How TK got cast in “Savages”

“As for Battleship and the test that Berg’s Friday Night Lights discovery Taylor Kitsch faces this year leading that film, John Carter and Savages, Berg thinks that like Kitsch’s Friday Night Lights character Tim Riggins, he’ll find a way to score. “He’s for real, a young Bruce Willis, a good looking athletic guy who is smart, sarcastic, self deprecating, and willing to fuck things up five times and get it right on the sixth,” Berg said. “He has the ability to move from humor to heroic behavior. The first person who saw Battleship footage was Oliver Stone, because he was thinking of casting Taylor in Savages. Now, if I had to make a list of 10 guys who’d see this film first, I wouldn’t imagine Oliver being on it. He watched half an hour, and left with a quiet smile. The next day he cast Taylor in Savages.” Berg plans for Kitsch to play one of the four roles in Lone Survivor, an adaptation of the book by Marcus Luttrell that Berg will make his next film at Universal. The film tells the harrowing story of how he and his Navy SEAL team members fought to stay alive after being ambushed in Afghanistan in 2005 by Taliban forces during a covert mission in the Hindu Kush mountain region, where the team went to kill a terrorist leader.”

More from Peter Berg here.