We then drove back to the airport where our jet awaited our arrival. We hung out with Peter on the flight back and got to interview him about the film.
He showed us some concept art of the alien ships. They were black, and had legs that spread out sort of like water spiders you see on the top of lakes. They looked pretty H.G. Wells-ish and supposedly each ship matches up very well to our ships. Technologically, the two enemies are almost evenly matched, so Battleship becomes a game of strategic warfare more than a fight to see who has the better toys. The concept images looked way cool and it'll be really interesting to see how our military can handle an enemy that can move quicker on the water than they can.
Unfortunately, interviewing someone on a jet isn't the best thing for a tape recorder, so hopefully this transcript will do what he said some justice.
Berg: The preproduction has been divided between…I was getting ready to make a film on Navy SEALS and I spent a lot of time with Navy SEALS…about a month and a half in Iraq, really moving in that direction. 'Battleship' came up and it's something that our company optioned about a year and a half ago and was sort of on the slow burner, was not being fast tracked. The plan was to do 'Lone Survivor'. My plan was to do 'Lone Survivor' first and then take a look at 'Battleship'. We'd had a concept but it was not as developed as I wanted. So I sat down with Derek and John and we had a series of very long meetings and decided that we would commit to this concept and that we'd take on…and attempt to do that as credible and intelligent as we possibly could and also then to make sure that we had a good script for the U.S. Navy. I've grown up as a son of a Navel Destroyer so I was a pretty fan of destroyers.
Berg: The goal was to put up something that could exist as a big, dynamic, entertaining summer blockbuster. That's clearly what you aspire to make when you take on something like 'Battleship' and I think we're well on our way. I want to share a few pictures with you guys of the enemy, pictures of what the enemy is going to look like. Nobody has seen these…but the enemy does come from another planet. That's not news. It's true, you guys uncovered it first. We tried to keep it a secret, but it's our goal to make that as intelligent and logical, certainly as 'District 9' was able to do. But to provide a real intelligence to our opponent, a logic, a rationale for being there and not purely hostile, violent creatures bent on global destruction. They've got a much more logical agenda planned that happens to come into conflict with us. Then there's a chance for two relatively equal opponents to go at each other and you get a sense of some of the equipment you saw, the level and intelligence of that character of what modern sailors are today.
Is there an explanation as to why it takes place on the sea?
Berg: Absolutely.
With this idea for the aliens, was that conceived by Hasbro for their 'Battleship Galaxies' game?
Berg: There was no studio mandate to do it. There was no Hasbro mandate to do it. There's been very little mandate from anyone. The film is going to live or die basically on the creative team. We're not getting any mandates from the studio other than, 'Go out and make the best film you can.' They've supported us tremendously. I think the first thing was that I asked them if they were going to go after this and be put in an arena where we would compete with films like 'District 9', like 'War of the Worlds', like 'The Abyss'. We needed the resources and right now that generally leads to ILM. They do the best work. They've got the best designers. They're really smart guys. That was our first hire. We've got great designers at ILM and these guys are so scientific and so logic oriented and they're the ultimate nerd scholars. These guys geek out harder than anyone…like we're trying to do. These guys can pull this off to the very high standards.
Is this an invasion or just something where the aliens are testing their technology against ours?
Berg: There's a group of life forms from some other planet have come to our planet for something. They've got a very specific agenda. That agenda is not global domination. It's an agenda and that agenda puts them into conflict with members of our military. Their technology is relatable. It's not incredibly far out and unbeatable. It's comprehensible. Hopefully it'll make for good fun and an intense ride.
So it'll be more strategic warfare rather than technological warfare?
Berg: Very much so. Whoever asked the question about stripping down the technology of today, that's a good question. One of the challenges that we're just kind of figuring out, 'Battleship' is obviously a simplistic game in many ways. As you play 'Battleship', if you've played it recently there's actually some really interesting psychological components to the game. Identifying the threat is a phenomenon when you play the game. You start to get a sense of who and wear your enemy is. It operates on a fairly interesting subconscious level, finding and identifying the threat and then killing it.
You mentioned the main hero of the film, the Captain of the Battleship –
Berg: The Captain of the Destroyer, yes, who is the protagonist. He's got a team of five guys who are sort of…if you looked at the guy who gave us the tour of the ship, the number two in command, the XO, the CO and then there was the mustache guy who was controlling the control room and then there was the Scotty character. That guy is really a modern day Scotty. If he would've taken you down to the engine room it would've blown your mind at how massively complex these engines are.
What made you shy away from doing the expected thing of doing a modern earthbound, real nation Naval warfare epic?
Berg: Right. Because the idea of the incredible context, the idea of a film where America goes to war against China or America goes to war against England or Australia or Japan, any of the few countries that have credible Navy's, that felt like it would border on some jingoistic American military thing that I couldn't get my head around. I liked the idea of something about it being larger than life. I like the challenge that presented.
Did you ever think about going period, doing a World War II epic?
Berg: We thought about it and there is a component of that in this film. There's a component of World War II Battleships in this film.
We were on a destroyer today. You’re hero is a Destroyer CO. So where does the Battleship come in?
Berg: I can't tell you that but it does. I have more art to show you.
Have you considered casting yet for the lead role?
Berg: We're in that process right now. I was a fan of the way that J.J. Abrams cast 'Star Trek'. So this is a real Battleship. There was a Battleship that could play into the film. There's a ship called The USS Missouri which really exists. It's in Hawaii now. It fired the opening shot in the Iraq war. It fired the first shots of the war. When we invaded Iraq it attacked locations in Iraq. It's a nine hundred foot battleship. It's got sixteen inch guns. The guns that you saw were five inch. The one five inch gun on the destroyer that you saw is more accurate and lethal than all of these because of the radar system but the power and awesomeness of this ship is not equal. You see when it fires that it blows about fifty yards sideways. They call it fighting the ship.
When you go into battle they say, 'Are you prepared to fight the ship'?
Berg: Correct. I'm going to show you a couple of concept pictures of potentially who and what it is we're up against. These are initial concept pictures. These are from ILM.
These are both air and sea?
Berg: They're sea based. They don't fly. But you can see sort of that there's an equal number of American and there's actually one Japanese ship involved in this conflict with the enemy.
So they don't fly. They're just kind of dropped off?
Berg: They are actually able to fly, insert themselves through the earth's atmosphere and make contact through the water. Once they get on the surface they don't fly. They stay put. They've enabled moving in a fairly unique manner, along the different ways of the sea. They don't have the standard propulsion but they have weapons systems and some of them are very violent. There are some that aren't but there are some that are the equivalent of our destroyers.
We're talking all real world physics stuff?
Berg: Absolutely.
They're firing missiles and bullets. They're not firing ray guns?
Berg: Absolutely. They fire ballistics, explosive ballistics.
How big are these compared to –
Berg: These are similar. These are about five hundred feet. There's one that's larger than these and there's one that's smaller than these, but they're very similar, evenly matched. It takes us a while to figure out how to fight them.
But like in 'Battleship', each player has an equal number of ships?
Berg: Correct. Some take more shots to sink and kill than others, as do our ships.
I'm assuming that the human fleet is cut off from all contact with the rest of the world and are forced to take on these guys without the help of the rest of the world?
Berg: That's more or less accurate, yes. For real, what do you think about the initial design?
I take it that it's a hydrofoil base, skimming along.
Berg: It doesn't move in different directions. It's not entirely hydrofoil, but it's able to move in a…if you've ever seen footage of water bugs, slow motion footage of water bugs and how they're able to move along the sea, think about that. They're able to move and sort of leap at different angles, but they're killable.
The idea that the laws of physics apply I find intriguing, more so than, 'They came back from space –'
Berg: Not at all. They're also damaged. They've got a problem. Upon arrival one of their ships is severely damaged and that's posed a real existing problem for them and they're trying to deal with that.
Are we going to see a lot of what the aliens are trying to figure out what they're doing or are we just going to focus on the humans?
Berg: You'll understand and ILM is doing an extraordinary job of creating, they're called the Regents [I think that's what he said -Ed.], the folks who inhabit these ships. Some of them are very scientific and very intelligent and not violent at all. Others of them are more violent but they're all concerned with the fact that they have a very real mechanical problem with one of their ships and they're trying to deal with that.
Is the model for this like 'A Bridge Too Far' where you jump from ship to ship, location to location, battle to battle, objective to objective?
Berg: I would actually say more 'The Bridge On the River Kwai' but they're trying to build something because they're in trouble and they need a power source. That's all I'm telling you. When you say 'A Bridge Too Far', they're trying to get something completed and in doing so they're not particularly concerned with any life that happens to get near them while they're doing that. They don't have anything against you but if you interfere with their agenda they'll kill you and that's why they have to be dealt with.
Do you envision them being CGI creations or guys in suits?
Berg: A combination of both. Similar technology to what you saw in 'Pirates of the Caribbean', some of that but not nearly as complex as Davy Jones. They have a similar geological makeup to us and they come from a place that has a similar ecology to ours.
Is it something that we've done to instigate them coming here?
Berg: Nothing.
They're looking for something, they need to repair everything and are ransacking the ocean for a replacement muffler?
Berg: Our planet is of interest to them ecologically.
Are the ships all going to be CG or are they models?
Berg: A combination of both.
Is the idea to make this into a franchise since Hasbro is involved or do you even think of it in that way?
Berg: I mean, frankly, my interest is in getting this world up and running, getting the Navy up and running and make it as credible and making the best film as I possibly can. Hasbro's agenda at this point, that's their agenda. My interest is to make a good film. My agenda is to make a film that also…as far as Hasbro goes I enjoy the challenge of letting someone come to this film and say, 'Why in the world is this film "Battleship"? What possible correlation am I going to find in this that feels in any way intelligent or grounded in any kind of reality,' a reasonably sophisticated intelligent film that you can actually go, 'You know what, okay. My hats off. That's a great way, a great reference to a board game that I never even thought necessarily deserved a wink or not.'
I was amazed at the parallels from the game that you pointed out. Was that all research that you did going into this?
Berg: A combination. Some of it I suspected but we've got a lot more. We've got some really great homage's to the game. These ships don't constantly show up on our radar. We can't find them and so the ways in which we go about trying to figure out where they are so that we can find them is a nod to the game.
Is there that famous line in the movie, 'You sank my battleship'?
Berg: Hell, yeah. Hells, yeah! Damn straight.
What did you think of the whole Colbert –
Berg: Oh, it was hilarious. I hear it and I've heard it countless times. 'What's the movie? Why the movie?' My first reaction is…look, the board game is about naval battle and naval conflict. Anyone of us could sit here and go, 'I've come up with this for the game and for the movie,' a little bit about what you might be seeing. I'd really like to pull it off and make it work so that all of you guys aren't sharpening all your swords and coming after mine and everyone else's heads. I think there's a movie. For naval warfare, I could've done a world war two film in a second about 'Battleship' or I could've done a modern film where the United States battled the South Koreans or battled the Chinese over Taiwan. There's a million versions. I was sort of flattered that Stephen Colbert took the time and I have a response to Stephen Colbert about that. I've got my response to Colbert which you guys will see.
Did your preparation for the 'Dune' film sort of play into your vision for the aliens and the alien race?
Berg: It got me excited about the idea of world creation in that any time you embark on world creation, no matter how good you are, if you're James Cameron and you've done it before and you grew up designing spaceships and spacecraft it's still an unbelievably daunting and unnerving task. You think, 'Okay, I'm going to throw my hat into the ring of world creation.' You've seen my films and I've never done that before. I was intimidated. 'Dune' kind of got me over the hump where I had sort of met enough world creation designers to understand how you go about doing it. 'Dune' for a variety of reasons wasn't the right thing. I was ready to go after it with 'Battleship'.
What do you think audiences and the military especially will be most surprised about in this film?
Berg: I think that it's going to feel really very real. I think the military is going to be surprised at how credible it feels, the idea that this threat could be a credible enemy that they could fight and that they could actually beat in a credible manner. I think if we do our job audiences are really going to buy into it. Our goal is to make this feel credible and not preposterous and not totally absurd. We want the audience, like with 'District 9', like in 'War of the Worlds', believe that this is for fucking real and this is going down. It makes perfect sense that there's got to be something out there alive and there's got to be a day that we have contact with it. These films if done with integrity are very effective.
How involved will the Navy be in the production?
Berg: Well, you can see from your experience today that I enjoy a very good relationship with the Navy. I'm a pretty liberal guy. I'm a huge fan of Barack Obama and probably not on paper someone that the Navy would look to and go, 'This is our kind of our guy.' But the one thing, as corny and as superficial as it sounds, I've grown to love soldiers and respect soldiers. I think that the Navy knows that. More than the hardware and showing off whatever, you saw some cool stuff today, what I'm really interested in is the soul and character of these people. That young kid that took you into the missile silo who was so shy and nervous that he could barely talk, I mean to me that's incredibly endearing. That's cool.
Is there ever any hope to getting a sequel to 'The Rundown'?
Berg: I hope so, man. I don't know why there's not. I think, yes. The answer is yes. I love 'The Rundown'. I don't know that the audience at the time was quite ready to accept Dwayne [Johnson]. We had a certain amount of resistance. They screwed around with our release date. The film still performed well.
Dwayne wants another one, doesn't he? Have you talked to him about it?
Berg: I love it. We always joke about when we're going to do it. Sometimes it's just a question of timing and getting all the stars to line up but there's no reason why we wouldn't do it.
What about a 'Hancock' sequel?
Berg: It's being written now and it's an issue of everybody involved in 'Hancock'. There are so many cooks in that particular kitchen that it's so busy and Will [Smith] has kind of taken time off to be with his kids and his kids are now making all kinds of films. There are so many people involved in that, from Will to his partner James Lassiter to Akiva [Goldsman] to Michael Mann, myself and to get us all in the same room just like this where we can all talk and then agree on anything, you've never met a group of people that have a harder time agreeing on anything. It's like the Israeli peace process times a thousand how tough it is to resolve. I think it'll happen though. We just have to kind of get in the same room for some consistency.
Do you see that happening after 'Battleship' or would it happen after a film that you want to get up?
Berg: 'Lone Survivor' is what I want to do next. If you haven't read that book it's an incredible story and a really dynamic one, in the vein of like a 'Black Hawk Down'. It's a true story about seventeen SEALS that were killed in one gunfight in Afghanistan. It's a great story. One survived.
Does knowing that you're doing that give you the freedom to do something as fantastical as 'Battleship'? Like you're having dessert first and will finish with broccoli?
Berg: Well, I wouldn't call it broccoli but your point is well taken. The reality is that I'm thrilled to do 'Battleship' but the industry that we all work and live in is fed off of these films and I'm excited to make a film like 'Battleship' because a film like this, if you make it right and it works and it hits globally we're all free. Movies like 'Lone Survivor' get funded and financed off of movies like 'Transformers', 'Star Trek', 'Iron Man', 'Spider-Man', 'Battleship' hopefully. Knock wood.
3-D or no?
Berg: A little bit. I think we're going to do some sequences 3-D.
Are you going to do IMAX?
Berg: Yeah. Can you imagine these things, the way that they said night fight, these things close quarter unloading on each other.
It's like the old pirate ship battles.
Berg: That's right. Only the sounds of the carrier are like on steroids.
You showed us a Japanese ship in that one mock up. Is it just a Japanese ship or will there be a whole international armada?
Berg: In this particular conflict the international component is a Japanese ship.
An enormous thank you to Peter Berg and Universal for making this happen. It was nice to find out more about the project and after seeing the concept art and talking to Peter about it, I think this will be a pretty awesome action flick. Peter is one of the most talented and fearless directors working in the business today so I'm looking forward to this one.
Stay with Latinoreview as we keep you updated on the progress of Peter Berg's Battleship!
Man all stations when you
