‘Wet, cold, miserable’: The role that pushed Brad Pitt to the very edge

Director David Ayer and his leading man Brad Pitt adopted a mantra-cum-running joke while shooting their wilderness survival epic Heart of the Beast in the alps of New Zealand’s South Island. “A guy and a dog,” says Ayer with a wry chuckle. “How hard can it be?”

“We got shut down by lightning a couple of times, and washed out,” says Ayer, who did a three-year stint as a submariner in the US Navy before embarking on a filmmaking career. “Brad was pretty much cold and miserable for most of the film.”

Pitt plays James Belmont, a battle-scarred and deeply traumatised former Navy SEAL. He’s a loner who likes to escape into the wilderness with Odin, the German shepherd who served alongside him in the military. But after a couple of idyllic days camping and fishing on a lake in Alaska, the pair of veterans come a cropper while trying to outrun a storm: James suffers a minor heart attack and the hydroplane he is piloting crashes, a long way from help.

Making the film was largely a case of men and women and dogs versus the wild too. The production was based at Glenorchy, a small town north-west of Queenstown that is the gateway to Fiordland and some of the most stunning and remote scenery in New Zealand. It’s beautiful, but a long way from the usual filmmaking facilities a Hollywood director might expect to have at their disposal.

“We had to build our own infrastructure,” says Ayer. “The New Zealand government was incredible because they let us shoot in places where no one had ever been allowed. But we had to tread so lightly and leave no evidence we were there, and really respect the environment.”

Despite the obvious logistical challenges, Ayer was hooked on the idea of making the movie from the moment he started reading Cameron Alexander’s script, which made it onto The Black List – the online showcase for Hollywood’s most-liked unproduced screenplays – in 2017.

“I started reading, started crying, had to stop reading, picked it back up, started crying, had to walk around, gather myself, sit down again,” he says. “It tapped into something deep in me. I lost my father when I was very young, and it somehow echoed that journey – there’s a very father/son-like relationship between Odin and James. It was a story I knew I had to tell, not merely to grow as a filmmaker but also to grow as a person.”

Ayer had worked with Pitt on his WWII tank drama Fury and insists the actor was “the only person I could think of to play this role. We had spent years trying to get it made, and then suddenly the sun came out [all the components fell into place], and the first and only actor I sent the script to was Brad.”

“No, not at all. None of us did. I mean, he was cold, wet, tired all the time. I’m like, ‘get out of here, go to the trailer and warm up’, and he’d say, ‘No, I’m just gonna get cold and wet again. I might as well stay here.’

“He learnt dog handling, survival skills, fire starting, how to move across the terrain with map and compass, how to self-rescue medically. That’s all real skills he learnt. And he was the only actor on the call sheet for the most part.”

Normally, when your star needs a break, it’s possible to shift things around a little.