Peter Berg and Derek Luke: Interview

Interview by Clint Morris

Interview with actor/director Peter Berg and Derek Luke
Starring and Directing in the movie Friday Night Lights.

Peter Berg's new flick stars Billy- Bob Thornton and Derek Luke

He might be kicking goals now as a fully-fledged, acclaimed filmmaker, but just a few short years back, Peter Berg was wedged between the bench and the locker room, sweating it out in a TV series he enjoyed, but felt locked into.

The show? Chicago Hope, David E.Kelley's hit 90's hospital drama, which starred the L.A native as cocky, slightly inane, but always steadfast doc, Billy Kronk.

"When I look back at it, I'm mostly amazed at how poorly it was shot," says Berg, who starred on the series from 1995 - 1999.

"David Kelley is a great writer, a real genius and very provocative and has an ability to take things like the medical industry or the legal industry and really use them as great mirrors to our society, and I thought the scripts were great, but it just looks so cheap.

"I was watching it on Discovery like a month ago or something, and god, it looked bad. Other than that, the stories were great, guys like Mandy Patinkin, Hector Elizondo, Adam Arkin, Ron Silver, Christine Lahti, Peter MacNicol - these are really good actors. It was a great show."

So why did he leave the series? "I was scared that I was going to go down being known as a doctor from a TV show. I was nervous to do this TV show initially, I had a nice little career as a film-actor going, and then the show comes and they threw a lot of money at you and suddenly it's all pretty seducing, and I thought, "okay I guess I'll try it". Then they started pulling me in and I was very resistant.

"All the other actors would be saying write more, more (dialogue for me), and I'd always be saying 'No, less, less'. I look at Zach Braff, who did Garden State, which was just great, and he plays a doctor on TV, and I bet he's thinking the same thing," says Berg.

"It's a tricky thing. You want to get out of it, but it's very hard. If you're not careful, you can overstay your welcome. You might make a lot of money, but it's very hard to get out from under that rug. The more you can reinvent yourself, the better - and unfortunately TV is designed not to let you redesign yourself."

Derek Luke, who stars in Berg's new film Friday Night Lights, joins in - saying he knows exactly where his director's coming from. "It's the same with film too. They think you're one type of actor. For instance, people might think I'm just 'Antwone Fisher' (he played the real-life character in Denzel Washington's acclaimed film), but you've got to go out and show them that you're more than that."

Berg says acting was simply a stepping-stone to his main dream of being a filmmaker: "I moved to Los Angeles thinking I was going to go to film school - I remember looking at AFI or UCLA, thinking I'd go to one of those two schools, but didn't. Instead, I ended up getting jobs on film - working in all areas of production. So, I never went to film school. Never took a film class."

After a good decade or so in film, Berg picked up a Panavision Camera and decided it was time to fulfil his dream of becoming a filmmaker. His first film was the dark comedy Very Bad Things (1998) and recently, he directed The Rock vehicle Welcome to the Jungle. His latest film, Friday Night Lights, follows the 1988 football season of the Odessa-Permian Panthers, one of the elite high school clubs of West Texas.

They're under so much pressure to win by just about everyone in the town. The team's coach (Billy Bob Thornton) is under just as much pressure, especially when his team doesn't win a game. The film is based on the book by H.G 'Buzz' Bissinger, who happens to be Berg's cousin.

Derek Luke plays Boobie Miles in 'Firday Night Lights'

Berg says he decided to cast Billy Bob Thornton in the role because he looked a lot like the real-life character he was playing. "There's a picture of the real Coach Gary Gaines in the book and he's sitting in the locker room after a game, and he just looks so much like Billy Bob, that we went to him," mentioned Berg.

"Truth is, we offered it to Tom Hanks, which pretty much every movie in America does, but Tom passed. Billy Bob said that Hanks recently called and said he's voting for all of us for Oscars, he loved the film."

Luke says he was attracted to acting in Berg's film because it was "something different to Antwone Fisher. The role spoke to me, he was one of these original players - cocky, cool - it just sounded great. I just so wanted to be a part of that."

Berg says although he took a meeting with Luke to talk about the film, he auditioned a lot of the other young actors. "We were actually pretty far down the road with another actor and then Derek walked in, and I thought, wow, that's the guy. With [Don], Tim McGraw's on-screen son, there was an Australian kid cast in that role (rumours suggest it could've been former "Home and Away" star Ryan Kwanten) but he was locked into a TV pilot. The poor kid, the show's long since cancelled and he could've had this part - it would've been a great starting role.

"With Lucas Black, the second he came in to audition, I thought 'this is the guy'. Done. His agent calls though and says 'Lucas knows he screwed up the audition', and I'm like 'No, he didn't, he did fine', and anyway, so Lucas forced himself back to audition again. It's always an interesting sort of adventure that gets someone into a movie," Berg enthused.

Berg's next film, as director, is Splinter Cell, a film based on the video game (reviewed here). "It's going excellent," says Berg. "J.T (Petty) is doing the weight of the writing on it, but I'm going to take all the credit."

Berg says he's always been a fan of the spy genre, and jumped at the chance to bring Tom Clancy's video game to the big screen. "I'm a big fan of that kind of story. I love secret-agent books - I love Bourne (Identity) - with missions, and kidnappings, executions and assassinations. I read books like, all the Ludlum books, I like the Alistair MacLaine books like Guns of Navarone… I just like that kind of stuff."

Berg says he's keen to mould a good actor into a hunky action star, rather than simply pluck someone renowned for action movies out and place him in the lead role, something like Doug Liman did with Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity.

A few names come up - everyone from Thomas Jane to Eric Bana and Kurt Russell - but Berg says it's too early to decide who should play the role. He does like one guy in particular though, and what a Clancy-fitting action hero this former Funky Bunch vocalist would make.

Next week, says Berg, he meets Tom Clancy, the inspiration behind the Splinter Cell game and impending movie. "Next week I'm going to DC to talk with him and Porter Goss, the new head of the CIA. [It's] very exciting."

Berg is also working on a film with Michael Mann, director of Collateral, which Berg had a small acting role in. "He's always been one of my heroes. The last two acting roles I've taken were was Collateral with Michael Mann and Corky Romano with Chris Kattan," says Berg, adding that the only reason he did the latter film was because it was the only film that got the greenlight before the impending actors strike a couple of years ago. "The thing with Michael Mann is called The Kingdom, about an American FBI agent who goes to Saudi Arabia to investigate a bombing."

Berg was also rumoured to be attached to a film titled Hip Hop Cops, but he says he has nothing to do with that. "That was something that was reported on IMDB and I have nothing to do with it," said Berg, quashing the rumour there and then.

Another film Berg's glad he's had nothing to do with was Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby, not because it was a poorly made pic, but because he despises its message.

"I'm very anti-Million Dollar Baby. I think it's a rotten message. When we were filming Friday Night Lights we had a kid break his neck, a 15-year-old, who became a quadriplegic," says Berg. For that youngster to see Eastwood's new film, and hear it's message, is appalling says the director.

"To go and see that that movie and come away thinking that Hilary Swank's [character is] better off dead and that the noble thing was for Clint Eastwood to choke her to death before she's even had a real chance to process the shock. I have a problem with that movie. It's offensive."

Friday Night Lights screens in Australian theatres from March 10th, 2005.
Click here for the movie review.

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