{"id":638233,"date":"2026-10-22T17:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/638233\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T17:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:56:09","slug":"peter-bergs-the-mosquito-bowl-football-meets-war-in-wwii-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/638233\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Berg’s ‘The Mosquito Bowl’: Football Meets War in WWII Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOver the course of his 30 years behind the camera, director Peter Berg has garnered the most fame from tackling two subjects: war and football. His latest film, The Mosquito Bowl \u2014 which has its world premiere at AFI Fest on Oct. 22 \u2014 combines a bit of both with a story about collegiate athletes who enlist during World War II and stage a friendly game at Guadalcanal. But a feel-good film this is not.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve done war from the 1800s, from Vietnam and Iraq, and one of the reasons I wanted to make Mosquito Bowl is to remind people that someone dying in World War II looks and sounds the same as people dying in Ukraine or the Middle East today,\u201d Berg explains. \u201cIt\u2019s critical that we understand that war is hell, and that we should do everything we can to avoid it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBerg\u2019s Friday Night Lights television series launched the careers of Jesse Plemons and Michael B. Jordan, among many others, and he\u2019s hoping to do the same with the group of actors whom he assembled to portray the real-life football stars in Mosquito: Breakouts Tom Francis and Ray Nicholson star alongside slightly more veteran actors Bill Skarsgard and Nicholas Galitzine. \u201cI think if Leo [DiCaprio] or Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet had wanted to be in the movie, we could have figured something out,\u201d Berg says, \u201cbut I always gravitate toward guys that aren\u2019t as well known because the audience can lose themselves easier and quicker.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHow do you go about casting new talent? <\/p>\n

\n\tI go to see a lot of movies and plays, and I\u2019m always taking notes. I saw Sunset Boulevard, and I was sitting behind Margot Robbie, and she was absolutely smitten with Tom [Francis]. You could tell he was a superstar. Everybody thought I was crazy because I declared, \u201cTom Francis is going to be in this movie,\u201d and nobody at Netflix<\/a> had heard of him. He\u2019d never acted in a movie before, so I had to audition him and also make sure he could get the American accent right \u2014 and learn football. I was so proud of him and all of the actors because my process is not the easiest.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn what way?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m a little chaotic and insane on set, and we work fast and it\u2019s raw. Most actors are used to a more sensible tempo, where you rehearse and have print marks and you slowly warm up. I\u2019m restrained when it comes to the football scenes, though \u2014 we filmed with a bunch of tough Aussie rugby players, and the guys didn\u2019t like having to stand down when it came time for the big hits. I told them, \u201cI don\u2019t care if you want to go play tackle football in your off time, but I don\u2019t want the crew shut down because we\u2019re stupid and we hurt you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPeter Berg; the director on set with Tom Francis (far right), who plays real-life University of Wisconsin star player Dave Schreiner, in a scene from The Mosquito Bowl<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKane Skennar \/ Netflix<\/p>\n

\n\tHow has the way you film combat scenes evolved, especially as technology advances?<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring Lone Survivor, I started playing around with immersive combat sequences. There\u2019s a 20-minute gunfight, and at the end of it, people would come up to me \u2014 men, women, Democrat, Republican, people with radically different perspectives on the SEALs and American intervention \u2014 and tell me that no matter the politics, they really felt like they were in it. In Mosquito Bowl, I wanted to go further. We have a 32-minute sequence that is more immersive than anything I\u2019ve done.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen you say \u201cimmersive,\u201d what do you mean?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe have cameras trying to keep up with actors who aren\u2019t sure where they\u2019re going, and pyrotechnics, bombs and smoke going off in safe but unpredictable patterns. And then exhaustion and confusion set in, and you capture that. Come to the set and I\u2019ll show you.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie is named after the football game the soldiers play, but it\u2019s ultimately a very gritty portrait of war. Do you worry about selling people on that dichotomy?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe football game was less of an athletic competition than a way for the Marines on Guadalcanal to deal with the carnage they\u2019d seen. It was a brief cup of coffee before they went back into war. But I never thought about what would be more user-friendly for anybody. Something that has always inspired me is the responsibility we have to think about who is sending people into battle and who we are asking to go to war.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the course of his 30 years behind the camera, director Peter Berg has garnered the most fame…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[312886,156,409,1094,111,139,69,283664],"class_list":["post-638233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-afi-fest-2026","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-netflix","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-the-mosquito-bowl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}