OIL’S WELL WITH MARK
Star’s latest film relives spill
Actor Mark Wahlberg likes to keep it real when he collaborates with filmmaker Peter Berg.
Three years ago, they joined forces to present Lone Survivor, a rehash of a Navy SEALs mission gone wrong in Afghanistan. Early in the New Year, they will release Patriots Day, a police procedural dealing with the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing incident.
Now, there is Deepwater Horizon. It’s their third movie based on a headline-worthy event — in this case the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster off of the Louisiana coast.
All three projects count as demanding cinematic ordeals, but it helps that Berg and Wahlberg get along on camera and off.
“I think we push each other and challenge each other, and in that way (Berg) and I complement each other,” says Wahlberg, promoting Deepwater Horizon at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Certainly, they had to dig deep to reimagine the world’s worst-ever oil rig tragedy, which killed 11 and caused an environmental catastrophe.
Written by Matthew Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the movie is loosely based on a 2010 New York Times news feature about the rig’s final hours.
Filmed in and around New Orleans, the picture has Wahlberg playing Mike Williams, one of the rig’s chief technicians.
In the beginning, we see him with his wife, Felicia (Kate Hudson), and his family, saying their goodbyes before his shift on the massive oil platform.
On board, the foreshadowing begins, as Williams’ buddy, and rig boss Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell) begins to question BP executives about pushing forward with the drilling.
That’s the cue for the subsequent explosions and the survival portion of the disaster flick. Berg presents the sequences with battle-like in- tensity.
To keep the scenes authentic, though, Wahlberg wanted Berg to hire Williams as a consultant on the shoot, and the director didn’t hesitate.
“It seemed like the right thing to do—he was the guy who was the last off the rig,” Wahlberg says.
Another key for the film is the relationship between Russell’s rig supervisor Harrell and Wahlberg’s Williams. Both are friends in real life and it shows in the actors’ performances.
Russell is “always willing to dive in there and make it genuine,” Wahlberg says.
To prepare the cast and crew for the complicated shoot on huge sound-stage water tanks, most of the key actors went to “rig school” to learn the procedures and the rig language.
“Everybody was aware of the fact that it was an environmental disaster, but I don’t think a lot of people realized there was a loss of human life,” Wahlberg says.
“Our focus was to honour those people, and the heroic things that they did, so we were always aware that we were dealing with people’s legacies.”
The same is true for Patriots Day. In that film, Wahlberg plays a police sergeant involved in the citywide manhunt for the terrorists responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing.
“All three of my films with (Berg) are extremely important, but all three are different,” Wahlberg says.
He points out that the Navy Seals volunteered for their dangerous Lone Survivor mission and the Deepwater Horizon crew knew “it was dangerous work.”
Patriots Day is something else again. “There were men, women and children rooting for their loved ones and something horrible happened,” he says.
Still, the Boston-raised actor always had faith that he and Berg would do justice to the story.
“We hold each other to very high standards,” Wahlberg says.