying."

Ayer cut costs by shooting on Super 16mm and refining the image using a digital intermediate process. Still that only saved $10,000 out of a $2million budget. Recouping that money in ticket sales isn't what gave him the shivers though; it was whether he could get the film finished at all. "On a practical level," he states, "it was a really dumb thing for me to go and make this movie. I wasn't bonded during filming, so any accident or catastrophe could've mushroomed into having to shut down. There were no guarantees. It was a speculative venture and it could've gone wrong in many, many different ways."

It was a really dumb thing for me to go and make this movie.

Working in the most volatile neighbourhoods of LA certainly upped the ante. "In a couple of areas we shot in you could hear guns go off and a little machine gun fire - AK fire actually," Ayer recalls. "It's just part of the environment. As a filmmaker you've got to be diplomatic. Going into that neighbourhood you've got to talk to people. A lot of times big film crews will go in and be brusque and dismissive and that's when they start having problems – they get legs shot out and that sort of thing... we didn't really have any incidents."

There was also a manic three-day shoot in Mexico that threatened to put Ayer behind schedule and rack up costs even further. "That was tough because our cell phones wouldn't work and our radios weren't working, we didn't have any maps and nobody knew where the locations were. We lost tonnes of time just driving around lost!" On top of that, "On the first night we totalled one of our cars. The amazing thing was that we got everything done. The last day we worked 21 hours and did something like 78 set-ups, which is inhuman."

So, after risking the roof, does Harsh Times live up to Ayer's original vision? "Yes and no," he says. "The movie is different from the script as written. There's a lot that didn't end up in the final cut, but it was a lot you didn't need. There's something about seeing the faces and seeing chemistry on film that eliminates the need for pages and pages of background. The other thing is the tenderness and humanity of these characters, which doesn't come across on the page."

Ayer is playing it safe for his next venture, Cartel, a look at the drugs war in Mexico that started life as a remake of seminal western The Wild Bunch. He recently finished the script and will direct it for Warner Bros. He's also receiving offers to direct other projects, but Ayer insists, "I'll always at my core be a writer. I'll always take on writing jobs and help out other directors, but when I do write that special script, I'll do everything in my power to direct it myself and not hand it off. In essence I've been to medical school and now I can go operate."

Harsh Times is released in UK cinemas on Friday 18th August 2006.

Stella Papamichael | Published 17 August 06

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