We're catching Peter Berg at an astonishing moment -- like the moment when the last membrane of rubber connects a plane's wheels to the runway before it's airborne. Not since Clint Eastwood breathed life into the western has a director shown such ingenuity in making tired genres riveting again. First came the Football Movie (and NBC drama) Friday Night Lights, which nailed the tension and sex and glory and pain of high school football in a way the previous thousand high school football movies didn't. Now, the War Movie. The Kingdom -- a disturbingly gritty, bravely relevant film about a team of special agents investigating the bombing of an American post in Saudi Arabia -- is more Michael Mann than Michael Bay. Any pyro can blow up Hummers; it takes talent to make it mean something. We asked Berg to choose three vivid images from The Kingdom, which opens in late September, and tell us the story behind each (kind of a director's DVD commentary long before there's a DVD).
Apache Helicopter Flying Over a Convoy
"We couldn't film in Saudi Arabia -- it's culturally prohibited in any form. We wanted to be able to film in the Middle East, so we went to Dubai and asked the government. They said no because there's a terrorist component to the movie. But their sister city, Abu Dhabi, said yes. And Abu Dhabi is somewhat competitive with Dubai, so not only did they say yes, but they pretty much gave us the keys to the city. Nearly anything we asked for they gave us. Almost as a joke, I asked if we could have an Apache helicopter flying thirty feet over a convoy of Suburbans through the middle of downtown Abu Dhabi, and they said, 'Absolutely. No problem. What else?'"
Car Explosion
"The opening of the film is a series of attacks. This is a secondary explosion, which is sort of a common mode of attack in the Middle East now. Small explosions designed to lure rescue workers and police are set off, and then when the rescue workers get there, the [secondary] explosions are set off. This was a giant car bomb, and when we blew it up, we didn't have enough money budgeted to have an explosion with force. This is actually a giant fireball. When we watched the playback, there was this giant explosion but nothing moved -- no car windows broke, no dust was kicked up. So we spent a lot of time redoing pieces of it, adding some computer-generated enhancements. We ended up destroying about 150 vehicles. And we did it all in a parking lot at Arizona State University in Scottsdale. It was very confusing to the locals."
Jamie Foxx, Movie Star
"This is the Emirates Palace, one of the biggest hotels in the world. We used it to double as a Saudi palace. It's massive. We lived there for a month, and it was very traumatizing. You would walk for what felt like miles and not see anyone. One day I hope to go back and remake The Shining there. What I remember most about being in the Middle East with Jamie Foxx is that the Abu Dhabi government insisted that he have security. I was in the restaurant in the hotel having lunch and about twenty-five massive-looking Arab men with machine guns sticking out the bottom of their suits came walking in. And then Jamie came walking in and then another twenty-five behind him. They had given him their highest level of protection -- what they would offer an American president. He also had a food taster and an ambulance following him. I didn't get any. Just Jamie. They knew him."
This story is part of our second annual register of emerging ideas, trends, discoveries, products, people, and obscene gestures you should know about before everyone else does.
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