After hits like Friday Night Lights and Painkiller, Peter Berg, along with Eric Newman (Narcos) and Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), transports us to brutal 1857 America in the limited series American Primeval on Netflix. Starring Taylor Kitsch, Betty Gilpin, Dane DeHaan, Saura Lightfoot-Leon, Derek Hinkey and Kim Coates, as different cultures, religions and communities converge, survival and control is the goal amid the Utah War.
As Berg explained to Yahoo Canada, he had been talking to Smith about working on a period piece, with both of them drawn to the 1850s specifically. They thought it was a “ripe opportunity” to look at a period of American history people “don’t know much about.”
“This is not for the faint eye,” Kim Coates, who plays leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint, or Mormon Church, Brigham Young, said. “How anyone survived in 1857 is still beyond me.”
To start off American Primeval, Sara Rowell (Gilpin) is really at the centre of the story, travelling with her son, Devin, from Philadelphia to California to get to Devin’s father. But when she’s late for her journey, left without an escort as the conflict between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the Shoshone and the U.S. army escalates, the reluctant Isaac (Kitsch) accompanies Sara and Devin.
Through the course of this story we meet more characters at Fort Bridger, all facing their own form of crisis.
(L to R) Preston Mota as Devin Rowell, Taylor Kitsch as Isaac, and Betty Gilpin as Sara Rowell in Episode 101 of American Primeval. (Matt Kennedy/NETFLIX)
For Kitsch, his collaboration with Berg has almost reached a 20-year history, playing the iconic Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights from 2006 to 2011, and working with Berg multiple between between that series and American Primeval.
“Obviously, there’s a shorthand now,” Kitsch said. “The material he goes after, a lot of the stories I want to be a part of as well, from Painkiller to this.”
“There’s just kind of a brotherhood that’s kind of organically situated itself in my life. I love the way he works. I love the improv. I love the environment he creates for you, to allow yourself to fail and not feel like a failure. He does push the actors, and there’s got to be an enhanced trust because of the improv that’s waiting to happen on set.”
(L to R) Betty Gilpin as Sara Rowell and Preston Mota as Devin Rowell in Episode 102 of American Primeval (Matt Kennedy/NETFLIX)
‘A character who had wandered into the wrong story’
American Primeval is particularly savage and violent, but for Gilpin, there’s this lasting emphasis on her character’s love for her son and determination to protect him at all costs.
“I sort of thought about it like, … it should feel like a character who had wandered into the wrong story, … like she should be in a Brontë novel or something, and not here,” Gilpin said. “And that the circumstances of her life and the thing that she’s running from, and running towards, are so heart-poundingly important to her that she has no choice but to be here.”
“I wanted it to feel truthful and authentic that a high society city girl in 1857, … she shouldn’t survive a day out here, but it’s sort of through this connection that she makes with Isaac and her love for her child that sort of fuels her over those mountains.”
Adding to the representation of Sara’s determination to survive this journey with her son, unlike many of the men in this series, Gilpin’s costume isn’t really the most optimal winter attire.
“Seeing the camera guys in full North Face gear head to tow, I’m in basically a cloth diaper,” Gilpin said.
What strongly comes through American Primeval is really how relentlessly dark it is in violent, particularly in the winter setting of this story. Kitsch highlighted that with Berg at the helm, he pushes the actors “even more.”
“[There were] days where it’s like, J.J. Dashnaw, my double, who’s been my double for like 14 years now, we’re doing this fight along this river and it’s real snow, a few feet high, and there’s days where it’s like, you go to set and you don’t know if you’re going to be fighting it,” he said. “Even though it’s not written, but it’s just there, and it’s cinematic, and it would make the show even more raw, and it’s so inviting.”
“We have a safety advisor going, ‘You guys are allowed in that water for 20 seconds before hypothermia sets in.’ … We just love pushing each other and it’s those kind of days that are so physical that it’s like, OK we’re going to have one take, we’re going to fight through this river and we’re going to get it. Let’s grab three cameras and shoot it. And it’s those kind of days that you love, because nothing puts you in the moment more than that.”
Gilpin said that while some of these elements were a “unique challenge” it ended up being a “gift.”
“When you’re filming on a soundstage for an entire project, there’s so much that’s controlled, and then all the pressure is on the acting,” she said.
“There were so many variables to this. The weather, the clouds, the horses, the stunts, the fire, the guns, that we realized the onus was up to us to really know our characters and be right there for each other, because there was so much else going on around us. So there was always a kind of stillness to be found just by looking at each other and being in the scene together.”
Derek Hinkey as Red Feather in Episode 103 of American Primeval (Matt Kennedy/NETFLIX)
‘It touched the soul knowing that somebody’s willing to listen’
A critical component of making American Primeval was having Indigenous cultural consultant and project adviser, Julie O’Keefe, come on board for the project to ensure the Shoshone, Southern Paiute and Ute are represented accurately.
“I really feel like for my part of this, I am gathering the best people possible from the Nations that are involved in this, and my job is to aid the director with his vision on how he wants to build his story,” Okeefe said.
“They came in and had a lot of one-on-one interaction with Pete, really looking at the overall picture of how each one of their stories was a part of this. … Also too, we had historians on set. So they would, for the Shoshone village, the props, they’re looking down at the setup of the sets. It is really down to a lot of the details. I saw, a really wonderful collaboration between those three nations and Pete.”
“I think for any filmmaker, knowing that you’re going into territory where you’re going to try and represent different Native American elements, tribes, and all that goes along with that, as a filmmaker it’s a responsibility,” Berg added. “There’s a lot of ways we could go wrong and get it wrong, and it’s kind of a situation where you’ve got to ask yourself what you don’t know that you don’t know, and understand that there’s a lot, and then find somebody as talented as Julie to help you with that.”
“We want to be true, particularly to some of the violence that occurred across the board at that time, but … we knew that we needed help, and we were very open to that. And Julie brought an incredible team of consultants in and I basically just said, ‘Thank you. Tell me what I don’t know.'”
For Derek Hinkey who plays Red Feather, part of a group of who wants to defend the Shoshone against those who have attacked, he shared that stepping into his character involved really tapping into his roots and “traditional ways.”
“I grew up on the reservation, incorporating my upbringing and my traditional beliefs, and what it is to be an authentic Native American,” Hinkey said. “It was a little bit challenging going back, knowing that this stuff really happened to my bloodline. It’s a genetic memory for me. So I was learning to balance the craft and the skill set, and back to my traditional ways.”
Hinkey also highlighted that ‘”the door was open,” with Berg, head of make up Howard Berger, and hair department head Johnny Villanueva, always asking questions.
“It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to sit here and tell you what your people were like,’ they asked me, ‘How do you do this?’ And I think that was a beautiful thing,” he said. “It was almost a seeing a turn of, … this isn’t what we think you guys are, we want to know what you are, and that is something that, I’ll always have big respect and big love for Pete, becausehe’s the general on this, and he gave everybody the the green light to listen.”
“For me, it touched the soul knowing that somebody’s willing to listen to me, to us, and not tell us who we are.”