From where Peter Berg sat, in the shadow of U.S. warships along a Navy pier at Pearl Harbor, the Hollywood director couldn’t see the star of his new action film “Battleship.”
No, not Taylor Kitsch, the pale TV actor from “Friday Night Lights” who leads the cast in the $200 million production and who strolled the pier in shorts, slippers and an aloha shirt. And not the equally pale and lanky co-star Alexander Skarsgard, who’s best known as the vampire Eric Northman on HBO’s “True Blood.”
Berg’s big star was far across the harbor, berthed at Ford Island: the decommissioned battleship Missouri.
Although the movie showcased some of the Navy’s most sophisticated ships, the 68-year-old Missouri gave the film its heart.
The 50-year-old director is best known for his film adaptation — and subsequent TV series — of “Friday Night Lights,” as well as the films “The Rundown,” which was shot in Hawaii with Dwayne Johnson, and “The Kingdom” with Jamie Foxx.
But Berg also harbors a great passion for military history. He’s the son of a Naval historian and former Marine, and often toured historic ships while growing up in New York City. Still, until he embarked on “Battleship” he had not seen the Missouri, he said.
“It’s an infinitely fascinating ship,” Berg said, as he spoke of its role in the movie that opens tonight in theaters nationwide.
QUESTION: How essential to your film was the Missouri? You couldn’t make a movie called “Battleship” without a battleship, right?
ANSWER: As I was very quickly reminded the second we announced we were doing ‘Battleship,’ there are no active battleships in the Navy. And I frankly wasn’t sure how we were going to crack that problem.
I was here doing research and getting ready to embark on a destroyer and someone told me the Missouri was in drydock and would I like to see it. And I said sure. It isn’t every day you get to see a battleship out of water. I went and looked at it and it was pretty amazing. Overwhelming, really.
Q: So you’re on a tour with a Missouri memorial official and he tells you that he plans to make a right turn out of drydock and berth it at Ford Island. But you had another idea?
A: I said what if you made a left turn and took her out in the ocean and made a big lap and I could get some helicopters and film it. And we could put her in the movie. He looked at me like I was insane. Cut to 2-1⁄2 months later and I am on the bow of the Missouri as she clears the Pearl Harbor channel and there are guys on board with tears in their eyes. There are jets coming into Honolulu International Airport banking their wings.
Q: Was the Missouri a part of the project at that point?
A: Sort of. I was working on that. These films are such a leap of faith. I had committed to trying to make the Missouri coming into the movie in the third act as our cavalry coming to the rescue. In order to take the first step to do that, I had to get it out there and had to film it.
Q: Filming on the ocean, even in calm waters off Oahu’s Leeward Coast, can be tricky. But you received some unexpected advice before you started shooting on that football field-size barge.
A: I think the saving grace was a phone call I got from Kevin Costner about a month and a half before we came out here.
I didn’t know Kevin and he said: “Look, for what’s it’s worth I feel compelled to call you. I have a lot to say about shooting on the water. When we did ‘Waterworld’ we did a lot of things right and we did a lot of things wrong. If you’re interested I would love to come in and tell you what we did wrong.”
And that was a really gracious call. He didn’t know me. He could have sat back and lit up a cigar and watched “Battleship” become the new pinnacle of troubled water shoots. Instead he came in and talked about understanding the role the weather plays and making sure we had backups for everything we needed and being prepared for crew members who wanted to leave. Building things with greater engineering resistance than we were told we needed to because swells will put more pressure on things than we we’re told. Watch out for sharks. Everything. All the things that messed him up.
And as a result we had no problems. It honestly went really well. Taylor Kitsch slipped and cracked his kneecap really badly. There were a couple of shark sightings, so we had to keep an eye on that. But nothing major.
Q: “Battleship” utilized a lot of Navy warships — destroyers, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, personnel. How difficult was that to negotiate?
A: I do love the military and my father was a Marine and I have nothing but respect for the men and women on ships. The Navy slowly came to understand that I was not interested in making a recruitment video or an unrequited love letter to the Navy. There were times when we disagreed when I wanted to show things that maybe they weren’t crazy about. But we always did it out of respect. And I was able to get what I wanted and they were able to get what they wanted.
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Wary studio puts on game face
Universal seems to have issued an all-hands-on-deck alarm regarding its erstwhile slate of board-game movies — several Hasbro-based projects have been dropped and the studio opened “Battleship” overseas, five weeks before it premiered here, to avoid a collision with box-office darling “The Avengers.”
But who can blame them for being edgy? “Clue,” the last board-game movie made, met an ugly demise in 1985 (Colonel Mustard, box office, lead pipe). And “Jumanji,” which was supposed to be a board game, met a similar non-reception in 1995. Still, the following are on the drawing board, its creators ready to hurl the dice:
>> “Monopoly”: Universal decided not to pass Go, but Ridley Scott and Hasbro are still in development on this screen version of the game from Parker Bros.
It’s the game that introduces kids to the triumphs and heartbreaks of capitalism, and which grown men have been known to hurl into the air upon losing their Boardwalk hotel.
>> “Candy Land”: Sony is firmly behind a movie based — loosely — on what may be the simplest board game ever devised, one requiring no skill, strategy or even thought, and which Adam Sandler, at last report, was planning to bring to the screen.
>> “Ouija”: It’s not hard to foresee what will happen in this takeoff on the allegedly black magical board game, by which pajama-clad adolescents have been communicating with the dead since the 1890s. Universal execs had originally divined that they were better off without this Hasbro-related film, but apparently have now come to their (sixth) senses.
>> “Risk”: Not exactly a juggernaut — Sony has been talking about this since 2009 — the game originally titled “The Conquest of the World” by its French creator seems as good a subject as any for a big-screen extravaganza. Like Monopoly, Risk is about destroying your opponent on the board or, in this case, the box office.
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Newsday
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