Deepwater Horizon stirs emotion in victims’ families
BATON ROUGE, La. — Arleen Weise was apprehensive when she learned Hollywood was making a movie about the offshore explosion that killed her son, Adam, and 10 other men aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Watching an advance screening of the action film last month stoked her grief and anger, and the shock hasn’t quite worn off yet. Weise said she’s still struggling to decide how she ultimately feels about how Deepwater Horizon portrays the last day of her son’s life before he died in the explosion off Louisiana’s coast.
“The first viewing of it is shocking for a family member to see that,” she said. “Hearing and seeing are always two different things.”
Weise and other relatives of the 11 workers who died in the April 20, 2010, rig explosion hope it will remind people about the disaster’s human toll. Many family members believe a focus on the catastrophic environmental damage from BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico unjustly overshadowed their loved ones’ deaths.
Director Peter Berg reached out to family members after news of the production surfaced.
“I know how personal this story is to you,” he wrote in a letter to Shelley Anderson, the widow of Jason Anderson. “The film is meant to honour and pay tribute to all the men and women who worked aboard the Deepwater Horizon, especially the heroic men, like Jason, who lost their lives.”
Anderson, of Midfield, Texas, said her 7-year-old son, Ryver, who was 15 months old when his father died, recently saw a trailer for the movie on television and asked, “Is that when Daddy died?”
“Now he’s going to remember seeing it on TV. I don’t like that,” she said. “It is so real to us that it hurts to experience it over and over again.” Associated Press