Peter Berg Defends Portrayal of Oil Workers as Heroes in 'Deepwater Horizon'
Peter Berg is about to get worked up. He’s “100 percent” aware of the criticism that the marketing of his new thriller, Deepwater Horizon, paints its characters as heroes despite the fact that they were at the center of the biggest oil spill — and one of the greatest ecological disasters — in U.S. history.
Berg feels there is an unfair public perception of the workers onboard the titular oil rig — particularly the 11 men who died in the 2010 explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — which he sites as a primary reason he wanted to make the film.
“It’s such ignorance,” Berg (Lone Survivor, Friday Night Lights) told Yahoo Movies Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival, shortly before Deepwater premiered to anti-oil pipeline protestors outside the screening and then strong reviews from critics. “People don’t understand that these guys who died were just doing their jobs. And all these armchair quarterbacks, I promise you, they use gasoline.
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“Everyone uses fuel, so it’s hypocritical to say ‘Anyone who works in fuel is bad.’ Well, OK, you use fuel, so you’re full of s–t. But the reality is they don’t understand the truth.… Those people who are saying, ‘Heroes? There are no heroes on that rig, these are greedy oil people.’ No they weren’t. These were simple guys, family men, doing their jobs, trying to be as safe as they could.”
A hybrid of famous disaster films Poseidon and The Towering Inferno, Deepwater Horizon is a tense and riveting docudrama that also packs serious emotional heft. The film replays the events of April 20, 2010 through the eyes of chief engineer technician Mike Williams (Mark Walhlberg), a Texas father who ultimately had to leap 10 stories into fiery water to escape the sinking rig.
Berg became interested in the story after watching a 60 Minutes interview with the real Williams, who recalled the recalled the horror of the events leading up to the oil spill and talked about praying he would survive to return to his wife (portrayed in the film by Kate Hudson) and young daughter. “I thought it was going to be more on the oil spill, but it wasn’t, it was about the 14 hours that lead up to the blow-out,” Berg remembered. “It told a completely different story.”
The filmmaker — who ultimately worked from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand based on a New York Times article by David Rohde and Stephanie Saul — then began meeting with the families of Williams’s 11 shipmates who died. They were initially ice cold to the idea of Hollywood reenacting the tragedy.
“They were really mad at first, a bunch of them, because they thought we were going to make a movie about the pelicans and the oil spill,” said Berg, referencing the birds seen covered in petroleum in the accident’s aftermath. Berg understood their anger. “These people are going through incredible grief because they lost their dad and they lost their husband, this horrible pain,” he explained. “And people think their husbands caused the oil spill. So people [say to them], ‘Oh your husband died? Well, he’s a f–king asshole.’
“So imagine now you’re a woman with a kid and not only did your husband die, you can’t even tell anyone about it because if you do, they give you a look like, ‘Well I guess he got what he deserved.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that’s f–ked up. That’s just wrong.‘”
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Berg points out that Deepwater Horizon, as shown in the film, actually had actually won an award from the Minerals Management Service in 2008 for its safety record, and had operated seven years without accident. “They never had a drop of oil spilled,” the director said.
The villains of the film Deepwater Horizon could not be any more pointedly portrayed. That would be BP, the oil and gas company operating the rig, and its representatives (lead by John Malkovich’s Donald Vidrine) who are shown in the film pressuring the rig’s installation manager (Kurt Russell) to move forward despite clear risk. BP ultimately pleaded guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter and agreed to pay $18.7 billion in fines.
“They wouldn’t talk to us,” Berg said about correspondence with the British company. “They were very effective at blocking us during the course of filming. We’d get permission to go on a rig, go film on a rig, and at the last minute it would be pulled. We’d get permission to go on ships that tend to the rig… it’d get pulled. Employees that were going to be consultants would get pulled.”
It was ultimately corporate greed and recklessness that lead to the disaster, said Berg emphatically, “through BP’s error, BP pushed them… [The victims] died trying to stop that. That’s heroic to me. That’s very heroic… They all could’ve jumped off the f–king boat. They could have got off into the lifeboats and gone. They could’ve run away and lived.”
Berg pauses, then adds with an apologetic sigh, “I get worked up on that one.”
Deepwater Horizon opens Sept. 30. Watch the trailer:
