There's no doubt that Peter Berg is a director on the rise. You don't hand over the keys to a Will Smith superhero flick set for a July 4th release ("Hancock") to just anyone.
In 2007 Berg took Jaime Foxx, Jennifer Garner, and company through a frenetic action flick set in the Middle East, "The Kingdom." The flick performed decently at the box office (and phenomenally if you choose to compare it to other flicks that dealt with the Mid East region in some capacity) and now gets a second chance for your consideration on a newly released DVD. We caught up with Berg the other day to chat up the flick a bit.
MTV: To the viewer this felt like a pretty complex undertaking. Was it the most complex project you'd tackled thus far? Read more...
Ladies and gentlemen, the next huge sci-fi franchise has a director. During an interview with "The Kingdom" director Peter Berg, he confirmed the rumor that "Dune" is coming and that he's the one that will helm it. Calling the plans for him to direct "a done deal," Berg told me that "if it weren't for the writer's strike, we'd be in it right now."
Berg says that while there's no script yet, they have a list of writers they plan to go out to once the strike settles. The helmer called himself "a huge fan of the book" and when asked about the scale of the film, he simply replied, "big big big."
As any fan of the Frank Herbert classic knows, "Dune" received the big screen treatment once before in a divisive David Lynch film. Berg said that while he's "a big fan of Lynch," he believes "that interpretation has left the door wide open for a remake." Read more...
Reporting by Nha Nguyen
Tom Cruise is back in the game! His animated proclamation of love on Oprah's couch had everyone wondering whether he had lost his bachelorhood, or his mind. But who knew that Tom would soon take over United Artists? In hopes to show he's still got the skills to pay UA's bills, comes his first effort to be developed after the whole couch/underperforming "MI:3"/getting fired drama, entitled "Lions for Lambs." Fellow castmate Peter Berg recently gave us the scoop on the top-secret upcoming drama.
"It's set in Afghanistan, and [is] more about the politics that are going on behind the War on Terror. The same writer -- Matthew Carnahan -- [that] wrote 'Lions for Lambs' [also] wrote 'The Kingdom,'" he said of his soon-to-open directorial effort. "[In 'Lambs'] I play the head of the Special Forces, who sends a team into Afghanistan to try to do a mission - and it doesn't go very well." Read more...
Playing the piano earned him an Oscar, his voice landed him a Grammy, and mixing in a few dance moves earned Jamie Foxx one of last year's biggest box-office hits with "Dreamgirls." Now the multi-talented star is graduating to the cello...and who knows where this instrument will take him.
"Man, yeah, I'm getting into it," Foxx said of the intense lessons he recently undertook to become an expert on the long-bowed member of the violin family. "I'm getting it down; it's a trip when you hear the instrument starting to talk to you. It's nice."
The lessons are part of Foxx's immersion into the world of Nathaniel Ayers, the real-life inspiration for the buzz-heavy upcoming film "The Soloist," which also had Robert Downey Jr. join the cast this week. "It's about a schizophrenic person who lives underneath an L.A. freeway," Foxx explained. "But he's a brilliant cellist and violinist." Read more...
