Quest for a human touch
Director Peter Berg says he strived not to sensationalize the 2010 offshore oil-rig tragedy
Recounting the fiery hours aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig seems like a natural fit for Hollywood, but director Peter Berg didn’t want to carelessly exploit a fresh tragedy with his new movie.
So with Deepwater Horizon, Berg’s action film starring Mark Wahlberg that arrives in theatres Friday, he tried to exercise restraint and emphasize humanity.
“You have to find a way to not get so caught up in the spectacle,” said Berg, who has directed massive-scale films like Battleship and Lone Survivor.
“You have to find some way to make it human.”
It was a formidable challenge for the crew on a $156-million production that centres on the victims of the giant oil rig explosion. Still, the calamity is the biggest selling point of Deepwater Horizon and prominently featured on its posters.
But it’s also a true story that happened only six years ago, leaving an environmental disaster off the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and injured more than 100 others.
Those wounds are still healing and Berg says time hasn’t made it easier to talk with former BP employees.
“BP paid these giant settlements and had gag orders,” he said during the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie was screened.
“(Survivors and their families) had all taken millions of dollars and literally weren’t allowed to talk.”
At least two of the real-life workers depicted in the film — offshore installation manager Jimmy Harrell, played by Kurt Russell, and rig monitor Andrea Fleytas, portrayed by Gina Rodriguez — were silenced through their legal settlements, Berg says.
Instead the filmmakers used a screenplay based partly on a New York Times article that spoke with survivors of the April 20, 2010, rig explosion and used creative interpretation to fill in the blanks.
To keep the film steeped in reality, the production crew constructed what the studio believes is one of the largest practical sets in film history.
The Deepwater Horizon was built at 85 per cent scale of the original rig inside a water tank at the abandoned Six Flags amusement park in Louisiana.
“We kept saying we’re not trying to make an anti-oil movie or a pro-oil movie,” said producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who has overseen the Transformers and G.I. Joe film franchises.
“We were just trying to record the events that went on that day.”
But sticking to the facts didn’t always happen on the production.
While Deepwater Horizon spends a generous amount of time explaining the dangers of offshore drilling, it also washes over the environmental impact of the oil spill, using a single scene of birds plummeting to the ground to symbolize the ripple effects of the leak on the outside world.
Most of the typical characteristics of a Hollywood disaster movie motivate the premise, including Wahlberg as Mike Williams, who is framed as the heroic engineer trying to escape the burning wreck.
John Malkovich plays one of his most villainous roles as BP executive Donald Vidrine, who comes across as a profit-hungry leader with minimal concern for safety.
Manslaughter charges against the real-life Vidrine were dropped by federal prosecutors, who accused him and fellow supervisor Robert Kaluza of botching a crucial safety test before the explosion.
Vidrine pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour pollution charge and was sentenced to 10 months of probation. A jury acquitted Kaluza.
Rig workers are portrayed as being pushed to the limit, though the film spends little time acknowledging their responsibility in the incident.
Deepwater Horizon also ignores that BP pled guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter and paid a $4-billion US fine.
Both facts weren’t mentioned in the film’s closing summary of the incident at a press screening.
Kate Hudson, who plays Wahlberg’s wife in the film, says she wasn’t particularly concerned with sticking solely to facts when it came to playing her character.
“It’s actually important sometimes to take artistic licence,” she says.
“We’re taking a lot of the stories and things we heard from families and people and then trying to focus on it being a story about them, about what they went through and what that feeling was.”