Director Peter Berg’s new Netflix series “American Primeval” is an ambitious Western epic about the bloody battles that erupted in 1850s Utah between Mormons, immigrant settlers, indigenous tribes and faithless opportunists looking for money. The scope is vast and the ambition imposing, but for Berg, the origins of the massive show were surprisingly simple.

“The origin of it was that I was obsessed with ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ and wanted to make something where we really had to face the elements,” Berg told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I felt the call for such a challenge.” In addition to Sydney Pollack’s 1972 Western with Robert Redford, there was another starting point that Berg referred to when meeting writer Mark L. Smith. “I have a weird collection of knives and axes and all sorts of things that people give me. I had this big ice pick and I just put it on his lap and said, ‘Could you write this as a series?'”

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The resulting show combined the vivid filming of Pollack’s classic with the sense of visceral violence that this ice pick conveys. Both come together in a breathtaking sequence in Episode 1, which shows a bloody attack by Mormon settlers on a wagon train. This set piece, based on the real-life Mountain Meadows Massacre, is presented as one uninterrupted shot, immersing the viewer in the perspective of a single mother and her young son; The choreography is as elaborate and elegant as the action is blunt and powerful.

Although the action appears to be one long take, according to Berg, it was actually eight shots stitched together digitally – but that didn’t make it any less challenging. “Once this idea is fully developed, it takes stunts, visual effects, cameramen, wranglers and dozens of people to pull something like this off,” Berg said. He gathered his staff in conference rooms where they framed the action using figurines and horses before heading to the New Mexico location and giving him a tour to figure out how they could capture the entire action in one shot.

“The development is further complicated by the fact that we wanted to shoot it at sunset,” Berg said. “When the sun goes down, you know you might have a 50-minute window to take photos. We’ve compiled eight shots in this sequence, so we’re assuming we’ll be shooting two of these shots per day for three days. And you have to be very precise because you arrive in the morning, rehearse all day and wait for the moment when the sun is exactly where you want it to be. And then you have to execute it almost flawlessly – maybe you’ll get two or three attempts if you’re really lucky.”

For Berg, the pressure was exhilarating, especially because his crew nailed the sequence like clockwork. “It’s a style of filmmaking I like because everyone is super into it,” he said. “It’s almost like a live experience, and you know if you screw it up, you’re going to have a problem because you have to come back another day, and that comes with a big cost.” Although Berg said that Netflix was skeptical at first whether he would make it or not, she and everyone else were really happy with the results. “They made us waste 90 percent of a day on 48 minutes of actual filmmaking.”

Berg’s desire to work in the tradition of “Jeremiah Johnson” and subject himself, his cast and crew to the rigors of a difficult location meant he had to spend 137 days in the elements and just three days in a studio – and that he says when they were done. When I came into the studio the company hated it. “We were so wild because we were out there,” Berg says, noting the cast and crew’s reaction to the stage was, “We don’t belong here. We’re not fancy enough.”

During filming, Berg and his collaborators had to contend with adverse weather conditions, from freezing cold to extreme heat, and had a fire department constantly on standby due to the strong winds. “It was heartfelt filmmaking, and I loved it,” Berg said, accurately noting that the filmmakers’ experience seeped into the DNA of the show itself, palpably conveying the brutality of the conditions in which the characters live . “The stakes are quite high, like life or death, so I wanted to give the actors a certain level of physical and emotional discomfort. There wasn’t a lot of luxury, and I think that helped us create a wonderfully uncomfortable tone.”

As unpleasant as much of “American Primeval” is, and as relevant as it is to today’s societal tensions, Berg still feels like he and the series are optimistic about America and its possibilities. “I believe that humans are violent animals and it is very difficult to separate our willingness to commit violent acts from our humanity,” Berg said. “It’s just part of us. We also made peace. We survived too. We didn’t have social media and no way to amplify conflict the way we do now, but I don’t think that’s anything new. And that gives me comfort because yes, we are violent, but we are also capable of love, empathy and compassion. At the end of the day, we are as interested in making peace as we are in making war.”

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