‘American Primeval’ Director Peter Berg on Finale Deaths, the Prequel Spinoff He’s Considering and ‘Friday Night Lights’ Reboot
[This story contains mild spoilers from Netflix’s American Primeval.]
In a television landscape where Taylor Sheridan has largely cornered the market on stories about western expansion with Yellowstone and its spinoffs 1883 and 1923, American Primeval has stood out for its exploration of the Utah Territory and the role settlers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) played in halting migration to the area. The efforts of which culminated in the gruesome 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, depicted in the Netflix miniseries, that left some 120 travelers dead.
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The six-episode Western drama written and created by Mark L. Smith and directed by Peter Berg, follows the journey of Sara (Betty Gilpin), a woman on the run, who seeks out a guide at Fort Bridger in Wyoming to assist her in transporting her young son Devin (Preston Mota) to his father in Missouri. It’s at the fort founded by Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham) that she encounters Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch) a mountain man who reluctantly, and successfully, aids the mother and son, who’ve been joined by Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), a mute Indigenous woman who fled her village by sneaking into their wagon, to safety.
Along the way, however, they find themselves in the middle of the budding war between native tribesmen, the U.S. army and Mormon renegades under the leadership of LDS president Brigham Young (Kim Coates), making for a dangerously violent journey that the series leans into heavily.
The show reunites Berg and Kitsch, who’ve collaborated on a number of projects over the years, most notably Kitsch’s breakout role in the sports drama Friday Night Lights (which is getting a reboot at Peacock), and movies such as Battleship and Lone Survivor.
“I like finding people who I am comfortable with, who I can get a shorthand going and who I know aren’t gonna be pushovers and are gonna challenge me and force me to work harder and think about things a bit deeper than I might normally, and Kitsch is on the top of the list for that,” Berg tells The Hollywood Reporter when speaking about American Primeval.
“I don’t know that he gets enough credit for how hard he works and how much he invests himself in these roles. He comes onto that set deeply invested and expects me to be as deeply invested as he is in every moment, and if I’m not, he’s real quick to make sure that I am,” Berg continues. “I never have to worry about his commitment and his willingness to push himself and to explore the art of acting.”
Below, Berg talks with THR about the series finale, backlash to the depiction of Young and what a continuation of American Primeval could look like as he teases the forthcoming Friday Night Lights reboot.
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What prompted your initial research into the Mountain Meadows Massacre for American Primeval?
When Mark L. and I were originally talking about trying to do something in this space, we were looking at a movie called Jeremiah Johnson that Robert Redford did a long time ago, where he played a city man who decides to head west and try and find gold and he ends up becoming a really legitimate mountain man and respected by all the different Native American tribes. We had both read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, a really good book about the birth of the Mormon religion and Joseph Smith passing the torch to Brigham Young, and the Meadows Massacre was included in that book. So we started talking about whether this would be an interesting way create our own space in the semi-Western landscape, which is pretty full right now, because we didn’t want to make a traditional Western.
The more we researched the Meadows Massacre, that took us down a Brigham Young rabbit hole and it was interesting because I had never thought of the Mormons as having an armed militia and being aggressive, and they really were. Something we tried to hint at in the show was that they weren’t insane and irrational about it. They were trying to survive, and there were a lot of people trying to wipe them off the planet. I’m empathetic to Brigham Young and the LDS church, but the Meadows Massacre did happen, and they were involved. And from the research I’ve done, it’s my belief that Brigham Young knew about that before it happened.
There have been some Mormon filmmakers and content creators who have pushed back on the accuracy of Young’s depiction in the series and the Latter Day Saints in general. What do you say to that?
It’s not a literal depiction of the Meadows Massacre because those massacres took place over three days and ours takes place very quickly. I’ve heard some of the pushback, but I haven’t heard anyone from the Mormon side deny that the Meadows Massacre happened and that Mormons did it. I have had them express concerns that we do take other liberties. We have a sequence where some Mormon women are abducted by Native Americans and that did not happen around the Meadows Massacre, but it did happen. There are many documented accounts of Natives taking people. We never said we’re making a documentary and that it’s all based 100 percent on fact. There are many liberties taken. But I think we are accurate very much in a reasonable way concerning the key events, particularly the Meadows Massacre.
You worked with Julie O’Keefe as the Indigenous consultant for the series. What kind of guidance did she provide?
She was my boss. I worked for her. Obviously, as a white filmmaker, entering some of these cultures, if I didn’t protect the integrity and the truthfulness of the piece with the right consultants, I’d be doing a lot of people a disservice and I knew that. I knew that there were things that I didn’t know, and I knew there were a bunch of things that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know. So Julie was a first hire. She sort of served as a consulting czar on the piece because not all tribes behave the same way and there’s not one Native consultant that can tell you what the Apaches and the Navajo and the Shoshone and the Paiute and the Ute did. So she went and found us Paiute and Shoshone and Ute consultants. And to Netflix’s credit, they supported that, which requires time and money to get it right. We worked really hard, from moccasins to language to the materials that the teepees were built out of, all the clothes, making sure that the actors and the extras were all Indigenous and that those boxes were checked. And if something wasn’t right and Julie didn’t like it, we wouldn’t do it.
The brutality of the series has been a talking point of many conversations, but it appears there was a conscious decision not to visually show the sexual violence that Sara and Two Moons faced. Can you talk about that choice?
We definitely wanted to try and capture a certain intensity of violence in the show. One thing that Julie kept saying to me throughout the show — because I would ask her, “Is this too much?” — is, “You have no idea. This isn’t enough. What you think the world was like back then and what you’re capturing, it’s not as violent as it really was.” It was an incredibly violent time, and we wanted to capture that violence.
I’ve done several projects with fairly febrile violent sequences in them, from Lone Survivor to Patriot’s Day to Deepwater Horizon, and those were real stories. I had to meet the family members of the people who died, the wives or the husbands and the parents, sometimes the children, and almost always I would be asked, “how am I going to portray the violence and is it going to be too much?” And what I would always say is, “I believe that one of the jobs of a filmmaker is to see a line where if you cross it, you enter into something that you can’t reclaim yourself from, and I don’t always know what that line is, but I feel like I have a pretty good instinct of it, and I try not to cross it.” So I might push it, but I won’t cross it, and with those two scenes you’re referring to, the sexual assaults, I knew that we were pushing up on a line. I think to have gone any further — and Two Moons, she actually never gets raped, it’s an attempted rape, but she stops it before it happens, which was important to me — I felt like showing any more with the assault of Sara would have pushed me, personally, across the line that I wouldn’t be comfortable with. And I wanted to make sure that after that scene, Sara was able to get payback, which she did.
Another thing, and I know I’m not always supposed to talk about this because people don’t want to talk about the R-word and I understand that, but I did spend a lot of time working with Betty Gilpin because I said to her, “I need your help in helping me understand how to recover your character from this assault, and I don’t know.” As a man, I certainly don’t know. And she ended up writing the line, which I think is an incredible line, where after the assault, Isaac tries to comfort her and he doesn’t know what to say, and she tells him, “Stop. Don’t do that. Don’t offer me pity. Don’t underestimate me.” That’s what those men back there did, and we saw what happened to them. And when Betty showed me that line, I was like, “That’s it.” I thought that was a very powerful way to help get that character back on track a bit.
Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) and Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) have an interesting story arc where he spends the entire series trying to find her and she, even after no longer being held captive by the natives, doesn’t want to be found. Talk about reuniting them in that finale death scene.
Mark L. Smith wrote that final scene, and it was something kind of out of Romeo and Juliet — sort of, but kind of on acid. I remember when I read that moment when they finally reunite, I got chills. I think I gasped, which I don’t do, and I called Mark and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, really?” And he just said, “Yes,” and I said, “Okay, I guess.” That, to me, of all the brutality and tragedy in the show, that’s the moment that hits me the hardest. It’s, again, certainly pushing an envelope in terms of violence and intensity, but as Julie O’Keefe says, it’s not anything compared to what it was really like. Women have called since it’s come out and said they really appreciated that Abish, who is this woman being forced into a marriage and forced into a life she didn’t want, was able to at least experience a real wild freedom for a moment, and that might’ve been preferable to her, that brief moment, than a life as one of eight Mormon wives in Salt Lake City doing whatever those women had to do every day.
It was also devastating to see Isaac’s character be killed in the very last minutes of the finale after guiding Sara, Devin and Two Moons almost completely to their original destination. Did you always see that as the ending?
We started the show without knowing exactly who’s going to live and who’s going to die at the end, and up until maybe two weeks before we got close to the ending, we didn’t know. Everyone was on the table. No one was safe, and I mean that, like no one. Mark and I would talk about it a lot, and Eric Newman, our other producer. I would call Bella [Bajaria], our boss at Netflix, and say, “What do you think?” And we’d be talking about the merits and keeping everyone alive or killing everyone. The ending that we picked was what we ended up thinking was probably the best. But who knows? I was sad, and Taylor was sad when we told him.
Isaac feels ripe for a prequel series.
We’re talking about it right now. Good pick. That’s the way we’d go if we do it, and I don’t know if we will, but that would be the way we would go.
Does that mean there’s no chance of following Sara, Devin and Two Moons as they journey on to California in a second season?
Well, one of the challenges there is that Shawnee and Preston, the actors that played Two Moons and Devin, we had enough trouble because the strike got us. We had to shut down for five months, and Preston went full puberty on us and gained three inches [in height] and his voice dropped and he started having hair on his face. It would be a real big time jump to keep that crew going, but the idea of looking backwards is really interesting to me.
A lot of people were surprised by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay’s cameo in episode one. How did that come about?
Jim is a friend of mine and an incredible human being, and I’ve been working on a documentary about him. He is a huge Robert Redford fan and a fan of Jeremiah Johnson and when I told him about this, he got so excited, so I was like, come on down. And Jim naturally looks that way. He looks like he could have been thriving in 1857. He’s just got that kind of Americana, old school quality. Sometimes you bring in people you like to do cameos and then the studio or whoever starts watching it and they’re like, “Come on, man, get real. This doesn’t work.” But everyone really liked him, and I was happy because it could have been cut. It wasn’t an essential, but it was a nice little moment, and he’s a great guy. Deserves another Lombardi trophy.
I have to ask about the Friday Night Lights reboot while I have you. Where do things currently stand?
We’re writing the script now. Jason Katims is taking the lead and I’m working with him on the script and Brian Grazer is producing it. That’s kind of the original creative team behind the series. Friday Night Lights, it’s going to be a reboot so it’s going to be a new cast and show life in 2025/2026, which is so much different than when we were doing the original show. There were no phones then — think about it — so things have changed. But we’ve been hearing the calls for a reboot for a long time, and sometimes it takes a while to get everybody in sync, but we feel like where the world is today versus where it was when we started filming, there’s a whole new world to look at and great new stories to tell. So it’ll be familiar, but it will be entirely different.
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American Primeval is now streaming on Netflix. Read THR‘s feature with Dane DeHaan on the scalping scene and his season journey, as well as the team on depicting the violence in the series.
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