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SUMMER TENTPOLE > BATTLESHIP<br />
BERG<br />
REUNITES WITH<br />
FRIDAY NIGHT<br />
LIGHTS’ TAYLOR<br />
KITSCH<br />
Where did the idea come from to have this battle fought at Pearl<br />
Harbor?<br />
It’s not “Let’s fight it at Pearl Harbor,” per se. It’s fought in the Hawaiian<br />
Islands. I thought of that for a variety of different reasons, one being that it’s<br />
a great contained area for a fight. And Pearl Harbor houses the most famous<br />
battleship of all time, the Missouri. I wanted to see if I could find a way of<br />
bringing the Missouri into the movie, so Hawaii was the logical place.<br />
So it sounds like you wanted to make a Naval film with a lot of<br />
fidelity to the work they do. At the same time, you also have to<br />
turn this into a blockbuster that incorporates aliens. How do you<br />
balance that?<br />
I do believe that the kind of films that are defining my generation of<br />
filmmakers are these big super films that have an extraordinary global<br />
impact. They’re seen by 15-year-old kids in South Korea and 80-year-old<br />
grandparents in Portugal and everywhere in between. There is an element<br />
of fun and spectacle and of escapism to these films. I wanted to do<br />
that, and I didn’t feel that I wanted to do that in a Naval war film where<br />
America fought China and we had sailors dying the way the real sailors<br />
die at sea, which is incredibly violent. People burn to death. People get<br />
ripped limb from limb. They get decapitated. They get eaten by sharks.<br />
It’s very violent, and I didn’t want that. I was thinking about a way to<br />
get a incredible villain into the film, or an incredible opponent. I found<br />
this documentary that Stephen Hawking did about aliens and about<br />
the Goldilocks planets. We’ve identified several planets that have similar<br />
environments to ours. Not only us, but other countries are sending signals—high<br />
frequency signals—to these planets, the goal being to inform<br />
them, that, “Hey, we’re Earth. Here we are—come and visit us.” Stephen<br />
Hawking came out and said, “That’s a horrible idea. If we do succeed at<br />
making contact, the chances of it being peaceful and copacetic are virtually<br />
nonexistent. We should just shut up and keep quiet.” That provided<br />
me with the inspiration to bring aliens in.<br />
You did a lot of scientific consultations during the making of this<br />
film with the Science & Entertainment Exchange. What kinds of<br />
stuff did you talk about with them?<br />
Mostly a lot about Goldilocks planets. What they are and how they operate.<br />
Scientists in the know and astrologists in the know believe there is no<br />
question there’s life out there. If you want to have some sort of rational<br />
method of trying to make contact with that life, you identify with these<br />
planets. I’m not a big fan of alien films where there’s just suddenly a<br />
massive generic invasion and we have no idea why or what the scope or<br />
capabilities of the aliens are. I like the idea in Battleship of taking our<br />
time to really explain how it is that we had this contact. Understanding<br />
what the contact is and what the aliens are. It’s not just these random giant<br />
spaceships the size of New York City hovering over our planet killing<br />
everything in sight.<br />
You also make a point of showing the war from the aliens’ perspective.<br />
How do you pull that off?<br />
It was important to me to try and create aliens that felt somewhat<br />
familiar to us. They come from a planet that is similar to ours. They have<br />
similar respiratory systems, neurological systems. They have emotions.<br />
They clearly act in a way that’s rational; they have specific agendas. They<br />
don’t fight unless attacked. We spent a lot of time trying to create a real<br />
pathology and look for these aliens so they were more than generic killing<br />
machines.<br />
It sounds like you already knew a lot about military strategy, partly<br />
because of your father. Was there anything you learned while putting<br />
the film together or any kind of theories you leaned on more<br />
than others in terms of how this warfare would go?<br />
Having access to newest ships in our Navy, the Aegis Class Destroyers,<br />
was really educational for me. They’ve never been filmed, and I<br />
think very few people even understand what they are. They’re 500-<br />
foot ships with up to 450 people crewing them. They are extremely<br />
complicated, magnificent, technological accomplishments. The men<br />
and women that run them are really, really smart. These ships are<br />
capable of attacking threats with incredible precision from very long<br />
distances. Being able to go on these ships and recreate them, build<br />
them, and use them as a big set piece for our film was awesome and a<br />
new experience for me.<br />
96 BOXOFFICE PRO MAY <strong>2012</strong>
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