danefergus: 'Battleship' Mystery: Who Says 'You Sunk My Battleship'?

Saturday 19 May 2012

'Battleship' Mystery: Who Says 'You Sunk My Battleship'?

It's a trick question! 'I had this idea that we should come up with a different way of respecting the line,' director Peter Berg tells MTV News.
By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz

Taylor Kitsch in "Battleship"
Photo: Universal Pictures

From the moment Universal announced plans to transform Hasbro's classic board game Battleship into a full-length feature film, the question weighing on fans' minds was not necessarily "How will they make that into a movie?" but rather "How will they work in the 'You sunk my Battleship!' line?"

For those who didn't grow up playing the game, we're talking about the classic tagline from Hasbro's old-school commercials that featured two players calling out targets until one proved victorious with a direct hit on their opponent's big boat, resulting in one of the most memorable and quotable board-game taglines ever: "You sunk my Battleship!"

We've made attempts to get various castmembers to spill the beans about the line, but it wasn't until MTV News caught up with director Peter Berg that we were able to get a definitive answer on the subject — which, in a nutshell, is no, the direct quote is not in the finished film.

"We have a version of it, though," Berg said. "There was a reference to the line: 'Ain't gonna sink this Battleship, no way,' " he quoted. "We say, 'No, we ain't sinking this battleship. ' They don't sink our Battleship. Sorry.

Berg said they put a lot of thought into how they could pay homage to the line but ultimately decided it would be best to provide their own spin on it.

"We played around. We said the line, we didn't say the line, and then I had this idea that maybe we should come up with a different way of respecting the line. But you know what? They didn't sink the Battleship," he reiterated, adding a "Raging Bull" reference in the process. "It's like Jake Lomatta said: 'You [didn't] get me down, Ray.' There a lot of ways you could've done it; we chose our way."

Check out everything we've got on "Battleship."

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