Friday Night Fights: Peter Berg Returns to Football … and War

Over the course of his 30 years behind the camera, director Peter Berg has garnered the most fame from tackling two subjects: war and football. His latest film, The Mosquito Bowl — which has its world premiere at AFI Fest on Oct. 22 — combines a bit of both with a story about collegiate athletes who enlist during World War II and stage a friendly game at Guadalcanal. But a feel-good film this is not.

“I’ve done war from the 1800s, from Vietnam and Iraq, and one of the reasons I wanted to make Mosquito Bowl is to remind people that someone dying in World War II looks and sounds the same as people dying in Ukraine or the Middle East today,” Berg explains. “It’s critical that we understand that war is hell, and that we should do everything we can to avoid it.”

Berg’s Friday Night Lights television series launched the careers of Jesse Plemons and Michael B. Jordan, among many others, and he’s hoping to do the same with the group of actors whom he assembled to portray the real-life football stars in Mosquito: Breakouts Tom Francis and Ray Nicholson star alongside slightly more veteran actors Bill Skarsgard and Nicholas Galitzine. “I think if Leo [DiCaprio] or Timothée Chalamet had wanted to be in the movie, we could have figured something out,” Berg says, “but I always gravitate toward guys that aren’t as well known because the audience can lose themselves easier and quicker.”

How do you go about casting new talent?

I go to see a lot of movies and plays, and I’m always taking notes. I saw Sunset Boulevard, and I was sitting behind Margot Robbie, and she was absolutely smitten with Tom [Francis]. You could tell he was a superstar. Everybody thought I was crazy because I declared, “Tom Francis is going to be in this movie,” and nobody at Netflix had heard of him. He’d never acted in a movie before, so I had to audition him and also make sure he could get the American accent right — and learn football. I was so proud of him and all of the actors because my process is not the easiest.

In what way?

I’m a little chaotic and insane on set, and we work fast and it’s raw. Most actors are used to a more sensible tempo, where you rehearse and have print marks and you slowly warm up. I’m restrained when it comes to the football scenes, though — we filmed with a bunch of tough Aussie rugby players, and the guys didn’t like having to stand down when it came time for the big hits. I told them, “I don’t care if you want to go play tackle football in your off time, but I don’t want the crew shut down because we’re stupid and we hurt you.”

How has the way you film combat scenes evolved, especially as technology advances?

During Lone Survivor, I started playing around with immersive combat sequences. There’s a 20-minute gunfight, and at the end of it, people would come up to me — men, women, Democrat, Republican, people with radically different perspectives on the SEALs and American intervention — and tell me that no matter the politics, they really felt like they were in it. In Mosquito Bowl, I wanted to go further. We have a 32-minute sequence that is more immersive than anything I’ve done.

When you say “immersive,” what do you mean?

We have cameras trying to keep up with actors who aren’t sure where they’re going, and pyrotechnics, bombs and smoke going off in safe but unpredictable patterns. And then exhaustion and confusion set in, and you capture that. Come to the set and I’ll show you.

The movie is named after the football game the soldiers play, but it’s ultimately a very gritty portrait of war. Do you worry about selling people on that dichotomy?

The football game was less of an athletic competition than a way for the Marines on Guadalcanal to deal with the carnage they’d seen. It was a brief cup of coffee before they went back into war. But I never thought about what would be more user-friendly for anybody. Something that has always inspired me is the responsibility we have to think about who is sending people into battle and who we are asking to go to war.

This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.