Berg got his love of the military from his father, whom he described as “a hard-assed ex-Marine” and, in later life, one of the real Mad Men. He was an ad executive for Grey Advertising. “You know,” Berg said, “three-martini lunches, the bar car on the train back to Chappaqua.” Wives would wait at the foot of the platform and catch their husbands as they got off the train. “But there was no judgment about it.” (Later a Universal publicist told me, “Peter’s parents don’t do interviews.”)

We came to signs that read “Lone Survivor location up ahead.” The place was a private ranch, and now there were cows all around us. “These aren’t wild,” Berg said. “They will be eaten.” Then he added: “The wild horses don’t hang with the cows. They don’t have much respect for cows.”

We pulled into a clearing, a patch of dirt, at the base of the mountains. As if cued, the sun came up, like a stage spot turned on by a lighting director.

While we waited for the rest of the crew to arrive by bus, Berg began telling me he never had a desire to be an actor. He wanted to be an athlete when he enrolled in Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Then one day a theater professor told him the school was going to close down the theater department because it didn’t have enough students. “I didn’t want to sign up, but he made me,” Berg said. Quickly, at 18, Berg came to love the theater — acting, writing, lighting, building sets were new outlets for his energy. What he loved most about the theater was that “it was a family thing, and there were hot girls” and really messed-up guys, he said. “For some reason I fit in. I’m not sure why. I guess I was intrigued as much by misfits as by heroes.” He’d envisioned himself as the latter but was beginning to realize that he might be the former. Of all the roles in the theater, he was least enamored of actors, however. They were manipulated by directors and writers. Their craft couldn’t exist unless they were given dialogue, a character, a story from the writers. The writers created something out of nothing. Furthermore, Berg valued real physical activity more than the illusion of it created by actors.

“I love actors,” Berg said. “I’m empathetic to them. I understand what they go through. But I didn’t want to be an actor.”

He became one anyway. After he left college, he moved to L.A. and got jobs working behind the scenes in the movie business. But he always managed to lose them, or be fired, actually. He didn’t respect money or authority, and didn’t want “anyone to have power over me.” But to survive he took on acting jobs from 1989 to 1994, when he came to the public’s attention playing a not-too-bright sexual stud in the low-budget independent film “The Last Seduction,” starring Linda Fiorentino. “It was supposed to be a nothing film,” he said, “and it went straight to HBO. But it got such great critical reception it was then released to theaters.” It won awards, and for the first time people in the business noticed Berg.

A year later, he got a recurring role in the TV drama “Chicago Hope,” which led to his directing an episode. That led in turn, a year later, to his first feature-film-writing-and-directing effort, “Very Bad Things.” Critics savaged its bloody violence, which made some people laugh and others “run out of the theater sick to their stomachs,” according to Berg. The movie, a hysterically funny black comedy about a Las Vegas bachelor party that goes very bad — a dead prostitute, others killed in the cover-up — was the work of an angry mind. (“I was going through a divorce,” Berg said. “I was full of violent confusion, rage.”) It wasn’t till “Friday Night Lights” a few years later, in 2004, that his career moved past the darkness of “Very Bad Things.”