Not the sort to wrap things in neat packages

Every writer has a story inside of him that’s like an itch he has to scratch, a story that keeps him tossing and turning at night. But in today’s Hollywood, movies rooted in personal experiences are a dying genre -- they don’t fit neatly into the studio’s franchise-obsessed spreadsheets. Just ask David Ayer. Having written such hits as “Training Day,” “U-571” and “The Fast and the Furious,” he’s viewed as one of the top writers in the game.

But Ayer had only one movie he wanted to direct, a tale as dark as a moonless night. Called “Harsh Times,” it stars Christian Bale as an ex-Army Ranger who finds himself slipping back into his old life of booze and reefer and petty crime after a job offer from the LAPD evaporates. As gritty and unsentimental as “Training Day,” the story has the feel of a West Coast version of “Mean Streets,” portraying a world defined by violence, where the lines between loyalty and betrayal are barely visible.

Even with Bale (who starred in “Batman Returns” this summer) on board, no one in town would make the film. So Ayer went to his agent, Todd Feldman, last year and said he’d bankroll the film himself. From the look in Ayer’s eyes, Feldman knew he couldn’t stop him. Still, he reminded him of the enormous risk he was about to take. As Ayer recalls, “Todd warned me that I was about to pour gasoline on my head and light myself on fire. But he said go ahead and light it up.”

Eighteen months later, Ayer’s film is here at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it will have its first official screening Sunday night. “Harsh Times” is on every studio acquisition executive’s list of must-see films, so it’s possible that by Monday morning, Ayer may get his house out of hock. On the other hand, he may have a nail-biting vigil ahead. Selling a movie at a festival is always a crapshoot. “Hustle and Flow” hit the jackpot at Sundance in January, going for $9 million. But at Toronto last year, one of the most eagerly anticipated films, “Haven,” a thriller starring Orlando Bloom, had such a poor reception that it never sold.

Ayer’s career path is markedly different from most of his screenwriter peers. It’s hard to understand why “Harsh Times” focuses on the scary misadventures of two borderline losers, played by Bale and “Six Feet Under’s” Freddy Rodriguez, until you realize that Ayer is writing about characters he’s known his whole life. Although he’s reluctant to provide specifics -- he won’t give his age, though he’s apparently 36 -- he clearly had a rocky childhood, growing up in South-Central Los Angeles. At 14, he moved in with relatives after his mother kicked him out of the house.

“I was a classic juvenile delinquent, always in trouble,” he told me over lunch recently, his voice so soft it barely carried across the table. A rangy guy with a buzz cut and a stubble of beard, he looks more like a gaffer than an A-list screenwriter. When I ask if he was a troublemaker, he laughs. “Dude, I dropped out of high school, hung out on the corner. I wasn’t a gangbanger, out killing people. But the option was right there in that neighborhood. It was a bad place. I figured I’d join the military or die. That was the plan.”

When he was 18, Ayer joined the Navy, spending two years in the service, much of it in a submarine in the Pacific. Discharged in 1990, he returned to Los Angeles, where he worked for several years in construction. For a while he moved to Mexico, looking for adventure. “I was a wandering soul,” he says quietly.

While he was working construction, Ayer started writing short stories about his Navy days. By chance, one of the houses he worked on was owned by screenwriter Wesley Strick, who’d written “Cape Fear” for Martin Scorsese. When Ayer showed Strick his stories, the writer encouraged him to pursue writing. “He really mentored me,” says Ayer. “He was my bridge to the future; he made screenwriting seem human in scale -- like something even I could do.”

After half a dozen failed efforts, Ayer wrote “Training Day,” which captured a deadly world where some of the police are just as coldblooded as their prey. The script earned him an offer to rewrite Jonathan Mostow’s “U-571,” allowing him to draw on his submarine experience. “David has a great voice -- he captures how people in the real world talk,” says Neal Moritz, who produced two Ayer films: “SWAT” and “The Fast and the Furious.” “He’s always searching for the truth, so he writes what he feels, not what the studio wants.”

Ayer was always willing to bet on himself. When he got an offer to sell “Training Day” for $300,000, he was so broke that his agent recalls picking him up for the meeting at an apartment in a deteriorating neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Realizing there was no firm commitment to make the movie, Ayer passed, saying he’d wait for a better offer. When he finally sold the script to Warner Bros., he got $1 million and a guarantee that the studio would make the movie.

So no one was surprised when Ayer mortgaged his house to make “Harsh Times.” He had spent several years taking the script to studios and production companies, but the response was underwhelming. “They felt the story was too dark,” he recalls. “It didn’t fit into their corporate moral black box. They kept asking, ‘Why do we care about these guys? Couldn’t we redeem them at the end?’ It was all the typical questions right out of their development manuals.”

One studio said it would give Ayer $11 million if he got Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio or Eminem in the leading role. He turned them down. One day he went to see “The Machinist,” which starred Bale as a torturously haunted man, and emerged convinced that Bale was his man. Ayer shot the film in 26 days, starting in December with a series of scenes filmed in Mexico, where Jim (Bale) and Mike (Rodriguez) go to see Jim’s girlfriend in a tiny rural village. The remainder of the film was shot around L.A., largely in Watts, Echo Park and Lincoln Heights.

There were no sets. In Watts, Ayer filmed at his wife’s aunt’s house, which he said was better than any set he could build.

The most valuable advice Ayer got about directing came not from an old Hollywood hand but from a friend who’d been a submarine captain in the Navy. “I was expecting a big lecture on leadership, but what he said was simple -- the captain is the ship,” Ayer recalls. “If you’re tired, the crew is tired. If you’re angry or distracted, the crew is too. So I led by example. After you’ve been underwater in a nuclear sub on a 67-day submerged run and you don’t have any more food, or you have a fire, both things that happened to me, it was pretty easy for me to tell people, ‘It’s only a movie.’ ”

Ayer grins. “Of course, the real priority is to make sure the crew is well fed. One bad meal and they all want to hang you.”

The director isn’t surprised that his film got a cold shoulder from the same executives who’ve paid him handsomely to write the escapist fantasies that dominate studio release slates. “It’s the development process that makes movies so tame,” he says. “They don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable. They want to take out all the bad language because then they get an R rating and they can’t advertise till after 9 p.m. They’re always obsessed about behavior and consequences. If you kick a dog, you have to be hit by lightning in the next scene.”

He rolls his eyes, barely containing his disgust. “That’s just not reality, at least not in the world I’ve seen. In Hollywood, you’re dealing with people who have a high-powered analytical education. But what’s good about movies isn’t logical. It’s emotional. We shouldn’t be afraid to have complex characters in our films, people who lie, people who contradict themselves and don’t always act in their best interests. Maybe that’s why people aren’t going out to the movies these days. If you give them homogenized, standard-issue films, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I can see that at home.’ ” And though the film is currently unrated, Ayer has set it deep in R-rated territory.

One of the most fascinating aspects of “Harsh Times” is how often Ayer’s two rogues bump into old homies from the ‘hood who’ve somehow made it out safely, scoring a suit ‘n’ tie job or an LAPD gig. It feels unconsciously autobiographical, since Ayer himself has escaped, going from delinquent to film director. “There’s a homie culture in L.A. that binds everybody -- you figure these guys all went to the same Catholic school and dated each other’s sisters,” he says. “I was like them too, drifting around, with no job, not knowing how my life would turn out.”

He shrugs. “Writing saved my life. For another guy, it could be something else. But if you’re going to have a good life, you’ve got to conquer the dark side of yourself. That’s what this movie is about. I wanted to show the tough choices people have to make that you don’t see in Hollywood films these days. It’s not a candy-coated story. But, you know, sometimes the medicine isn’t so sweet.”

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Big Picture columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment at the Toronto Film Festival. He can be e-mailed at Patrick.Goldstein@latimes.com.