Pete Berg (‘Boys in Blue’ director) on the star of his docuseries being murdered: ‘It hit me like a freight train’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“I went to a college in St. Paul, Minnesota, a school called Macalester College in the late 80s,” says actor, producer and filmmaker Pete Berg. “I lived in the Twin Cities for five years of my life. They were some of the happiest years of my life. It was kind of a magical time. Prince was just kind of blowing up and we used to go see Prince at First Avenue, a great music venue in Minneapolis. My memories were of an incredibly peaceful place. A very nice place. I remember a real diversity. When the George Floyd killing occurred, I was devastated. Like many filmmakers, writers and artists, I felt compelled to have some sort of creative response.” Watch our video interview above.
Berg read a New York Times article about the Minneapolis North High football program that is coached by Minneapolis police officers. The school with a predominantly Black student body was near the area Floyd was killed and had an increasingly successful football team. With that premise, Berg began work on his four-part Showtime docuseries, “Boys in Blue.”
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“The George Floyd killing was opening up all of these polarized views on guns, on policing, on race, on education,” Berg explains. “‘Depending on which news service you were watching, you were fed the company line. My goal and my hope was that by going in, in a film vérité style of filmmaking, meaning we’re just going to try to capture the truth — push the news cycles aside and immerse ourselves in a more complex, nuanced reality. What is it like to be living in an American city today? What is it like to be living in a neighborhood like Minneapolis North?”
Three days before filming was to end, Berg received a phone call that the 15-year old star quarterback in his film, Deshaun Hill, was gunned down in broad daylight while walking to the bus stop after school. Berg, who created the TV show “Friday Night Lights,” says, “The one thing you know about sports is that you never know what’s going to happen. I was talking about the unpredictability of a football season. I was aware that you don’t know what’s going to happen to characters off the field, but when I got the call…the reality that you don’t know what you’re going to get when you go into unscripted territory hit hard. It hit me like a freight train.”
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