Making Of Patriots Day

Three years after the Boston Marathon bombing, Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg reveal how they returned — very sensitively — to the scene of the horrific crime

- Andy Lewis

In spring 2015, Peter Berg began having a series of lunches with survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing. The director had been thinking about making a film about the terrorist attack — dramatizing how, in April 2013, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shocked the nation by detonating a kettle bomb on Boylston Street in Back Bay, leaving three dead and about 260 injured. Still, Berg was having trouble finding the right story to tell and — just as important — the right tone for telling it. He reckoned that talking to people who had lived through the event might give him some inspiration.

It turned out to be a good idea. “I had lunch with Danny Meng,” recalls Berg of his meeting with the immigrant Chinese tech entrepreneur who was carjacked and held hostage by the Tsarnaevs after the attack. “It was probably the most interesting lunch I’ve had in my career. He’s very soft spoken, and his English isn’t great. But as he told me the story of his hour and a half in the car with both brothers, how he strategized to buy time, to outthink them, to plan an escape. And then he gets to the part at the gas station, where they take all his money and fill up the car with gas and set the GPS to New York, and he knew they were going to kill him, how he could smell it, their body temperatures getting hot. It was really one of the most incredible stories I’ve heard.”

Getting that story on film, however, along with a dozen other harrowing true tales of the bombing, proved to be an intense, pressure-filled sprint in itself. There was no question Berg had the technical chops to re-create the mayhem of that tragic day — for the director who brought Battleship and