Press Archive

The Courier-Mail
(Brisbane, Australia)
16 October 2000
by Lawrie Masterson

Brothers in Arms

In and English village, War World II has broken out again, writes Lawrie Masterson: ‘This stuff to me is 1000 times more fascinating than fake stories’

TOM Hanks tugs at the peak of his cap and pulls his jacket around him as he descends the 7m wall of a dyke.

He walks on to a grassy area scarred with foxholes and strewn with the bodies of dead soldiers. All around, bloodies men in tattered army uniforms stand talking quietly.

Hanks looks tense but very much in control. The dual Academy Award-winning Hollywood actor and star of the universally acclaimed War World II movie Saving Private Ryan is back in the trenches, although this time he is calling the shots, not firing them.

Hanks and Private Ryan director Steven Spielberg have teamed again as executive producers of a $US100 million (A$171 million) television project, Band of Brothers, and Hanks is directing the fifth hour of the 10-episode mini-series.

This is one of his big moments, a scene in which men of Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division storm German strongholds on a 5km-wide island between the Lower River on the north and teh Waal River on the south in November 1944.

“We’re trying to so something huge in a finite amount of time,” he says of a filming schedule which expands or contracts to allow between 15 and 30 days for each one-hour episode.

“We have a lor of money, which is nice, but money can’t buy you calendar day. But if they could fight War World II, we should be able to make the movie version of it.”

While they dyke where Hanks is standing is meant to be Holland, it is actually at the disused Hatfield aerodrome in Hertfordshire, about an hour’s commute from Central London. Parts of Saving Private Ryan also were filmed there.

For Band of Brothers, the flat 325ha expanse owned by British Aerospace has been transformed remarkably and ingeniously into areas ranging from a US military training camp in Georgia to a French village.

“There’s no escaping the pedigree of Saving Private Ryan here, ” Hanks says of the obvious attention to detail and attempt at realism. “I think we all sort of embraced the expertise we were able to develop. A lot of our crew have worked on both.

“One thing that’s of tantamount difference is that probably half our guys (actors) have actually spoken to the men they’re playing. We’ve got visitors, actual men of Easy Company, coming next week.”

Some will record interviews that will be interwoven with the screen action on Band of Brothers.

Spielberg also has been an occasional visitor to Hatfield and is in daily contact.

“The advice Steven gave me was, ‘Get the realationships. Don’t be satisfied with just the machinery or the bullets or the tactics or the boots and the mud. Make sure you get the thoughts on the faces of the guys’,” Hanks says.

In Hatfield itself — normally a quite village of 25, 000 souls — the increased traffic and occasional sounds of artillery and rifle fire from the aerodrome are tolerated happily. Band of Brothers has generated jobs and is a welcome tonic for the local economy.

The area is within a designated green belt and there will be more jobs to restore it to its natural state when filming wraps.

Being made for the American cable giant HBO and expected to be screened in Australia late next year, Band of Brothers is based on the 1992 book by noted historian Stephen E. Ambrose. Hanks first read it as part of his research for Saving Private Ryan.

It follows the men of Easy Company from their training at Camp Taccoa, Georgia, in 1942 through their jump behind enemy lines in Normandy on D-Day and on Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, the Rhineland campaign and the taking of Hitler’s Nest at Berchtesgaden.

ALONG the way this elite company of airborne light infantry — drawn from backgrounds as diverse as Deep South coal mines and seats of learning at Yale and Harvard — suffered 150 percent casualties.

The scale of the mini-series production is massive. Until now, however, Keep Out signs have been waved in the faces of any prying media.

“Oh, it’s insane, ” Hanks says of attempts by the British press to infiltrate the TV version of Easy Company. He pauses, then corrects himself: “No, it makes all the sense in the world. I think this is a pretty big deal.”

On any given day, caterers at Hatfield aerodrome can expect to feed between 650 and 700 cast and crew members, sometimes as many as 830.

Gunsmith and War World II weapons expert Simon Atherton provides an armory of more than 500 authentic weapons, some of which require special licensing from the British Home Secretary, and has another 800 rubber replicas.

That doesn’t include what are literally the big guns such as PAK nicknamed the tank killer, and a 50-calibre Browning machine gun which causes dust to rise for 10m around its mount when fired.

Every cast member, right down to the extras, has a photo ID card he has to hand in before being able to check out a weapon for filming.

Using original specifications, German tanks have been manufactured from scratch in warehouses on the site. The tank which rumbled through the final battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, costing Hanks and many of his men their lives, has been pressed back into service.

Production designers and set construction crews moved in to Hatfield aerodrome five months before filming started.

Vegetation, including specific varieties of grass, was imported to match different areas in France and Belgium. A modular village, which can convert to become one of 12 different towns, was built.

The producers of Band of Brothers have even constructed a river, complete with rubber ducks. Today, Carentan, France, stands on one bank and Eindhoven, Holland, on the other. It has all been achieved in such a way that cameraman can pan 360 degrees at will.

Standing in the middle of Carentan, where there is no activity at the moment, is almost eerie. The real village is one of the closest to Utah Beach, one of the major landing points on D-Day.

In Carentan’s television reincarnation, the walls of the Cafe of Normandie are shell-shocked and the building adjacent has been burnt out. Every window in the town is shuttered and shards of glass cover the streets. An old-fashioned bath tub teeters precariously in the third floor window of another bomber-out building.

All that remains of a wrecked church is its facade. Hidden behind it are trailers and other production equipment, a sudden jolt back into the present.

“The sets look authentic and that’s part of it,” Hank says “but what we’re really trying to capture is the mindset of what went on.”

“We’re hoping to communicate that, you know, when somebody is on the other side of a hedgerow and he’s firing pieces of hot lead that travel so fast you can’t even see them, that when they hit you it’s not a good thing.”

“And it’s even worse when they hit your buddy or someone who has been your best friend for a long time.”

“That’s where we’re trying to be as authentic as we can. If we’re as authentic as we can be, it does become, whether we like it or not, a historical document that people will look at and say, ‘Look at what people did back then’,” he says.

“This stuff to me is ultimately 1000 times more fascinating than fake stories you could come up with just to do some cool action movie or some cool TV series. I also think it’s more important.”

About four hours before directing his big battle scene, 44-year-old Hanks, noticeably trimmed down for his role in the coming movie Castaway, is talking between mouthfuls inside a mess tent on the Camp Taccoa, Georgia, location.

With him are one of his co-executive producers, Tony Ho; Vietnam veteran Captain Dale Dye, who trained Hanks and his co-stars for Saving Private Ryan and was charged with getting the Band of Brothers cast into fighting shape; and two of the leading actors, Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston.

Band of Brothers has not gone the route of signing a major Hollywood star to help sell the series, no doubt relying on the clout and prestige of Spielberg and Hanks in their roles behind the scenes. David Schwimmer from TV’s Friends, who plays the domineering and widely despised Captain Herbert Sobel, is probably the highest profile name in what is a huge cast of unknowns.

CAPTAIN Sobel carried no physical injuries but deep mental scars from his war experience. He is said to have made a botched suicide attempt before he eventually died in 1988. Neither his former wife, nor his two sons, nor any of the men of Easy Company attended his funeral.

Lewis, who is English, plays the key role of Major Dick Winters and American Livingston is Captain Lewis Nixon. The two Easy Company men remained firm friends until Nixon’s diabetes-related death about five years ago. Winters is now 82 and lives quietly in retirement on a farm in Pennsylvania.

Other members of Easy Company have died even while the mini-series has been in production.

‘(Sergeant Wayne) Skinny Sisk died in January, before our documentary crew could get in touch with him in order to talk with him,” Hank says. “I’m not sure what the numbers (of present day survivors) are, but we lose one about every two weeks.”

For young actors Lewis and Livingston, Band of Brothers brings with it not only the potential to make them major stars overnight but also the responsibility or portraying men who were real-life war heroes.

They were chosen for their roles after exhaustive auditions conducted in New York, Los Angeles, London and Toronto. Apart from completing Captain Dye’s notorious boot camp along with about 40 other actors who play the core of Easy Company, Lewis also had to work with a dialogue coach to perfect an American accent.

“I have someone around me at all times to make sure that I don’t slip,” he says.

In full uniform, his muddy face streaked with perspiration, he continues: “I think everybody on this film knows how important it is to get it right because it will have real education value to anybody who sits down to watch it.

“There is a lot of firepower to it and a lot of excitement and exhilaration, but we hope that you see these men and what they went through and how it changes their lives.”

Nixon and Winters came from vastly different backgrounds. Nixon was from an old money New York industrial family and was a Yale graduate; Winters was more an ordinary guy who became extraordinary during the war through his astonishing bravery and heightened natural ability to lead men.

Nixon remained intensely private about the war, even with his widow, Grace; Winters was more willing to share his story with historian Ambrose and others. Nixon liked his booze; Winters was famously a non-drinker throughout the campaign.

After they were discharged from the army, Nixon found Winters a job with one of his family companies and Winters, too, became a wealthy man through creating and marketing revolutionary animal food products.

He still speaks with tremendous affection of (Nixon), Lewis says. He says that in spite of there being a kind of shambling, heavy drinking side of him, he was a brilliant, brilliant mind and a brilliant officer.

Lewis was able to spend about a week with Winters when he visited the production in May, about a month into filming.

He was suspicious of this whole project when it first took off and thought that what they did in the war might be Hollywoodised in a trivial way, Lewis says.

“He was quite a tough nut to crack, but I think we have his support now and his generosity has been fantastic.”

In an effort to help Lewis accurately portray him, Winters has even handled over copies of about 100 letters he wrote a platonic female friend during the war. He said he could tell her things that he couldn’t even tell his parents, and he had a very close-knit family, Lewis says. “He has just been happy to give me stuff, to give me information.”

“Winters is an amazing character,” Lewis says. “This guy did some incredible things in the war and he is really, classically, a man defined by his actions rather than his words.

“He was an action hero with presence, intelligence and lucidity in an incredibly high-pressure situation.”