There he is, Pete Berg, the badass on the horizon.
The director is seated at a table across the room when a handful of journalists arrive in a Toronto hotel suite to speak with him about Deepwater Horizon, his oil-rig disaster drama about the heroism associated with a calamitous explosion off the coast of Louisiana in 2010. The movie was a bugger to make.
“I never had to make a movie where I had to deal with so many lawyers,” says Berg, all in black.
“They would be in the editing room. I had very contentious conversations.”
The studio lawyers were worried about repercussions from BP, the London-based oil and gas company judged most responsible for the explosion’s resulting oil spill.
John Malkovich plays the BP representative who may or may not have disregarded safety issues when it came to the deep-water drilling, and it was important not to paint him as too much the villain or BP as the bad guys, lest litigation result.
Asked about the pushback from BP that did come, one of the film’s producers not only mentioned the threatened lawsuits but also the mysterious cancelling of contracts.
“There were a lot, more than I’ve ever seen on a movie,” says Lorenzo di Bonaventura, interviewed after Berg’s roundtable session with scribes. “We can’t say who did it, but it was interesting.”
Big Oil is a big deal on the Gulf Coast. A lot of jobs depend on it. The environment around the filming was tense, and it was suspected that BP may have pressured local tradespeople to cancel contracts with the Deepwater Horizon crew. But asked about whether the director caved in to the pressure or not, the gregarious and barrel-chested di Bonaventura smiles widely.
“Let’s just say that Pete loves a fight.”
So we hear. And it wasn’t too long ago that Berg, who spars and keeps fit at a boxing gym he co-owns in Santa Monica, Calif., was fighting for his career.
Berg, the former Chicago Hope television actor, had established his directorial bona fides with 2004’s Friday Night Lights, a Texas high-school football drama based on a non-fiction book by H.G. Bissinger.
But Berg followed that critical hit with 2008’s so-so Will Smith superhero movie Hancock and 2012’s Battleship, a big-budget disaster at the box office, if not the sea.
“I actually liked Battleship,” says the 52-year-old filmmaker, scratching at his salt-and-pepper facial scruff. “I wasn’t happy with the box office on it, though.”
The board-game-based would-be blockbuster Battleship was released domestically on the same weekend as The Avengers. The latter film set box-office records; the former, not so much.
“If we had been smarter and realized that Avengers was going to take all the money, we would have moved the release date,” Berg says, striking the table in a karate-chop manner as he speaks.
Berg was asked about Battleship’s less than all-star cast. “I don’t know,” he answers, his eyes cast down, sweeping the table with his hand now instead of hitting it. “For me the movie is more important than the cast.”
But wouldn’t it have been nice to have the Deepwater Horizon cast – Kurt Russell, Kate Hudson, Mark Wahlberg and Malkovich – aboard Battleship? “Well,” he allows, “that wouldn’t have hurt.”
In 2013, Berg came back with Lone Survivor, a riveting Navy Seal saga starring Wahlberg. Asked if Berg had re-established his standing after the Battleship debacle, the producer di Bonaventura shakes his head firmly in the negative. “He didn’t need to redeem himself to me,” says the man behind the Transformers franchise. “But I think what it did was remind me that Pete has this overabundance of testosterone and an incredible sense of sensitivity.”
Given that Deepwater Horizon is a true story in which 11 people died, a measure of sensitivity would be required. Berg met with all the families of the workers who lost their lives because of the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig explosion. Some of the families visited the film set, which was an abandoned Six Flags amusement park just outside New Orleans.
Starting with Lone Survivor and followed by Deepwater Horizon and the upcoming Patriots Day (about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, starring, you guessed it, Wahlberg), Berg has chosen to concentrate on true tales and genuine spit-and-blood heroes.
“You look for inspiration,” says Berg. “What gets me up at 5 o’clock every morning to work for 16 hours a day? For me, generally now it’s real stories, where I can meet the people who are really involved. I can look into their eyes, and they’re going to let me know whether we got it right.”
A big part of Berg’s comeback is of course Wahlberg, who in addition to starring in the director’s latest movies is now a close friend. “We never set out to do three films together, but it’s been a wonderful collaboration,” says Berg. “I betcha we’ll make a few more together.”
Berg goes on to say that he cherishes his friendship with Wahlberg, a work-play relationship he describes as rare.
Sounds like Berg is going soft on us, but di Bonaventura assures me that isn’t the case. “Pete tried to get me in the ring a few times, but I’m not stupid. Maybe the back alley, but forget the ring.”
Probably best to forget the back alley too, Lorenzo. Berg might decide to go full Deepwater Horizon, and drill you one low. The man’s a fighter.
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Russell reflects
Kurt Russell began his career in the early 1960s when he was a boy, but to hear him tell it he was never a child actor exactly. “At 13, I was a man. I thought like a man. I spoke like a man. I treated people like adults, and I expected to be treated like an adult.”
Russell, now 65, was speaking to journalists during the Toronto International Film Festival for the oil-rig actioner Deepwater Horizon, when the discussion turned to his relationship with Walt Disney. “I knew him. He wasn’t just an acquaintance. We’d play Ping-Pong at lunchtime. He’d come down to the set and we’d discuss certain things.”
The actor, who would go on to become one of the Walt Disney Company’s biggest stars in the 1970s, believed the visionary mogul appreciated the exceptional maturity for a boy his age. “I didn’t have a kid’s point of view. I just didn’t.”
In 2005, Kurt Russell starred in Dreamer, a family drama that featured a preteen Dakota Fanning. Russell would speak to Fanning on set, marvelling at her advanced poise and seeing a bit of himself at her age. “Dakota at 10 is who she is now,” Russell said, speaking about young people who are “self-made,” with a view of the world that comes from their own perceptions, not from what they’re told to think. “I just loved being around her.” –