You’re going to need a smaller boat
If recent summers are indicative of those forthcoming, an increasing number of Hollywood movie directors will have to learn how to bounce back after a failed blockbuster. Peter Berg, maker of 2012’s very damp squib Battleship, rediscovered his mojo in unique and surprising fashion: by only making based-on-true-story action-dramas starring Mark Wahlberg. Three in a row. The first in 2013, Lone Survivor, recounted a failed US Navy Seals mission in Afghanistan. The third, coming soon in Oscar-movie season, is Patriots Day, a retelling of the manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing.
Between the two, he has Deepwater Horizon, with Wahlberg as Mike Williams, a survivor of the 2010 explosion on the BP oil rig that titles the film. It is a terrific piece of work, absorbing and tense, a true tale that, despite the extreme situation, feels very real, thanks in no small part to a minimum of CGI and shooting most of the film on a replica-rig set. Berg’s crew built this platform in a giant water tank in the car park of an abandoned amusement park outside New Orleans.
Is it cheaper to build sets now that ESQUIRE: good CGI requires hundreds of technicians?
It’s certainly as expensive to go PETER BERG: practical and really do it. If we had just gone with computer effects, the movie would not have had the same visceral muscle to it. We could light real fire and hit the set because it was made of metal. We also had snakes, alligators and wild pigs; it was just outside New Orleans. We had people working 24-hours-a-day, a night crew and a day crew, pulling snakes out of the water tank and making sure alligators didn’t get under the trucks. They couldn’t deal with the wild pigs. They just ran around.
Why have you turned to films based
ESQ: on true stories?
I found that I like things that are not
PB: too presentational and too artificial. I prefer working in this space and I’m more comfortable in it. But these are real stories about people that really died. For Deepwater Horizon, we met with the families of the 11 men who died, we invited them all on set: the widows, children, grandchildren. The real Mike Williams was on set pretty much every day. He had licence to walk anywhere he wanted, say anything to anyone — including myself, Wahlberg and the set designers. If he saw anything wrong, he had freedom to call out “bullshit” and we would stop and then fix it.
You also have non-actors in scenes to ESQ: add authenticity, too?
I love actors, I am an actor and I believe PB: in actors, but if you can get six coastguards to really do the response the way they would do it, it’s very hard for an actor to compete with that without going to coastguard school for six months. When guys come in and play themselves, it can be very compelling. I do it often. There will always be one who comes up to me and I can see what he wants to say, and I always say the same thing:
“I do not want to hear that you want to give up your job, leave your family, move to Hollywood and become an actor. It’s not going to happen.”
BATTLESHIP DIRECTOR PETER BERG DISCUSSES DEEPWATER HORIZON,
MARK WAHLBERG AND THE MERITS OF THE ANTI-BLOCKBUSTER ‘If you can get six coastguards to really do what they would do, it’s very hard for an actor to compete with that’
What do you like so much about working ESQ: with Mark Wahlberg?
It’s rare as an adult that you make a really PB: good friend and, on Lone Survivor, Mark and I became friends. I never had a brother and he’s as close to a brother as I’ve ever had. And it’s nice to know that you can trust the guy you’re going to be working with every day.
With the message that fossil fuels can ESQ: kill you, is this a green action movie?
This film is not intended to be an
PB: indictment of fossil fuels. It’s looking at the reality of them, and they are what the entire planet is running off at this very moment. To me, oil is a little like sausage. A lot of people want it, but nobody wants to acknowledge how we get it. It is dirty work and it is fucking hard.
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Deepwater Horizon is out in cinemas on 30 September