“A project from the heart” is what costume designer Owen Thornton called the making of David Ayer‘s Fury. Thornton first met Ayer several years ago at a dinner party where they discovered a similar sensibility between them. “We talked in the same language. We really just hit it off. And we always kept in touch,” said Thornton. When Ayer was making Sabotage (2014), he brought in Thornton to help create the military looks. So it became the most obvious choice to bring Thornton on as costume designer on Fury, especially since the two had been talking about how great it would be to make a World War II film for five years.
During these years, Thornton looked for used military clothing all over the place – the Rose Bowl flea market, vintage shows in Los Angeles, New York and even Japan. “I was traveling around and I’d always be looking for used and abused military clothing, stuff with holes, damage, repairs, debris and dirt and then I built a nice little archive. This archive is what we based the looks of Fury on,” he explained. The way clothing aged became a fascination of Thornton’s. He didn’t want things to look just off the rack. He wanted them to look as authentic and real as possible and the way clothing looks after it’s been through war was a big part of it.
“It has to look right because if it looks right, then the audiences are going to feel like it’s right,” the costume designer said. The exhaustive preparation certainly paid off. Seeing his work during the shoot from the beginning was an amazing experience. “Day one of shooting was one of our biggest days. It was called The Battalion Scene and it was where Wardaddy and his tank drive into the encampment. We had 400 American extras walking around and about a couple hundred POWs and just to see all the work on the screen was amazing.'”
Not that there weren’t challenges. A particular one that couldn’t be avoided was the short days and lack of sun in London. “We were fighting the light in England. We were doing a day shoot and the days were too short. The sun comes up at 9:00 a.m. and sets at 3:30 p.m., and we had to get a lot in. It was like a freight train, non-stop, all the time.”
A favorite part of Thornton’s experience was working with the cast that starred in the film – Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf and Logan Lerman. “The cast was really good. Everyone was really nice. Everyone was really humble. They were amazing guys to be around. Everyone had a ball,” he said. The commitment of the cast and crew contributed to how incredible of an experience working on Fury was for Thornton. “It’s one of these movies that everyone who worked on it talked about it as one of the best things they’d ever done. I was really glad to be a part of it.”
