Can Peter Berg Redeem Himself After â€˜Battleshipâ€™?

Peter Bohler for The New York Times

Peter Berg wanted me to box with him. "Come on, you're a tough guy," he said. I tried to disabuse him of that notion. I told him I'd been in only one fight in my adult life, and I lost that one.

We went to Team Tapia Boxing Academy in Albuquerque, where Berg was scouting locations for the film he had written and was directing, "Lone Survivor," based on a book with the same title about a Navy SEAL mission in Afghanistan that went terribly wrong in 2005. Berg fell in love with boxing when he was a 14-year-old freshman at the Taft School in Connecticut. "I was on fire," he said, "a seething ball of energy moving at a speed I couldn't explain." He was angry and disruptive "and diagnosed as a troublemaker," he said. "Today it'd be A.D.H.D., and I'd be Ritalined up." Instead a dean took him after class to his basement, where Berg and other disruptive students learned "to dissipate all our energy" by fighting. Boxing calmed him. "You can't box angry," he said. "You have to be disciplined. Before boxing, I was this angry kid ready to fight if someone said, 'Hello.' "

Through boxing, Berg became fascinated with what he referred to as "the psychology of violence," which has informed most of the things he has directed or acted in. Sports violence ("Friday Night Lights," "The Great White Hype"); criminal violence ("Very Bad Things," "The Last Seduction"); and military violence ("A Midnight Clear," "The Kingdom," "Battleship," "Lone Survivor"). But violence on the screen is never as viscerally satisfying as it is in the ring. "There's a truth to the violence of boxing," Berg said. "You have a very real threat, an opponent." Movie violence is make believe.

At Tapia, the manager taped up my hands while Berg shadowboxed in the ring, waiting for me. Berg is 51, hyperactive and lean, his long arms rippled with muscles and veins. Once my gloves were on, I pounded them together and stood up.

Later that night I called my wife. She asked how the boxing went. I said, "I broke Peter's jaw." She said, "I hope he can still talk." I told her I was kidding. It was make-believe. I got a lesson on the heavy bag instead.

The next night, Berg told me to meet him for dinner at a steakhouse on the outskirts of Albuquerque. I waited at the bar till Berg rushed in late, looking spent, and sat down. He'd been at Kirtland Air Force Base checking out "choppers" — Berg likes to use military jargon — and also scouting mountains for the big shootout between the Taliban and the SEALs. (In the movie, which is due out at the end of this year, the shootout comes across as one of the most realistic depictions of close-in combat in film.) "I must have climbed 30 mountains," he said. "We need different locations because we couldn't get access to Indian land." He raised his eyebrows. "It's sacred, except for the land with casinos on it, I guess."

Berg was exhausting himself making "Lone Survivor" on the cheap. A 42-day shoot, a $40 million budget, a list of producers as long as his arm whose only required movie expertise was the ability to fork over at least a million dollars to get a credit — and still, his team was scuffling around for money until a few weeks before filming was about to start last fall. "Universal will release it," he said, "but I have to deliver the finished film to them." Berg had been trying to make "Lone Survivor" for five years. "I'm a patriot," he said. "I admire our military, their character, code of honor, belief systems. I lived with the SEALs, their families, went to their funerals. I went to Iraq. Did you ever see anyone killed? I did." Berg is infatuated with heroes, military, sports and, sometimes, because of his teenage years, misfits.

He was directing for scale, the minimum salary allowed by the Directors Guild (which in this case was $17,000 a week), and had got most of his crew and actors (including Taylor Kitsch and Mark Wahlberg) to work at a discount too. No one worked for scale on his most recent movie, "Battleship," which was supposed to be the summer blockbuster of 2012. Instead it was one of the biggest science-fiction-movie busts in the history of the genre. "Battleship" had problems from its inception, beginning with the idea of trying to make a movie out of a board game. Berg knew "Battleship" was in trouble even before it was released. When we spoke by phone last summer, he told me: "You should go see it. It's fun, but leave your brain outside the theater."