things like that,” he eventually says, erring on the
side of diplomacy. Then he adds, “If someone
walks into a bank and shoots it up under your
name, it’s under your name. What are you gonna
do?” He laughs, maybe at the madness of it all.
Bright, then, is what Ayer did next, determined
to make this onehis. With a $90 million price tag
it’s also the biggest film Netflix has ever made, the
world-building taking place both on and off
screen, mining new territory creatively and
commercially, a high-stakes experiment. Nothing
is normal here.WUNDERKIND SCREENWRITER MAX
Landis (Chronicle) wroteBright. Two thousand
years ago, the premise goes, orcs, elves, fairies and
centaurs roamed the Earth, there was a great
battle for supremacy, and the humans won. TheHuman-orc partnership
Daryl Ward (Will Smith)
and Nick Jakoby (Joel
Edgerton).Nick is the fi rst
orc to don the
LAPD uniform.right is almost done.
It’s late September
2017 and there are
only some musical
cues left to drop in;
otherwise we’re good to go and director David
Ayer, sitting in his offi ce in Silver Lake, LA,
accompanied by barky dogs, is buoyant. Bright,
a genre-bending, R-rated stew of LAPD grit and
Tolkien-esque fantasy, seems to have ended up
exactly as intended, and he sounds relieved.
His positivity has context.
In January this year, in response to a Twitter
compliment about Suicide Squad, Ayer broke into
unprompted candour. “Wish I had a time
machine,” he wrote. “I’d make Joker the main
villain and engineer a more grounded story.”
As his tweets went on, it became clear how hurt
he was by critical responses to the fi lm, which
made $745 million at the box offi ce but received a
score of just 25 per cent on review aggregation
website Rotten Tomatoes. Rumours abounded;
The Hollywood Reporter wrote of “multiple
editors and competing cuts”. So, was Ayer’s
approach to Bright, asks Empire, infl uenced
by his experience on Suicide Squad?
“Yeah, absolutely,” he admits. “Because
I got some supercharged muscles on Suicide
Squad, from making a fi lm so big, but it was
a rough experience. A tough experience. It
became a bit of a slog at the end. It was an
incredible fi nancial success, but I got fl ayed by
the critics, and that’s scary, that’s painful. And
it shook my confi dence as a storyteller.” As
a result, he was determined to apply the lessons
he’d learned. “I’m very proud of Bright,” he says.
“It’s my voice, it’s who I am. And it was great to
get my voice back.”
It’s instructive to understand when he felt
he lost that voice. We ask if it was amidst the
critical kickback, or during the Suicide Squad
production itself, and Ayer is silent for a few
seconds. “I gotta be cautious on how I answer