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" Whether he&amp;#039;s acting, directing, or producing, Peter Berg tends to set his stories in two arenas that showcase masculinity at its most primal: sports and war. His career \u2014 and for a guy who looks and sounds perpetually hungover, he&amp;#039;s intimidatingly prolific \u2014 is one long study in American manhood. Or rather, one long lesson in it: He worries that we&amp;#039;ve gone soft as a culture, and has taken it upon himself to present us with role models that embody increasingly quaint virtues like courage, hard work, and fortitude. (Think Coach Taylor, from Friday Night Lights, or boxing trainer Freddie Roach in HBO&amp;#039;s On Freddie Roach.) A Navy brat who took up boxing in his teens, Berg has exhibited a few of those himself, notably perseverance: After having helmed last year&amp;#039;s mega-dud Battleship, he&amp;#039;s bounced back with a surprise late addition to the Oscar conversation, Lone Survivor, an adaptation of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell&amp;#039;s memoir, starring Mark Wahlberg. We spoke over the phone about that film, his new HBO Sports documentary series State of Play, and his mission to toughen America up. Step one: stop playing Call of Duty and pick up a football. ESQUIRE.COM: You directed the first 30 for 30 documentary for ESPN. How is HBO&amp;#039;s State of Play going to be different? PETER BERG: We want to try to be a bit more theme-oriented. 30 for 30 does an incredible job of telling specific stories, like the Gretzky trade. [Eds note: &amp;quot;King&amp;#039;s Ransom,&amp;quot; which Berg directed in 2009.] We&amp;#039;re gonna try to stay away from particular stories and be a bit more concept-oriented. Hopefully whatever my particular style and tone are, those will be enough to create some space for us to exist. But I&amp;#039;m obviously a big 30 for 30 fan. ESQ: What topics can we expect out of State of Play? PB: The first one [Trophy Kids] is about over-parenting in youth sports. The second one is gonna be on the NFL trying to change its culture. Trying to literally slow down the intensity of violence of the game. ESQ: That&amp;#039;s interesting, because all of your projects deal with competitiveness, sports, war, violence... PB: I know, what&amp;#039;s wrong with me? Jesus. I wanna to do a love story in Paris. ESQ: How would that go? PB: I don&amp;#039;t know. It would probably end up with a lot of violence. I have to figure it out. ESQ: You&amp;#039;ve mentioned that you think America needs to toughen up, but where do you stand on the debate surrounding violence in football and boxing? PB: I mean, it&amp;#039;s case by case for me. I think football does need to figure out a way to get the head out of the game. That doesn&amp;#039;t mean I don&amp;#039;t think that America needs to toughen up a bit as a culture in many other ways. But I do think that football needs to figure out a way of playing without the head. ESQ: What about this first episode? It&amp;#039;s pretty dramatic. Like Dance Moms, but with Sports Dads. What&amp;#039;s your take on those overbearing parents? Are they just trying to live their sports dreams through their kids? PB: I think that&amp;#039;s part of it. It&amp;#039;s not just the dads; it&amp;#039;s the moms also. There&amp;#039;s clearly a vicarious element to these parents. What we see in this documentary is pretty extreme. I think that many of us with kids that are playing sports kind of relate to the frenzy that youth sports in America are becoming. The whole environment of youth sports has become, like so many other things in our country, so monetized, over-hyped, and so much pressure is being put on kids&amp;#039; athletic performance at a very young age that the idea of play and fun is becoming virtually anathema. ESQ: You say America&amp;#039;s gone a bit soft. What are some of the symptoms of that? PB: I just think that we live in a culture where everybody gets a trophy, you know? The idea that you can come in last in a soccer league or a flag football league and you get a trophy as a kid, I don&amp;#039;t know that that&amp;#039;s necessarily the right way to treat competition. I think that we generally eat poorly as a country. We don&amp;#039;t exercise enough. We&amp;#039;re entitled. We expect a lot without necessarily being willing to give much. One of the many reasons I&amp;#039;m so attracted to that Navy SEAL community is the work ethic and the code that they live by. That&amp;#039;s not a political code. It&amp;#039;s a way of life. It&amp;#039;s a belief that you should live life hard, and you should experience life, and you should participate actively in your life. And make choices and live by them. ESQ: So I guess I have to take down my Most Improved Player soccer trophy from when I was eight. PB: I mean, most improved, now that might actually be worth something. The idea that you can lose and win, though, that might not make a lot of sense. The Navy SEALs have a phrase: It pays to be a winner. They&amp;#039;re encouraged to try and win. And in war, you don&amp;#039;t get a trophy for coming in second. ESQ: As a guy who&amp;#039;s become a public advocate of American manhood, what&amp;#039;s your take on war video games? PB: Pathetic. Pathetic. Keyboard courage. Can&amp;#039;t stand it. The only people that I give a Call of Duty get-out-of-jail-free card to is the military. They&amp;#039;re out there serving and they&amp;#039;re bored and they want to entertain themselves? Okay, maybe. Kids? Uh-uh. ESQ: Navy SEALs have a standing invitation to your house in Montana, and you&amp;#039;ve spent a lot of time with them. Do they play those games? PB: Some of them do. But I tell them I think it&amp;#039;s pathetic. I think anyone that sits around playing video games for four hours... It&amp;#039;s weak. Get out, do something. ESQ: You put your actors through the training for Lone Survivor. Did you go through it yourself? PB: Not so much. I went to Iraq and I went to embed with the SEAL platoon and watch them work. The training that the actors went through was never to try and equal what SEALs go through. We couldn&amp;#039;t do it. I couldn&amp;#039;t do it. The training was to learn how to use the equipment and to do your best job to imitate a Navy SEAL. It wasn&amp;#039;t to ever become a Navy SEAL. The actors all learned to shoot weapons and got in good shape, and their body fat went away and their abs got ripped and they got strong and all that, just as a product of mimicking that lifestyle. We never set out to try and replicate that personally. If we could have done that, we probably would have been Navy SEALs. ESQ: That said, did the actors ever think that even imitating was too hard? PB: No, they were up for the experience. But again, very respectful that what Marcus Luttrell and his brothers who were killed went through is something that you don&amp;#039;t kick up in three months. ESQ: Doing Lone Survivor after Battleship seems like a textbook application of the one-for-them, one-for-you rule of Hollywood. Is that how you see it? PB: You know, there are aspects of Battleship that I&amp;#039;m very proud of, and we never set out to do a film believing that we&amp;#039;re not 100-percent enthusiastic, and that we don&amp;#039;t believe in it, and that we&amp;#039;re not gonna do everything we can to have a really satisfying creative experience and hopefully a financial experience for the investors. It doesn&amp;#039;t always work that way. But no, I wouldn&amp;#039;t say it was just one-for-them, one-for-me. I loved making Battleship. I loved learning about the Big Navy. Some of it obviously didn&amp;#039;t work as well as I would have hoped, but there were things about that movie that I&amp;#039;m very proud of. ESQ: Any desire to go back to your comedic roots? I loved Very Bad Things and Great White Hype, but we haven&amp;#039;t seen too much pure comedy from you since. PB: I have a joke in Lone Survivor. When the kid brings a duck into Luttrell, that&amp;#039;s my one joke. At this point, I&amp;#039;m looking for stories that interest me. If it&amp;#039;s a comedy and I&amp;#039;m interested, that&amp;#039;s great. I&amp;#039;m really, at this point, about the story. ESQ: What&amp;#039;s your favorite sports movie? PB: I&amp;#039;m just thinking for a sec. Probably Slap Shot. ESQ: Why&amp;#039;s that? PB: It just got me. I just thought that the Hanson brothers were the most awesome characters in the history of film, and Paul Newman&amp;#039;s a beast. I just love that film. ESQ: What about your favorite war movie? PB: Probably Das Boot. That really blew my mind. Private Ryan I thought was quite good also. ESQ: What are you working on next? PB: Right now the next thing is a TV show for HBO called The Leftovers, which I&amp;#039;m doing with Damon Lindelof. It&amp;#039;s based on a book by Tom Perrotta and it explores what would happen if on a random day at a random time, two-and-a-half percent of the world&amp;#039;s population instantly disappeared, and it&amp;#039;s about how the world might move on from an event like that. It&amp;#039;s pretty intense. PLUS:  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a26257/peter-berg-interview/>