← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Peter Berg's 'American Primeval'
00:23:13
Peter Berg discusses his latest limited series, "American Primeval," set in the American West in 1857.
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Listener supported WNYC Studios.
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This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Many members of the team, all of it spent last Friday night watching the first episode of season two of the series Severance. So we're all very excited to tell you that coming up later this week, we'll speak to two of its stars. And on tomorrow's show, bassist Divinity Rock. She's a former music director for Beyonce. She has recently been nominated for a Grammy Award. She joins us for a live performance in studio. That's later this week. Now let's get this hour started with the new series American primeval. It is 1857, it's Utah, and the price of land could be your life. The Mormon militias, the US Government and the indigenous people, they're all fighting to just simply exist. That's at the heart of a new Netflix series, American Primeval. In the story, we meet Sarah. She just wants to get from Boston to the west coast, ostensibly to see her husband. She and her son miss their meetup in Utah and they need help. Here's Sarah asking for help from Mr. Bridger, a frontiersman who has built his own trading post. Quite an establishment you have here. Expected things to improve once we came across more people.
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Civilization and civilized are two different words entirely. Ms. Royal, I might suggest you head back to Boston where you'll find more of each.
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My husband is waiting for us at Crook Springs.
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I suggest maybe you wait a little longer until early spring. Weather will have ease by then, and any luck, the tribes of Mormons will stop their ravaging.
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I'm afraid waiting is not an option, Mr. Bridger.
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I can't seem to make clear what you're asking for.
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Ms.
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Roll asking for a guide to Crook Springs. Ultimately, Bridger introduces them to a tracker named Isaac. But along the way, the violence that erupts around them may be too much. This is not Little House on the Prairie, y'all. In his review, NPR's Fresh Fresh Air. David Biancooli said American Primeval is filled with, quote, chaotic violence, endearing characters and some sights and performances you'll not soon forget. It's written by Mark Smith. You may recognize him from the Revenant and has been directed by my next guest, Peter Berg. American Primeval is on Netflix. Hey, Peter.
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How are you?
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I'm doing great. You know, the frontier is often so romanticized in American culture. How does American Primeval challenge or expand this narrative?
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First of all, let me apologize for my. For my voice. My throat went. Went south on me last night. My voice is somewhat not here, but I'm such a fan of yours and of your. Of your stations. And I. I wanted to be here. So I apologize to everyone for having to suffer through this. I'm not in pain. You know, we. We felt. Mark L. Smith and I felt very, very passionately that we wanted to explore a different aspect of the west of the 1800s that was not romantic, that was not soft, was not peaceful. But really look at how hard it was for people to survive and how many things could be a real problem. You know, a loose tooth could kill you back then. Going 20ft to go to the bathroom in the woods could kill you, as could a lot of other human beings. It was a very violent time, and we wanted to explore that. And I, I love the review that you just gave us. This ain't Little House on the Prairie, y'all. No, it's not.
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The opening shot is so that wide land, the sky is endless. When you think about the role of the frontier, what does it play within this story?
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Well, I mean, I think one of. One of the motivators for us to do the show was looking at how violent our world is today. You know, we're living with two major wars in Israel and in Ukraine, issues flaring up between us and China, issues in Sudan. There's so, so many flare ups. And Markel and I were thinking about kind of, you know, how did, how did we get here? Have we grown? Have we matured? Have we as a species become less violent or more violent? And the frontier in those big open spaces that existed in the 1800s, it seems we're. We're every bit as violent and full of human beings scared and trying to protect their land and their tribes. And we wanted to explore that and use the frontier as a springboard into it.
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This is that great line, civilization versus civilized are two different worlds.
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Very true.
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Yeah. How did you balance the brutality of the time that you've described? But you also needed to create characters and moments that audiences could connect with emotionally.
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Right? Well, I think it for me was that kind of balance between, you know, violence and fear on one side and love and kind of familiar family like, connections on the other. And I think that that's so true of all of us. Right? We're all quick to be your best friend and your worst enemy. Right. I bet you would be my best friend and my worst enemy by looking at you. And I'd like to think that I would be your best friend to your worst enemy. And so if you want to portray the worst enemy aspect of people, you have to also balance that with the best friend side of people. And that means love and the desire to care for one another. That is as equal, I believe, as our ability to hate and administer violence upon each other. So we look for both.
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You've directed films, Friday Night Lights, Deepwater Horizon, but you've also directed miniseries. And when you're thinking about a miniseries, how is directing a miniseries different when thinking about the entire narrative versus a film?
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Right. So it's harder. I'm just a blanket term. Directing a limited series is the hardest thing I think you can do as a director. You know, a movie, typically a big movie, has maybe an 80 day shoot and is at the end of the day, you know, an hour and 45 minutes to two hours long. A limited series had. We had 155 day shoot and we were six hours long. And our shoot was up in the mountains with snowstorms and lightning storms and wind storms and heat waves in the summer and rattlesnakes and bears and wolves and all kinds of union strikes. We had a WGA strike and a DJ strike. Our lead actress got pregnant, our lead actor broke his foot. Every day was an exhausting, glorious challenge. And so as a director, to manage six hours, you know, basically a six hour movie, it's not necessarily harder. It's all hard. Making a commercial is hard. Everything is hard in life for anybody that wants to do anything. Well, it's hard. Your job is hard. But six hours in a limited series and directing all of them was one heck of a challenge.
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All directors have to make decisions. That's just what you do all day. You make decision upon decision upon decision. What was a tough decision for you to make? And American Primeval.
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One of the big challenges was kind of balancing the fiction versus the nonfiction aspects. We represent and present an event called the Meadows Massacre, which was a massacre, a mass killing that happened in 1856 in southern Utah in which a group of Mormons dressed up as Native Americans and actually recruited some Native Americans and attacked and killed about 100, 140 pioneers. And we wanted to present that. We did quite a bit of research and we do imply in our show that Brigham Young at a Minimum knew about that, knew about that attack and was okay with that attack. And we knew that that would not necessarily endear us to members of the LDS community. So that was something that was. We researched quite thoroughly. I spent time with various authors and historians and went and toured that site in Utah where the Mormons have actually acknowledged that they did that massacre and they built a memorial. But knowing that we were going to present something as real and potentially inflammatory as the Meadows Massacre was something that I thought was a pretty big challenge.
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Have you heard from the Mormon Church?
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I haven't gotten any phone calls, but I've certainly. All I have to do is go online and I can hear from them quite clearly.
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And the second.
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I'm sorry. What I would say to that is I understand the feelings and one thing that we tried to do in the show. And if you look at the first episode, I actually play a character in the film once up being killed by the Mormons. And prior to the killing, you see my character be very antagonistic and disrespectful to those Mormons. And that was, you know, part of an attempt to make sure we balanced the violence, at least in terms of. With the justification for how the Mormons were pushed into that. That corner in which they felt the only way they could survive was to. Was to attack, was to go on the offensive. So we try to tell about. Get present a balanced version of that. I know they're still going to be mad at me though. That's okay.
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My guess is Pete Berg, he's a director of American Primeval. It's on Netflix right now. Yeah, that's that we have that scene where you are an actor as well as a director. How'd that come about?
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I actually thought it was a very important scene. I do like to put myself in everything so that I can show my great grandkids knew one day. You know, I think that'll be kind of cool. Like see what great great grandpa did when he was a little bit younger. But I did feel in the case of Primeval, that this role of Fancher, and it was the Fancher party that was massacred by the Mormons. 57. Presenting him as someone who was. Was in fact quite disrespectful to these folks, to these Mormons, and probably didn't deserve the faith that he got based on that disrespect. But if you started looking at the violence that the Mormons were experiencing in Illinois, in Georgia and in upstate New York, where it all started, the Mormons were really basically under an extinction order, people were trying to exterminate that religion. So I wanted for my character to provide at least the window into that kind of attitude that was prevalent against the Mormons, which I do not think the Mormons deserved.
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Let's take a listen. This is American Primeval.
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You possess a permit to be on these lands.
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Permit?
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By proclamation of Governor Brigham Young, no person shall be allowed to pass through this territory without a permit provided by a proper officer. If you don't have a permit, you and your party need to turn your wagons back east before nightfall. You're not gonna keep on through here.
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Friends, you can assure Governor Young that we're gonna be out of here first light. He'll never knew we were here.
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Well, I'm afraid it don't work like that. Governor Young's declared martial law to protect his people. Due to you and your kind. Driving us out of our homes, killing our loved ones, telling us to find our own place to be. We found that place, mister. You're standing on it.
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As I understand it, I'm standing on land owned by the United States government. I do not need permission.
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Proclamation of Governor Brigham Young.
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No man shall be talking about your proclamation. I do hear you. I'm not deaf. Only problem is that we have our own proclamation. And that proclamation says that we take orders from no man.
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That's American Primeval. I'm speaking with its director, Pete Berg. Some of your cameramen, especially the handheld folks, they're like, right in there during those scenes, you know, particularly when the scalping happens. Why did you opt for such intensity in those scenes, especially that close up.
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Right. So I like to. Obviously, every filmmaker has his own style and his own. His own way of doing things. I have always sort of operated with the goal of making my films feel like a participatory experience for the audience, not a spectator experience. Meaning.
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I don't.
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I don't want you sort of calmly sitting in a movie theater or sitting in your living room on your phone eating popcorn or, you know, playing with your dog while you're watching something that I do. I want to kind of grab you by the throat and hold you, and I want to make you watch it, and I want to make you not be able to look away and feel it, you know? And that's kind of my goal with all of it. And I try to work my crew and my cast and everybody up into a bit of a creative frenzy to capture that. And using those handheld cameras, we were using very wide lenses, like 11 millimeter lenses, which are Very, very wide. You get close to someone's face with a lens like that, and you're kind of in their brain, you know, you are part of their soul. So I. That's my style. Some people tell me it's exhausting, and my mom used to tell me that a lot, but that's just kind of what I like to do. So I apologize if I got too tight for some people, but I don't think you'll look away.
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I also thought the sound was really interesting in the entire series because you can hear the arrow's sound as it goes past your ear. You can hear the brace on the boy's knee. It creaks a little bit before we can even see it. How did you and your team approach catching, casting, and capturing natural elements and. And the oral sense of what's going on? A U R A L. There's a.
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Mad genius sound designer named Wiley Statement, who I've worked with many times, who's won several Academy Awards. He's done a bunch of Quentin Tarantino films like Django and James and some other extraordinary films. He was nominated for an Oscar with me, I think, twice. Once for Lone Survivor and once for Deepwater Horizon. I never was nominated. Wiley's been nominated, and he deserves it. So I'm just trying to keep up with Wiley, but he's a real sound artist. And, you know, for. For listeners who don't understand how important sound is, I encourage them to think about it and maybe research a little bit. Some of these incredible sound designers like Wiley, who just. They're artists, you know, and they. They create an incredible library of sounds. And then they go up to their laboratory, and Wiley's got this wild, beautiful laboratory up in the mountains above Los Angeles, which, thankfully was not burned down in fires, but was close. And he just goes into his laboratory and creates these rhythms and these mixes of sound design. And it's interesting because it always takes a while for it to click in. So during the course of the editing process, you're hearing a little bit and you're hearing a little bit, and then it's kind of the last domino to fall, you know, finally locks in, and that sound design locks in, especially if you're. If you've got good sound at home, which, you know, sometimes it's frustrating because I'll see someone listening or watching our show on their cell phone with no headphones. I'm like, oh, my God, you have no idea how hard we worked. But, you know, that's the way it goes. But when you really Listen to Wiley Sound design. It's. It's art. It's real, real art. And he makes all of us better.
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Someone else who was on your team, you had an indigenous cultural consultant. What did you need to know from her?
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Everything. Julie was my. Was the boss, I like to say. Obviously, you know, I'm. I'm a white American male. And I knew that we were making a film that. That was aiming to represent at least three Native American tribes, Shoshone. I knew there was a lot that I didn't know, and I knew there was a lot that I didn't even know that I didn't know, you know, and I didn't necessarily even know what some of the questions were to ask. So we hired a series of consultants, Julie being sort of the primary consultant, who then went and got sub consultants, because she would tell me, there's not like one size fits all when it comes to Native American consultants. I'm from this tribe, which means I don't know a lot about other tribes. So we had Shoshone piute consultants, language consultants, wardrobe consultants, you know, food consultants, horse consultants for each tribe. And I would just. As we. We all would. All of us, all the department heads would defer to these consultants and say, show us, you know, what would. What would this pair of moccasins look like? How would these beads be worn? How would food be prepared? Certainly. How was the language spoken? And all of the actors made a real commitment to getting the language right, which is not easy. You know, we had four different languages. Well, five if you include French, but we had English, French, Paiute, and Ute all being spoken. Those are all radically different languages. And so, you know, I'm sitting there watching characters speaking in some of these languages. I have no idea what they're saying. I have no idea what they're saying, much less are they acting well. Right, because you can't understand it. So I would have to look at the consultants and say, a, are they getting the words right? And B, are they acting well? And so they became kind of like co directors and partners, and it was really kind of awesome.
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My guest is Peter Berg. He's the director of American Primeval, the story about survival in Utah in 1857. I want to talk about the women in this. The women are really strong in this. Everybody from the Shoshone tribe, the leader. You've got Abish, who is Mormon, who makes a turn. We'll say Betty Gilpin, who's amazing. But you also have to think these women didn't have rights. They couldn't vote in 1857, but they have to be strong in their own way. How did you talk to your female actors about their role but having to remember it's 1857.
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Right. Well, the thing that we would talk about was that, okay, yes, in 1857, there was civilization in America in Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and parts of San Francisco. You know, these were thriving cities where women often did not have many rights. And certainly in some of the more remote townships, women didn't have any rights and they were forced to be, you know, very passive and assume an inferior role to men. However, the world that we were in sort of circumnavigated all of that because everybody was just fighting to stay alive.
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Yeah.
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And if I'm fighting to stay alive and you're fighting to stay alive, you know, made the best man woman win. Right. Because you're going to want to protect yours, I'm going to protect mine. And let's see. You know, I, I. It's my belief that, you know, when you put people in those kind of stressors, it doesn't matter what the your race is, what your sex is, what your sexual orientation is. It's like, how much do you want to survive? And so we felt like the, that was a clean playing, level playing field for men and women in our show because everyone was just trying to survive.
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Also, I want to give a shout out to Betty Gilpin. I think she's taking over for Omari tonight.
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She is. It's her opening night. Go see Omari.
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A very good show. By the way, what did you learn working on American Primeval that you just didn't know before?
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I mean, I learned a lot about American history. I learned a lot about Hollywood unions because we had to deal with the WGA strike and the SAG strike. And so I really have come to understand how these contracts work. But I think, you know, personally, it was such a big show. You know, like I said, 140 plus days, really mammoth undertaking. And I personally learned more the value of teamwork and being able to work with people that you trust and delegate and to kind of encourage people to be their best. And if you do that, you get their best. And if you look at American Primeval, I was a director, but I was just kind of the cheerleader in many ways. And incredible stuntmen, incredible actors, set designers, costume designers, hair, makeup. It was an incredible team effort. And for me it was a reminder that we do go further together. And it's actually kind of more fun. So it was a great time.
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This is a good text. We just got in. Thank you for today's segment. I am always amazed, disappointed how older films depicting this period contain characters who are clean shaven, washed, have perfect teeth and hair. Greatly appreciate that authenticity will now be presented.
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Appreciate that. You know, some people ask me why we didn't have more romance, if you will, in our show. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Can you imagine what kissing someone would have the experience of kissing with all that breath and whatever. Forget about like, you know, going beyond kissing, but just kissing someone?
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No.
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Would have been a real exercise in survival. So I don't know how people procreated but still were bats, but not in our show.
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The name of the show is American Primeval. It is on Netflix. Peter, it was a real great time talking to you.
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I apologize again for my voice. Next time I'll be 100%.
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Take care.
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Okay, thank you.
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