Peter Berg has been behind movies such as Hancock and The Kingdom and now he is back with his new blockbuster Battleship.
I caught up with him to talk about making the movie, working with military veterans and casting Rihanna.
- Watching the movie it did remind me of Transformers, Alien and a little bit of Robocop so are you a big fan of these sci-fi movies? And did you maybe speak to Michael Bay about this movie?
I haven’t done a whole lot of science fiction but I am a big fan of the navy and I wanted to do a navy movie film, I wanted to a big movie and I wanted to do a movie that had a big global reach. But I didn’t want to make a film that felt really violent so the idea of humans fighting humans felt too violent.
I had seen a Stephen Hawking documentary about Goldilocks planets and us reaching out and sending signals and he thought that this was a bad idea because he didn’t think that we would all get along.
I love Stephen Hawking and I think he is fascinating guy and that is really where the idea of the aliens came in and I thought that it would help take the violence out and make it a little bit more fantastic and help the audience suspend their belief.
I wasn’t a huge sci-fi fan but I enjoyed the first Transformers movie a lot, I like all those movies that you mentioned. I talked to Michael Bay as he is a friend and a good acquaintance of mine but filmmakers do tend to be quite isolated we don’t all share secrets and talk too much - we are supportive but we keep to ourselves.
I have one of two friends who are filmmakers, Michael Mann is a good friend of mine and someone I talk to quite a bit, but generally I think it’s the job of a filmmaker to go out and find his own way and you should hear the voice of the filmmaker in the movie.
I don’t study other filmmakers when I get ready to make a movie I follow my own creative spirit, inevitably people will say ’this feels like this’ or ’this feels like that’.
Obviously Hasbro have been leading their advertisement with ’from the makers of Transformers’ but my feeling is if you sit through ten minutes of Transformers and ten minutes of Battleship they are two very different experiences. Michael and I are two very different filmmakers, I admire what he does but I do my own thing.
- You have always wanted to make a nautical themed movie so how excited are you at finally being able to get that chance? And is this the type of movie that you had in mind?
It’s a pain in the ass. I had always imagined making a film about the sinking of the Bismarck, a really famous historical battle that cost thousands of men their lives on both side; the English and the German. It’s just an incredible adventure story that is very very violent.
There was a book called The Cruel Sea that I wanted to turn into a film that was about the German wolf pack submarines that were attacking the British supply convoys. But it was just so violent as you would have ten ships just cruising along and then all of a sudden two of them would just blow up because the subs had got them and thousands of men would die these horrible deaths.
The Battle of Midway in World War II is the most important naval battle in the history of any war because if Japan had won that battle, which they almost did, we would be talking Japanese and German right now as the war would have gone another way.
There are a whole host of stories like that that I was always attracted that were real and historical accounts of great battles. But they were violent and as depressing as hell and they were the movies that I thought about making.
With Battleship I wanted to make a fun movie, I wanted to make a summer popcorn movie and I wanted to make a movie for the whole family. I love Battleship it is not the naval movie that I thought I would make but it is the summer popcorn movie that I always wanted to make.
- One of the things that I enjoyed about the movie was the humour and it wasn’t a take itself too seriously blockbuster, which we sometimes see, was that a conscious decision from the conception?
Yes it was. Movies should be the reflection of the filmmaker and I try to find humour, sometimes successfully sometimes unsuccessfully.
My first movie was a black comedy called Very Bad Things where a group of bachelors kill a prostitute and then end up killing each other and that was a comedy (laughs).
I grew up with a very sarcastic mother and father and there was a lot of humour in my family and all my friends are quite brutal with their humour and Taylor Kitsch is brutal with his humour, you might not know until you get to know him a bit better.
We wanted to make Battleship and we were ripped apart from a lot of people right from the get-go as being the most preposterous idea for a film ever, making a movie about this ridiculous board game and you have got pop singers and models - what the f**k is going on over there?
I felt it was important to right away by having the guy fall through the roof of a burrito restaurant and getting shot by a taser to let the audience know that we don’t take ourselves that seriously. That’s not to say that we don’t aspire to have some great action moments and scary moments and emotion.
But at the same time we want to give the audience permission to take their super critical… we are not The Artist and we are not Harvey Weinstein aiming for an Oscar nomination we want to provide a big fun family experience, so that is why we played the way that we did at the beginning of the film.
- What was the experience like of getting the USS Missouri out on the sea?
Awesome, that was awesome. That was really a mind-blowing experience. I was at Pearl Harbour taking a tour of some war ships and the Missouri was in this big dry dock and was being given a facelift and they gave me a tour of it.
It was out of the water and you could see the whole thing and it was an incredible sight. I was being given a tour by the director of the Missouri Foundation and I was like ’when are you done?’ And he said ’we are done in three months’ and I was like ‘well then what happens? And he said ‘well we flood up the dock and we tow it back to its normal dock. We will pull out of this dock and turn right and we go into Pearl Harbour and tie her up.’
And I looked to the left and to the left was the open ocean and I said ‘what if you jut tow it out to the left?’ And he was like ‘oh yeah Pete sure we will just tow the Missouri out onto the ocean so you can make your Hollywood movie. We will just take the most famous ship into the world and tow it onto the ocean.’
Four months later me and that dude were on the Missouri and we were towing it out onto the ocean and I was like ‘yeah’. But he had tears coming out of his eyes and he just said ‘I can’t believe that we are doing this’. We had all these veterans, these men in their nineties, who came out for it and put their uniforms on and they were crying, the ship was out there and people were going crazy.
Battleship is intended to be a fun movie but I make no secret of the fact that I am a supporter of soldiers and veterans; we have real veterans who have lost their limbs in our movie and those old men who come out at the end are all veterans. I get emotional around that and it was a great experience for me.
- How did you come to hook up with the Hoeber brothers?
I didn’t know them. But when we were looking for writers I was looking for fun I didn’t want dark, some of the writers were like ’we can make a brutal war where America and China go to war. It will be like Hunt For Red October but more violent.’ And I was like ‘nah’.
The Hoeber brothers were goofy, funny and wildly imaginative guys who just got it and they were like ‘we just want it to be fun.’ They went maybe a little too far in the first draft with the fun but it was fun and they helped set the tone right from the get-go. We wanted to have fun and they are great guys.
- Was there any pressure to make the movie 3D?
No not really. I think I am one of the 20% who get migraine headaches from 3D - I don’t like 3D. I go to watch films in 3D and yes I do appreciate really wild moments where something comes flying at you but I enjoyed Avatar as much in 2D as I did in 3D.
I really get headaches and I end up taking the glasses off and rubbing my head and half way through the movie wishing that it wasn’t in 3D. So I never asked plus it costs so much money that they are not dying for you to do it.
If ever there was a movie that would be f***ing bad ass in 3D it would be Battleship with the shredders coming at you and the 16” guns on the Missouri that would have been pretty cool - maybe for the next one.
- How was casting Rihanna and then working with her on set?
For me I love movies that have surprising casting where you see someone who you don’t know or if you knew them in one way, Albert Brooks in Drive; he is a comedic actor and he is great in Drive.
I did a film called The Kingdom and a film called Friday Night Lights and I used a very famous American singer called Tim McGraw, he is very famous in America, he had never acted before but he was a very charismatic guy.
He did a great job in a limited role, he wasn’t carrying the movie just like Rihanna isn’t carrying Battleship - it was just a really interesting casting choice.
There is a long history of musicians acting, Frank Sinatra won an Oscar for a film called From Here To Eternity and after that he did a film called The Manchurian Candidate. Mick Jagger did a film called Performance, David Bowie did a couple of movies, Roger Daltrey in Quadrophenia, Whitney Huston in The Bodyguard, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz in Precious. The idea of a singer being an actor is certainly nothing that I invented.
Rihanna is an extremely charismatic young woman and I had seen her videos and I though this girls is really hot, charismatic, wild and playful and that is not easy to do - if it was easy to do then there would be a lot of Rihanna’s.
I was surprised to find out that she had never acted in a movie and that I could be Rihanna’s first - I was excited by that. So I had a great meeting with her and she was everything that I thought she would be; she was adventurous, she wanted to be directed and she wanted to be pushed.
I said ‘I want you to do that part’ and she was like ‘great but don’t treat me special just treat me like any other actor. Don’t go easy on me just be real with me.’ She was great. People ask me if it was hard to direct her but I always say ‘every actor is hard to direct’. I have a twelve year old son and actors are like kids.
I coach my son’s American football team and you have twenty twelve year old boys and they are all different and they are all great, beautiful and magical and they are all a pain in the ass. You have to figure out a way of dealing with each one and every actor that I have ever worked with from Charlize Theron, Will Smith or Jamie Foxx they all have their unique challenges.
Rihanna had challenges just like Taylor Kitsch has them and just like Liam Neeson has them and she was certainly no tougher than anyone else.
- Greg Gadson was another none actor so how did you go about casting him?
Well Greg I found in an article about modern prosthetics in National Geographic. I had this character of a wounded solider and I turned over the page and there was Greg Gadson in his uniform and all muscle - he was like The Rock from the waist up - and he had two wild looking robot legs and I was like ‘shit I want that guy’.
Greg Gadson was an injured colonel in the army who was still working and I had to go through a long process of trying to make him agree to do the film and then get him out to Hawaii and get him learning how to act and being comfortable on a film set, and that was challenging.
We used the Veterans Administration to find living veterans, because a lot of guys are in their nineties; one guy was 102. We got about forty of them and they just had the time of their lives as they were hitting on the girls and flirting with anyone and drinking beer and telling stories - they had more energy than anyone.
- So what’s coming up next for you have you anything lined up?
Yeah Lone Survivor is my next movie and that is a very popular book in America, it’s a true story about a Navy Seal mission in Afghanistan in 2006. It was a mission were all sorts of things went wrong and it was a very complicated and intense Navy Seal mission - nineteen Seals died and one survived and the one that survived wrote the book The Lone Survivor.
Have you ever seen a movie called Touching the Void? It’s kind of like Touching The Void as it a mission were guys make a few wrong decisions, no big decisions, and they set off on a course of absolute hell and have to fight there way out of it.
Battleship is released 11th April
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in Peter Berg Taylor Kitsch Rihanna