He’s been spending most of his time on the high seas recently, marshalling the aquatic conflicts of Battleship. But with the sci-fi pic now sailing its long post-production course to screens, Peter Berg is turning his attention back to the project he was developing before the board-game based blockbuster sank everything else on his schedule: Navy SEAL drama Lone Survivor.
The film has been adapted from the book co-written by former SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who was part of a covert squad in Afghanistan in 2005. When the team was ambushed, a horrific firefight broke out, which claimed the lives of almost everyone.
So what could have spurred Berg to pick up work on the film once more? Let’s just say a recent event featuring another squad of real-life SEALs might have had something to do with Universal getting him to plan a January shoot and hire Battleship’s Taylor Kitsch to play one of the four troopers who fight for their lives.
"They leaned right into it with me," Berg tells Deadline. "Bin Laden's death has cleared the way for this, a movie that will be an unapologetically patriotic film that honours and pays homage to an incredible group of badass guys who do this. The film will be a bit like Black Hawk Down, but it will focus on the quartet, which is fewer guys than that film. The mission was similar to the assassination mission that got bin Laden, but things got complicated when they ran into three kids and an old man," he said. "Under the rules of engagement, they could have killed them, but they decided to let them go and take their chances, even though they knew these people would likely talk."
Thanks to the recent events, Hollywood has discovered a new passion for Middle East military films, with Disney trademarking the term SEAL Team Six so it can develop new projects based around the team that took out bin Laden, and Hurt Locker collaborators Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal shifting a SEAL-focused drama into first place on their schedule…