Fury is a 2014 American war film written, directed, and co-produced by David Ayer. It stars Brad Pitt with Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal as members of an American tank crew fighting in Nazi Germany during the final weeks of the European theater of World War II. Ayer was influenced by the service of military veterans in his family and by reading books such as Belton Y. Cooper's Death Traps, a 1998 memoir that underscores the high casualty rates suffered by American tank crews in combat against their better-equipped German counterparts.