How ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ and an Ice Ax Inspired Peter Berg’s Epic Netflix Western ‘American Primeval’

Director Peter Berg‘s new Netflix series “American Primeval” is an ambitious western epic about the bloody battles that broke out in 1850s Utah between Mormons, immigrant settlers, indigenous tribes and faithless opportunists trying to make money. It’s enormous in its scale and impressive in its ambition, but for Berg, the origins of the massive show were surprisingly simple.

“The genesis was that I was obsessed with ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ and wanted to do something that required us to really go out into the elements,” Berg told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I felt a calling to that kind of challenge.” In addition to Sydney Pollack’s 1972 Western with Robert Redford, there was another starting point that Berg referenced when he met with writer Mark L. Smith. “I have a strange collection of knives and axes and all sorts of things that people give me. I had this big ice ax and I just put the ice ax in his lap and I said, ‘Can you write this as a series?'”

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The resulting show combined the vivid location work of Pollack’s classic with the sense of visceral violence implied by the ice axe, both of which come together in a stunning sequence in episode 1 depicting a bloody attack on a wagon train of Mormon settlers. This set design, based on the real Mountain Meadows Massacre, is presented as one unbroken take, immersing the viewer in the point of view of a single mother and her young son; the choreography is as elaborate and elegant as the action is blunt and powerful.

Although the action looks like one extended shot, Berg says it was actually eight shots that were digitally stitched together – not that that made it any less challenging. “Once that idea is hatched, there are stunts, visual effects, camera operators, wranglers and dozens of people that have to be involved to pull something like this off,” Berg said. He gathered his collaborators in conference rooms where they designed the action using figures and horses before going out on location in New Mexico and walking through it to figure out how to capture all the action in one shot.

“It’s going to be an evolution further complicated by the fact that we wanted to shoot it at sunset,” Berg said. “So as the sun goes down, you know you have maybe a 50-minute window to shoot. We stitched together eight shots in that order, so we figure we’ll shoot two of those shots a day for three days. And you have to be very precise because you get there in the morning and you practice all day, and you wait for the moment when the sun is right where you want it, and then you have to do it almost flawlessly – you get maybe two attempts or three if you’re really lucky.”

For Berg, the pressure was exhilarating, especially as his crew ran the sequence like clockwork. “It’s a kind of filmmaking that I like because everyone is super amped up,” he said. “It’s almost like a live experience and you know if you mess it up you’re going to have a problem because you’re going to have to come back another day and there’s a lot of cost associated with that.” Although Berg said that Netflix was initially skeptical about whether or not he could pull it off, they and everyone else were really happy with the results. “They let us waste 90 percent of a 48-minute day on actual film production.”

Berg’s desire to work in the tradition of “Jeremiah Johnson” and put himself and his cast and crew through the difficult location shoot meant 137 days out in the elements and only three in a studio — and he says that when they got into the studio, hating the company it. “We were so excited to be out there,” says Berg, noting that the cast and crew’s reaction to the soundscape was, “We don’t belong here. We’re not smart enough.”

Throughout the shoot, Berg and his collaborators dealt with harsh weather conditions from freezing cold to extreme heat, keeping the fire department on call the entire time due to the high winds. “It was heartfelt filmmaking, and I loved it,” Berg said, accurately observing that the filmmakers’ experience seeped into the very DNA of the show, clearly conveying the brutality of the conditions in which the characters live. “The stakes are pretty high, like life or death, so I wanted a certain level of physical and emotional discomfort for the actors. There wasn’t a lot of luxury, and I think that helped us create a kind of beautifully uncomfortable tone.”

As uncomfortable as much of “American Primeval” is and as relevant to today’s societal tensions, Berg still feels that he and the show are optimistic about America and its possibilities. “I think that man is a violent animal, and it is very difficult to separate our willingness to engage in acts of violence from our humanity,” Berg said. “It’s just part of who we are. We’ve also made peace. We’ve also survived. We didn’t have social media and the ability to amplify conflict the way we do now, but I don’t think it’s a new. And that gives me comfort because yes, we are capable of love and empathy and compassion. At the end of the day, we are as interested in making peace as we are in making war.”

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