Peter Berg Interview - Battleship Movie

Peter Berg is intense. Star of 900,000 episodes of Chicago Hope and the director of a diverse slate of films (go see The Kingdom if you haven’t – it’s terrific) has been readying for a movie like Battleship for a while. The very successful Hancock showed he can do fantasy, and his naval background makes him the right man for the military sequences.

So how long have you been planning all of this?

Peter Berg: Two years ago when we were looking at our company for some franchise-type films, you know, some titles. Growing up on the seas, my father was a naval historian, I grew up on boats. I was always a huge fan of the Navy and flirted with doing some different naval films. Story of John Paul Jones, founder of the American Navy, was one of them. And then I sort of thought one day, you know Transformers had come out, and I thought, “What about Battleship? What about creating a naval combat film? Modern-day naval combat?” We looked into the rights and they were available and met with the Hasbro people. They kind of were like, “Well what’s the movie?” And I kind of off the top of my head, “So I think they’ll fight a recon group from another planet.”

You winged it?

Peter Berg: And they were like, “What?” And I said, “No, like a recon group. Like a small group of international ships, as in five ships from the game, and we’ll have a contained enemy rather than global domination, Independence Day type of, you know, motherships that go on for twenty miles. Contain that enemy with an agenda and try and make it a fair fight.” That was the genesis of it. The last two years I’ve been sort of thinking about it and working on it and writing it and spending a lot of time with the Navy, a lot of time on those ships over there. Those are aegis class destroyers over there, and those are the stars of the film. That’s a Japanese destroyer on the far end. That right there is a ship very similar to the star of our film. Everyone knows that they don’t have battleships in the Navy anymore. Destroyers replaced battleships. But then of course, there’s Missouri, which technically is still part of the Navy. It can be re-commissioned. So we’ll get this in the film too.

So it sounds to me like you’ve wanted to do a naval battle story, science-fiction, and then it sort of led into an association with Hasbro and the game. I’m wondering, what does the association with the game and the IP bring to the story that wouldn’t be there if, let’s say, Hasbro said, “Eh, we don’t want to get involved,” and you just made your own science-fiction naval film?

Peter Berg: There are a lot of subtle references and winks to the game all throughout the film. The idea of a contained battle, five on five, is something that, because if you have sort of a global battle conflict between the US and Russia and China, it’s just trying to seem too steeped in reality and jingoist and I couldn’t get behind that. So the idea of a contained battle was appealing to me and that came from the game. The idea of stealth technology, the idea that we can’t just dial in on our radar and attack, you’ve got to sort of figure out where your enemy is and then attack them. It’s kind of a theme throughout the film. The Regents have a weapon that looks something like a large peg.

So that’s something that has to be, for lack of a better expression, a little bit tongue-in-cheek. I mean, it seems as if you are taking some of it very seriously – giant budgets, special affects – but it’s a big red peg, and people think, “That’s the game I played when I was a kid...”

Peter Berg: Well, you know it’s not exactly a red peg. It’s an ILM-designed really cool sophisticated thing that happens to detonate. It’s a piece of ordinance that if someone knows the game, will sort of be able to identify, “Ok, that’s a peg.” But they’re not red pegs, they’re not blue pegs. Hasbro doesn’t sit around here and say we need this and this and this. They’re just happy to have the title and we’re happy to have the title – it’s a great title. But we’re free to do whatever we want and I think that it’s really, at the core, a character-based naval action-adventure story. That’s what it is.

So no contractual obligation to use the phrase, “You’ve sunk my battleship?”

Peter Berg: None. Zero. They’re very cool. They’re just excited. Like, they made so much f*cking money on Transformers... 

We saw a lot of the production art and some of the ships look really incredible. Can you talk a little bit about your involvement, and what you want out of those ships, and how they compare to other invading spaceships in recent cinema?

Peter Berg: It started with the idea that a recon group from another planet finds its way to our planet. Now, they hone in on the signals that we send out to invite planets, or they picked up on one that is emitted here on Oahu and they basically tracked in on it. I like the idea of these functional, multi-utility ships so they can be used for research as well as fighting. They’re not designed to come and dominate a planet. They’re designed to come, be secure, they’ve got offensive fire-power, they carry scientists and communications equipment. They’re designed to find a planet, much like we would, that has resources - they’re obviously a bit more technically advanced than we are - has resources that are of interest to their planet and, if so, communicate back, get a message out. So that became the core idea for these ships. And then I wanted to be functional. I was trying to come up with a look, so I started studying high-speed footage of different water insects, water pond bugs that have these kind of spidery legs and they can move in vertical directions. They have vertical propulsion. They kind of get this tactile pressure going on the surface and kind of explode.

What are the aliens looking for? What do they want? 

Peter Berg: Just research. If you think of them as the Lewis and Clark generation. 

You’re shooting on the water. How freaked out are you?

Peter Berg: You know, I remember when Kevin Costner called me right before it came out and we had a real long talk. And he said, “Let me tell you what we did wrong and what we did right.” It was a great call. And we talked, you know, we had an understanding of what could go wrong out there. We spent the first week deciding to go right at it. We spent our first week of production half a mile out on a barge. 

Have you had any requests from the Navy?

Peter Berg: You know, I have a great relationship with the Department of Defense. Despite the fact that my politics don’t always line up perfectly with their politics, the respect for the military is always never questioned. So there’s never anything big. It’s literally more like, “So you would call this guy a Lieutenant Colonel, not a Colonel?” or, occasionally we might have characters acting a little crazier than the military would like. It’s usually in a reasonable discussion. If we do something that’s flat-out against military policy – you can’t have over 22% body fat and be on a ship. So if there’s a weight issue, or Taylor Kitsch wants to wear his hair a little longer. We go by the book on all of that stuff.

For more interviews and reports from the set visit our full Battleship set report.