Revving The RunDown: Peter Berg Ascends The Rock for Action Comedy


By Harry Haun

In his not-so-long-ago youth, he was a pizza deliveryman, a dockworker and a model. Then he went to Hollywood and continued accordingly. Many might consider this looking through the wrong end of the viewfinder, but not Peter Berg. He was getting an education—from the ground up. “I worked in every different department there is on film crews at one point or another,” beams the 41-year-old Berg. “Grip, camera assistant, electrician, prop man, stand-in, craft service, production assistant—I did pretty much everything.” And, yes—because of his skin-deep, movie-star good looks—that included becoming a movie star. (The Last Seduction and A Midnight Clear are, to date, the pick of his two-dozen litter.)

But through this whole swirl of profession-switching, what Berg really wanted to do was direct—a big leap he took in 1998 by going the Sturges or Stallone route of writing his own ticket. Producers so liked an original screenplay of his that they give him a shot at calling the shots, resulting in the well-received Very Bad Things with Christian Slater and Cameron Diaz.

From that point on, there was no stopping him. It has just taken time. Feature No. Two (but who’s counting?) reaches the movie marketplace on Sept. 26, and wannabe box-office challengers are keeping their distance. Universal Pictures’ The Rundown is a big bruiser of an action comedy, showing a distinctly new side of The Rock (aka WWF superstar Dwayne Johnson). It happens to be the title performance. “Rock’s character,” Berg explains, “is what we call a retrieval expert. He runs things down for people. If you need something that’s hard to get, he runs it down for you.” In this case, he’s running down Seann William Scott, a rich kid on a perpetual treasure hunt who is closing in on his first valuable find in a long-lost gold mine just when The Rock arrives to bring him back (preferably alive) from Brazil.

The rest of the film is a lively tussle between them and the evil-kingpin-in-residence (Christopher Walken).

Most of Berg’s time—in the five years between pictures—was spent on Truck 44, an action piece about five New York firemen plotting a robbery.

It never left the station. He wrote the script himself and was preparing to direct it when September 11 sent the flick reeling into turnaround. It is currently “in development” at Fox, festering. “I think the idea is strong, and it’s something I’d love to do,” he admits, but there’s a distant tone in his voice.

“When Fox backed out, I was frustrated and not sure I knew what I wanted to do. Then The Rundown came along, and it just seemed like the right thing for me to do.” Another factor: Berg thinks big. “I liked the idea of doing an adventure film—a big action adventure that would enable me to get into the business of big-budget moviemaking.” As he saw it, The Rock was the best way to get this big ball rolling.

“I met him when he hosted ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Spent a week with him and came away convinced he was a new kind of action actor who could carry a film. He can be very self-deprecating, and that’s refreshing.

I knew I could find some really comedic elements to work with in him.” Indeed, directing The Rock was a lark, Berg insists—mostly a matter of reining him in a bit from his usual double-decibel brand of wrestling-acting. “The thing about Rock is he has been performing on a pretty grand level for a long time. If you look at some of his wrestling matches—particularly the drama that goes on between the actual matches—he’s quite good. If you watch him, he delivers these monologues and has 30,000 or 40,000 people sitting in the palm of his hand. He played the character of The Rock too perfectly.” That praise, however, comes with a cautionary, don’t-try-this-at-home note: “I don’t know if I’d recommend this as a road. I guess it would be a rough road to take. I think whatever works, works. It worked for him, but I don’t know if I’d recommend an aspiring Juilliard graduate spend five years touring the country, wrestling. That might be tough.” But there are definite advantages to going that route.

The Rock rates $12.5 million for this title character, up $7.5 million from his previous (also title) role, The Scorpion King, which spun off from The Mummy Returns. The bounty hunter he plays in The Rundown is not just his first contemporary role—it’s the first time he got there without benefit of CGI. Contemporary Hawaiian jungles pass rather plausibly for the contemporary Brazilian jungles in this script by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt. (Berg just tweaked it a little.) “When you’re in the middle of a jungle, you’re pretty much in the middle of a jungle,” Berg reasons. “You can’t see much anyway.” The decision not to lens in South America was made quite quickly and easily—on June 14, 2002—as Berg, producer Kevin Misher, their line producer and their production designer scouted locales in the wilds along the Amazon.

Backcountry bandidos swarmed down, “introduced themselves to us very aggressively” and relieved the quartet of their car, cash and laptops—much to the chagrin and mortification of the Brazilian Film Commission, which had been counting on the mega-bucks that the movie company would have pumped into the area’s economy. “It’s too bad,” says Berg, “because I think it was a wonderful area. I look forward to going back to Rio and São Paulo and seeing those cities, but this was a rough area, there’s no question about that. One of the reasons I got into this business was for the adventure of experiencing new things.

I love moving into new worlds of culture. It’s thrilling to go into another world and try to assimilate and learn and have a cultural experience, rather than driving out to the studio backlot. I find it to be more inspiring.” These days, Berg is deep into the joys of Odessa, TX, adapting and directing Friday Night Lights for producer Brian Grazer, based on the book about a small Texas town’s obsession with high-school football. (You may recall, from that cheerleader-murdering mom, that Texas takes the sport seriously—inordinately seriously.) At present, he’s patching nine previous drafts of different screenplays together into one cohesive whole and casting about for “six relatively unknown young guys” to play the leads. Second unit cranks up in November, and it’ll all be shot in Odessa and Austin—bandidos permitting. Berg sees his acting career receding, mostly because there are no roles around that can compare to the real-life one of director. He’s actually hard-pressed to say what aspect of it he enjoys most. “I think it’s the totality of the experience. You go through so many different mini-experiences when you’re directing a film. Right now, for example, I’m down here by myself in Austin, TX, spending my days with the West Lake High School football team. It’s just me and the football team. It’s a chance for me to quietly observe and learn and watch. There’s nobody else around, and there’s something calm and refreshing about that. I know in two months it’ll be a whole different experience, because there’ll be hundreds of crew people on the case. The emphasis will be on them rather than on these kids. There’s something I like about this quiet experience of early developing, but there’s also something really fun about being in the middle of battle with 300 people on your crew and 2,000 extras, and you’re trying to churn out a film and get a bunch of complex shots and make your day. There’s something invigorating about doing that, too.”