This week on the Awards Tour podcast, Rotten Tomatoes Awards Editor Jacqueline Coley sits down with prolific producer, actor, and writer Peter Berg, whose limited series American Primeval topped Netflix’s top 10 for several weeks after its debut in January. The Western series, which was created and written by The Revenant writer Mark L. Smith, features a mother (Betty Gilpin) and her son (Preston Mota) navigating the harsh landscape as they venture across the American West in search of a better life.
Listen in as Berg talks about the grueling shoot that ran for 130 days in remote New Mexico locations, what he learned from the massive success of Friday Night Lights, and what we can expect from his upcoming Rihanna music documentary. Check out all episodes of American Primeval now on Netflix, and we’ll see you on the next stop on the Awards Tour.
Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: Can you talk a little bit about why you wanted to go on this journey into an area of cinema that you haven’t really gone this deep into yet?
Peter Berg: I mean, the idea of a period piece is something that was appealing to me, and that’s something that I have never really done before. And Mark L. Smith, the writer, is someone who had done work in this space — he wrote The Revenant — and he and I were friends, and we’re both big fans of a movie called Jeremiah Johnson that Robert Redford did a long time ago. We really liked the idea of trying to make a show about survival, about just how hard it is to survive, particularly back in 1857, when you could get killed five different ways just walking in the woods to go to the bathroom. And that was something that, for a variety of reasons, was appealing to both of us.
I generally am attracted to the idea of trauma as an experience in much of the stuff that I do, probably because I experienced trauma as a young kid and have a lot of trauma centers in my brain that I’ve always gone back to when I’m working. So things like Lone Survivor or Patriots Day or Deepwater Horizon… My very first film, Very Bad Things was fairly traumatic. And what I’m drawn to is the idea of traumatizing characters and experiencing and presenting trauma to a viewer, and then trying to help them get out of it at the end and explore themes like love and courage over fear and kind of the collective power that comes from people working together and forgiving and those kinds of themes.
American Primeval is streaming now on Netflix.
