It’s Brad Pitt and His Dog vs. the Alaskan Wilderness in David Ayer’s ‘Heart of the Beast’

And still, Ayer admits that he’s “surprised” with how well the final product turned out. After spending his last two films unleashing Jason Statham on hundreds of nameless tough guys, it’s a drastic swerve to make a dog named Uber the Paul Walker or Ethan Hawke to Pitt’s Vin Diesel or Denzel Washington.

“You’re sitting there in the rain, there’s mud everywhere, you’re slipping off the side of the mountain, and the dog is running around,” Ayer recalls of production. “And every now and then something came across my monitor that took my breath away. I’m like, This is the movie. This is why we’re here.”

As someone who writes most of his own films, what was it about this script that sucked you in?

I’ll just be really honest: it made me cry. Reading the script, it’s like a tone poem, in a sense. It’s so sparse—just a guy, a dog, mountains, and the calamities and triumphs that unfold, but what’s fascinating about the script is they’re constantly rescuing each other. It’s not like a guy and his pet—they felt like co-equals in this story. Brad wanted to be No. 2 on the call sheet, and rightly so. There was just something profound in the script. It felt like a study in grief, in healing, and of the human heart. So I had to do it.

A decade after working together on Fury, why was this the right project to reunite with Brad Pitt on?

I think we’ve both matured a lot in life. And Fury was interesting because it’s a war movie, there’s tanks, stuff blowing up, people everywhere, and there’s a scale to it. In this film, there’s nowhere to hide. It’s me, Brad, a camera, and a dog. He’s coming off the success of F1, and it’s such a big international world, with the cars and the noise and the crowds, and then he got compressed down into this aesthetic of simple beauty and playing such intricate…I don’t want to say suffering, because there’s so much joy and hope in it. But it was definitely an evolution. And it’s probably the most difficult film I’ve made, for those exact reasons. There was not any room for a misstep.