DAVID AYER

'WHAT HAPPENED WITH SUICIDE SQUAD, IT SEARED MY SOUL. BUT I'M TENACIOUS. I'LL NEVER STOP. YOU'VE GOT TO KILL ME. I HAVE SO MANY STORIES TO TELL'

- JAMIE GRAHAM

Training Day. End of Watch. Fury. Writer/director David Ayer was revered in Hollywood until Warner Bros. recut his Suicide Squad and he took all the blame. Ayer's been trying to rebuild ever since, and now looks to regain his footing with Jason Statham action thriller The Beekeeper. 'I grew up on the old-school action movies, he says.

David Ayer is 6ft 2½in. Built. He looks, you might say, like a character in one of his movies – a corrupt cop, perhaps, or the leader of a street gang. His narrowed eyes exude don’t-mess-with-me authority. They’ve seen it all. And we don’t just mean the highs and lows of Hollywood, from Denzel Washington winning a Best Actor Oscar for one of his first screenplays, Training Day, to Warner Bros. shoddily reworking his ‘dark, grounded, soulful’ Suicide Squad into a crappy comedy. This guy lived with his cousin in South Central LA when he was kicked out of his Maryland home, and spent his teenage years tussling with cops. He joined the US Navy to escape street life, working as a sonar man on a nuclear submarine.

These life experiences pour into his work. Jobbing as an electrician when he left the Navy in the late 80s, he shared some of his stories with a screenwriter whose house he was wiring. The enthusiastic response encouraged Ayer to turn to scripting. Screenplays for sub movie U-571 and 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, focused on the subculture of LA street racing, opened doors, and then his spec script for Training Day attracted Washington.

Ayer was good to go. Screenplays for Dark Blue and S.W.A.T. came next. He directed his own scripts for Harsh Times and