How Brad Pitt took the war movie to a new level

The slugging unfolded during a gruelling, week-long boot camp held near Bovingdon Airfield in Hertfordshire during a wet September last year. The core five-man cast play members of a Sherman tank crew fighting the last vestiges of German resistance in April 1945. During their boot camp they were billeted in tents with wool blankets, sleeping in their military clobber. They were deprived of showers, electricity and hot food, and surrendered their mobile phones upon arrival. They only used everyday equipment that was prevalent during the war. And Pitt followed the same regime as everyone else. "Brad is a worker," says the film's writer and director, David Ayer, when we meet the filmmaker and his cast at Bovington Tank Museum, which provided much of the real-life armour used in the film. "Brad is humble and you don't get the movie-star baggage. You don't get the entourage. He will stand in the mud and eat a cold sandwich with you."

One night, the actors' camp was raided amid a melee of smoke grenades and blank-bullets so that they could experience something akin to a real ambush. They also went on a rescue mission to retrieve a comrade, while each night they shared guard duties, taking shifts and suffering interrupted sleep patterns, rarely enjoying more than four hours' kip at any one time.

It was, however, the sparring and the fistfights that caused the most contention. "You want to get some punches thrown at you so you can throw some punches back," reckons Pitt, 50. "You want to be on your toes and you want the feeling that anything can happen, and we lived that daily."

Not everyone took it as well. "We fought a lot," says 22-year-old Logan Lerman, who plays the rookie assistant driver. "I hated that at first although it then became a love-hate thing." How so? "I hated the fighting but there are boundaries when you're working with an actor that you slowly dissolve through getting to know each other," continues Lerman, who starred in Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Lightning Thief, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower and Noah. "You can break through the barriers once you start fighting. If you're comfortable punching someone in the face then you're comfortable doing anything with them."

Alongside Lerman and Pitt - who plays the battle-hardened sergeant - the cast features Shia LaBeouf, who plays the tank's gunner; Bernthal, his loader; and Michael Pena, the principal driver. "They're all older than me and more experienced and in better shape, because I'd broken my arm not long before shooting began," says Lerman. "I got my ass kicked every day with these guys. There was also a battle of egos. Everyone's ego came out when we started fighting and it really showed the type of person that everyone was. I went in there thinking, 'I'm not going to throw punches, I'm going to be nice and just tap around.' But for the other guys it became about who was top dog - and then it became 'Put up or get your ass kicked' every day."

The most intense behaviour, says Lerman, came from LaBeouf, the star of Michael Bay's first three Transformers films. LaBeouf took his preparations to the extreme. "He pulled out one of his own teeth," Lerman says. "He didn't do it himself - he went to a dentist and got the dentist to pull out his tooth, but it's a strange request."

LaBeouf, whose CV contains films as diverse as Nymphomaniac, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, also sliced his own face with a knife. "In the rehearsal stages we were figuring out our makeup, the level of dirt and cuts, and they put some cuts on his face," Lerman explains, "and Shia was like, 'It doesn't look real.'

"Then he walked out and I saw him in the hallway and he was like, 'Do you want to see something fun?' And he took out a knife and cut himself. And throughout the whole movie he maintained that; he kept reopening the cuts on his face."

Did that not freak Lerman out? "No - I loved it. That level of commitment is amazing. Even when Shia didn't have to work, he was still operating the tank's turret in every shot. In the wide action shots you don't have to be there as an actor. They can have someone else inside the turret, but he was there every day for every shot. He works harder than everyone else."

Before the boot camp and the start of principal photography, LaBeouf linked up with the US military. "I joined the National Guard two months before we shipped out to boot camp," explains the 28-year-old, whose character in Fury is known as Bible. "I was a chaplain's assistant to Captain Yates for the 41st Infantry." He spent a month with the 82nd Cavalry on the Gowen Fields Airbase in Idaho as they prepared for Afghanistan and attended a gunner school with the US Army, passing all sorts of real-life military tests. "Then I linked up with my cast and went to Fort Irwin in California to spend some time in the M1A2 Abrams [tank]," he says.

Such was the bond forged between the five actors that LaBeouf did not want the experience to end. "I wanted to stay on after we were done," he says, "which is the first time that has happened. The film is honest.

"David Ayer said the experience would change me and that I will never have worked harder or given more, that he was going to push us hard and that what we were going to get into would be fully immersive, full-on and brutal. David likes to take things all the way to the edge. That's where the truth is and I wanted to be a part of that.

"War is the only place in society where men can unconditionally love each other - and we had that. I will know these men for the rest of my life. We're like a family."

Indeed, the familial feeling engendered by the boot camp, the inter-cast fighting and the tough 12-week shoot proved vital to the film's authenticity, according to Pitt. "There is bickering, irritations, laughter, smells, proximity, closeness, being tuned to each other's moods and knowing each other's next move," says Pitt. "A tank is a very tight and intimate place; we eat, sleep, piss, fight, all within this confined metal box. We're one big, fat dysfunctional family." Although this family happens to operate an M4 Sherman tank, the mainstay of the Allies' armoured divisions in western Europe. Pitt's grizzled crew leader is known as Wardaddy.

"The Wardaddy character is the tank commander so his responsibilities are to his crew, to make sure their morale is up and that they are operating as a machine," says Pitt. "A tank crew has to operate as a machine. If one cog fails, they are not going home."

In many ways this is the key to the movie, which focuses on the arrival of a new crew member, Norman Ellison (Lerman), a rookie with no combat experience whose appointment reflects the shortage of American manpower at the end of the Second World War. Ellison is both stunned and bewildered by what awaits him on the front lines. The crew, meanwhile, are equally horrified. "Suddenly this new kid is thrown in," says Pitt, a three-time Oscar nominee as an actor, courtesy of Twelve Monkeys, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and Moneyball. "He has no experience of a tank and that makes him dangerous to the rest of the crew."

Ayer - who wrote the screenplay for Denzel Washington's Oscar-winning Training Day and wrote and directed the Los Angeles cop movie End Of Watch - says Lerman's character is "the son Wardaddy never had". The journey they embark upon is brutal in the extreme, the crew fighting three major engagements over a tense 24-hour period, including a ferocious duel with a much more heavily armoured German Tiger tank.

For Ellison, these muddy, blood-soaked hours bring his first experiences of death, killing, murder, love and horrendous loss. The child becomes a man in a day. "In the film we see this trade-off," says Pitt. "We see a very hard and capable character versus the innocence of this kid and, somewhere along the way, they inform each other."

Pitt's character doesn't shy away from battlefield atrocity and the actor is to be commended for his commitment to the truth, as outlined to the cast by the many former soldiers they spoke to during their preparations. "We spent extensive time with vets from the Second World War," Pitt recalls. "Men who were in tanks and mended them every day and were in battles like the Bulge, men in their 90s who were sharing stories with us.

"I can't even define the respect we walked away with for these guys. We also talked to vets who came from current battlefields and who gave us personal stories that allowed us to get into the right mindset. My hope is they recognise something of that in the film."

Authenticity has been the watchword throughout the production and all kinds of wartime horrors are made manifest; what plays on screen is far more visceral, and accurate, than any pictures from the Hollywood war films of the mid 20th century, movies such as The Longest Day (1962) and Battle Of The Bulge (1965), which famously features modern tanks rather than authentic examples. Redressing the balance was one of Ayer's prime motivations for writing the screenplay. He is a military enthusiast, a former LA gang member who served as a submariner in the US Navy, and does not take matters lightly. He has extensive knowledge of the American 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions, which played a prominent role in western Europe during the Second World War, and he has put together a brutal film.

Few will deny the veracity of the on-screen combat and the horror of what's on show owes much to the commitment of the actors. "You could make a war movie that is fun," notes Bernthal, "but David is not a fun guy. He is very serious and very dark, way darker than he'll ever show you. He constantly made us go through things that made us feel dark. This was never supposed to be fun.

"It was the toughest thing I've ever done and hats off to Brad for his willingness to participate in all this. He's Brad Pitt. He doesn't have to do all the s*** we have to do. We are all punching each other in the face, we're living in s****y conditions, we're going through these tough days, and he is doing everything that we did." Including the fistfighting and more than his fair share of blows below the belt. "He was part of our unit," smiles Bernthal. "Brad was the tank commander and just one of the guys." n

Fury (15) is in cinemas from Wednesday. Read Alison Rowat's verdict in The Herald on Thursday.