The place where Bob Bauman was killed is not a battlefield anymore. It’s developed land on Okinawa now, with a convenience store nearby — a detail Bill Skarsgård shared during a post-screening Q&A attended by The Nerd Wire at AFI FEST on Oct. 22.
Skarsgård plays Bauman in Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl, which had its world premiere that night at the TCL Chinese Theatre. Before production began, he traveled to Okinawa, met with Marines stationed there and took a historical tour of the battle. Together they traced his character’s footsteps to the spot where Bauman died.
Skarsgård told the audience it was hard to picture the war in such an ordinary place. He described standing exactly where Bauman took his last breath, and said the experience affected him deeply and stayed with him through the entire shoot.
It was the quietest moment of a conversation that kept returning to the same idea. The Mosquito Bowl is about a football game and a battle, but the people who made it talked about it as an act of remembrance. The evening also included a performance by the U.S. Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon.
The real men behind the film
Adapted from Buzz Bissinger’s 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, the film follows a real game. On Christmas Eve 1944, 65 Marines from the 4th and 29th Regiments of the 6th Marine Division, many of them former college stars, played football on Guadalcanal while they waited to ship out. Within months, 15 of them had been killed on Okinawa.
Bauman was one of them. A Wisconsin tackle drafted by the Chicago Bears, he was killed on June 6, 1945, shortly after taking command of A Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, according to the University of Wisconsin’s Gold Star Honor Roll. He was 24.
The other leads also play men from Bissinger’s book: Nicholas Galitzine as Brown’s John McLaughry, Ray Nicholson as Purdue’s Tony Butkovich and Tom Francis as Wisconsin’s Dave Schreiner. All four joined Berg and sound designer Wylie Stateman on stage after the screening.
A cousin’s book and a family’s war
Berg opened with a joke, thanking the crowd for turning out on a rainy Thursday night for what he called his little romantic comedy.
The moderator noted that Berg’s father was a Marine who fought in Korea, and Berg said that history was a motivating factor. The deeper pull, he said, was Bissinger, his cousin, whom he described as the closest thing he has to a brother. Bissinger also wrote Friday Night Lights, which Berg adapted into the 2004 film and then developed into the TV series. This story was personal for Bissinger too: his own father served with the 4th Marines on Guadalcanal and at Okinawa, according to We Are The Mighty.
What draws Berg to his cousin’s writing, he said, is how Bissinger takes football and makes it about poetry, emotion and love, about winning and losing and the complicated feelings in between. Berg said he connects to that personally and suggested their shared blood might have something to do with it.
That is why he never thought of The Mosquito Bowl as simply a war film or a football film. To him, it was Bissinger’s voice coming off the page. He ended his answer by speaking directly to his cousin, thanking him and asking him to write another book soon.
Passion over pedigree
Asked how he chose his cast, Berg said he was looking for one thing: passion. A former actor himself, he joked that actors are liars who will often say whatever they think a director wants to hear, so he looked past the pitch and tried to find the most committed young men he could.
That led him to two Brits and a Swede — Galitzine, Francis and Skarsgård — who knew little about American football, and to Nicholson, the lone American, whom Berg called his secret weapon. Football and soldiering could be taught, Berg said. The passion they brought every day could not.
Nicholson is the only one of the four who played football, in high school. He said the game was key to understanding Butkovich, a man who saw life through football. Material from Purdue University gave him his first real introduction to Butkovich, he said, and with it a sense of responsibility to portray him worthily. Nicholson thanked the families of the real Marines, including Bauman’s and Schreiner’s, and said he hoped the cast had been of service to them. Like Skarsgård, he had just seen the finished film for the first time.
For Francis, the key was Schreiner’s letters. Talking them through with Bissinger, he said, revealed a young man who examined his own life closely and kept lists of ways to improve, down to sitting up straight.
Living the story in order
Those bonds were helped by an unusual production choice. The film was shot largely in chronological order, which Galitzine called a luxury he would choose for the rest of his career if he could.
The actors got to know one another at the same pace their characters did, he explained, and lived through the story’s horrific moments in sequence. By the time they reached the Mosquito Bowl game itself, the cast genuinely shared their characters’ excitement to play football again. The final week, filming the Okinawa sequences, was heartbreaking. Being able to follow those men’s journey in order, he said, was the greatest gift an actor could ask for.
The sound at the edge of the frame
Stateman’s description of the soundtrack was not what you might expect from a war film. He called The Mosquito Bowl very delicate.
In their first conversations, he said, Berg explained that he and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret planned to shoot most of the action in close-up. That left the edges of the frame, and the theater itself, as the space where sound could work clearly and precisely. The camera stays with the men; sound tells you how big the world around them is.
Berg also told him not to be afraid of silence. So in the film’s wide shots, Stateman said, the team let silence do what it does to an audience: make them think. War movies usually try to overwhelm. Stateman described trusting quiet to land harder than noise, and he credited the editors and craftspeople who helped build it.
Organized chaos
The evening’s final stretch belonged to Berg, who turned the Q&A into something closer to a family reunion. He called cast and crew down to the stage — actors, editors, his camera team, his costume designer from New Zealand, his makeup artist — and gave a shout to Explosions in the Sky, the band that has scored his Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor, American Primeval and now this film.
He credited Jouffret with making his ideas real and described his sets as chaotic for actors and crew alike, a kind of organized chaos that only works because of people he trusts. Making a movie like this, he said, takes a village. He called himself a cheerleader who asks his team for passion, faith, belief and a lot of ideas.
Then he told the story of Coy Aune. While researching Friday Night Lights in Austin, Berg was assigned to Westlake High School, and no one would talk to him. He was about to give up and find another school when a 17-year-old Aune walked up to him at a Gatorade machine. Aune’s family welcomed Berg into their home, and Berg went to school with him every day.
Without that, Berg said, he would have called Bissinger and told him he didn’t see a path forward. Aune is now a camera operator and, Berg said, a father of three. His credits include Berg’s Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day, and he is listed as a B-camera operator on The Mosquito Bowl.
Berg also thanked Netflix for supporting a theatrical release, said he loves movies and urged everyone in the room to keep making them. The Mosquito Bowl opens in select theaters Oct. 30 and streams on Netflix beginning Nov. 25.
The team that came home
It made for a joyful, crowded finish, and it fit the film more closely than it might seem. The Mosquito Bowl is about young men who found something like a family on a football field and then lost much of it on Okinawa. Berg ended the night surrounded by his own version of that team, including the Westlake kid who once kept him from walking away.
Bob Bauman never got to find out what came next. According to the honor roll, he had talked with his girlfriend about playing pro football and maybe someday opening a sports camp for kids. More than eight decades later, the people who brought him back to the screen filled a stage in Hollywood, and Skarsgård, who had stood where Bauman died, was among them.
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