Press Archive

Sunday Times
13 May 2001
by Jeff Dawson

The most spectacular …

…TV series ever seen has been shot in Britain. Jeff Dawson was there to see the bullets fly

War, they say, is hell. At the very least, it’s extremely muddy. Icy, squelching, shin-deep, caking everyone and everything. Under a leaden November sky, the detritus of combat is all around - a Sherman tank, bits of Jeep, scattered ammo cases. Two mechanics are improvising a spare wheel for the “meat chopper”, a Jeep-towed machine gun that does exactly what it says. On northerly gusts, you can hear the pop-pop-pop of small-arms fire. A mile ahead, an American patrol has crossed the river to flush out the retreating Fritz. A Land Rover arrives to take you to the front, skidding around craters, wipers beating in double time to smear an arc of visibility. You head for the pall of smoke beyond the huge earthworks.

The village of Haguenau, in Alsace, has seen a lot of action. The occupiers had renamed Rue Stendhal - the high street - Adolf Hitler Strasse. But, in winter 1944, at the height of the Bulge, Fuhrer Row is now a sorry line of blasted-out shops, curtains flapping, behind broken glass, the church spire gone. Rubble and sandbags are piled up everywhere. Snow and death are on the ground. In a corner of the town square, four GIs huddle behind a wall. Someone yells: “Incoming!” A huge explosion lifts the ground, raining down heavy clouds of earth that hurt if you don’t turn your back.

“Glad I moved you up?” smirks the director Tony To, having advised a more sheltered vantage point than that previously adopted. The crew set up for the next shot. A warning: mobile phones off. Incoming calls can trigger remote-controlled explosives. They’ve been out here for six uncomfortable months, throughout the winter of 2000-1, but at least they can be sure that it will be over by Christmas.

Much has been made of cinema’s current love affair with the second world war: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Enemy at the Gates et al. In two weeks’ time comes Pearl Harbor, Jerry “Armageddon” Bruckheimer’s all exploding torpedofest. It’s not just the movies either. In America, a wave of literature is devoted to the “Greatest Generation” (to use the title of Tom Brokaw’s bestseller); Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have become passionate spokesmen for Holocaust survivors and war veterans; there’s a popular obsession with the events of six decades ago. A final tribute before old soldiers fade away? Retro heroism, given the lack of contemporary adversaries? The notion that modern push-button warfare doesn’t engage like good old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat? Or rather, given Hollywood’s cyclical propensities, are we still riding the bandwagon set in motion by Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line?

Saving Private Ryan is key here. With little fanfare, the unglamorous location of Hatfield Aerodrome has been playing host to arguably the most extensive war epic ever filmed. At £80m, Band of Brothers is a companion piece to Spielberg’s Oscar-laden opus, though with a difference. Produced by Spielberg and Hanks for the US cable channel HBO, it will go out as a 10-part mini-series. The BBC will screen it this autumn.

On a 1,100-acre site employing, literally, a cast of thousands - 500 speaking parts, more than 10,000 extras and enough ordnance to take Berlin all over again - they have been filming the nonfiction tome by the war chronicler Stephen Ambrose. Beginning in 1942, it’s the true story of Easy Company, the 506th Regiment of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division, from basic training, through Normandy and the liberation of Dachau, to their capture of Hitler’s Eagle Nest at Berchtesgaden. A Pilgrim’s Progress through the Good Fight, each hour-long episode is the work of a different director, including Richard Loncraine (Richard III), Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) and Mikael Salomon (Hard Rain). Hanks himself assumes command of episode five.

“It was two or three months after Ryan that this kind of gelled, ” explains To, who is also a producer. “In the research Steven and Tom did for Ryan, they came across Ambrose’s books. They said, ‘This is fantastic. There are so many stories to tell. Let’s tell the true story.’ The choice of the min-series is dictated by that. This could not be told in two or three hours.”

Television being the ugly cousin of handsome Hollywood, Band of Brothers hasn’t been accorded much fanfare, and given that HBO are the makers of the Sopranos and Sex and the City - pushing American telly into the realm of quality drama - this is strange. It’s probably because, with the exception of Friends’ David Schwimmer (as an unlikely hard-arse officer), there are no recognised stars in Band of Brothers. The lead role of the decorated American war hero Captain Richard Winters has gone to our very own Damian Lewis, the star of BBC’s Warriors and Hearts and Bones. His world is about to change quite radically.

The casting of unknowns serves a dramatic purpose. In the manner of Norman Mailer’s definitive war novel, The Naked and the Dead, anyone’s number can be up. “Part of the impact is that you really come yo know these characters very well, and some of them are yanked away from you,” says To, explaining how, despite the horrors of Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan, you knew that Tom Hanks was going to soldier through to the final reel.

When people talk of the brilliance of that film, of course, they invariably mean its opening 20 minutes. “I think we advanced war-film-making to the edge of the envelope,” asserts its military adviser, Captain Dale Dye, a 56-year-old former US Marine and buddy of Oliver Stone who, from Platoon onwards, has led his own mission to restore credibility to military movies and now, television series. “Technical errors were huge and commonplace,” he explains. “But it was also stereotypical. Soldiers were fat, Southern, ignorant bastards; officers were horrible and had their own agenda. All of that is nonsense. The problem is not teaching actors how to handle a weapon: you have to teach them emotion, the psychology, make them understand what that soldier’s life is like.”

The quest for realism with Band of Brothers has been staggering - from the wardrobe (2,000 uniforms, real or replicas, accurate down to the thread count) to the armoury of 200 rifles (racks of American M1s and German K98s) and the enormous vehicle unit, featuring 150 half-tracks, tanks and trucks, some scratch-built, the rest commandeered from collectors or, for the Panzers, retrieved from fields in eastern Europe. “By episode three, we’d used more squibs [small explosive charges that stimulate bullet hits] than we did in the whole of Private Ryan,” explains Joss Williams, the special-effects supervisor.

As with most modern war films, the actors were put through the inevitable boot-camp experience; but while the cast of Saving Private Ryan ran screaming back to their hotels after a couple of days, this lot stuck it out. In fact, the looming Captain Dye cuts such an awesome figure that the actors still salute him on set. For today’s scene - from episode eight, The Last Patrol - the four soldiers, including Hank’s 23-year-old son Colin, take their positions. Damian Lewis gazes across the river, while the grunts gingerly approach him about their next mission. No sooner is the take in the bag, however than Lewis is whisked away to the other side of the site, where episode two is being shot (Le Grand Chemin, directed by Locraine).

Hatfield Aerodrome, a former British Aerospace facility that is due for redevelopment, provides something that only Hollywood can dream of - hangers bigger than Tinseltown sound stages, one of which houses a forest of 250 real firs, and a site so vast that two units, coded red and blue, have been filming simultaneously with little chance of ever bumping into each other. The climatic scenes for Ryan, also shot here, used only a small fraction of the space. The Normandy village from the film has been replaced, as part of the production’s £12m construction costs, by a modular one that can reconfigured for 11 locations in France, the Low Countries and Germany. The river running through the site is entirely man-made.

With all this cash being splashed about, no wonder the UK has been keen to play host. The fact that 70% of the production budget is being spent in Britain qualified Band of Brothers for all the tax breaks used to woo Hollywood over here. Last year, a record £500m-plus of foreign filming took place in the UK, including Tom Raider and The Mummy Returns. Not that the decision was cut and dried. The British Film Commission lobbied hard against rival bids from Ireland and the Czech Republic. Tony Blair flannelled Spielberg and Hanks personally. (Blair’s son Euan even got work experience on the project.) “Certainly what helped me was an overwhelming feeling that No 10 had an interest in this and wanted to see a successful outcome,” says Steve Norris, the commission chairman.

The fact that the BBC has had to fork out a reported £15m for broadcast rights (”Greatly exaggerated,” says the corporation) has raised the inevitable question, however. In the wake of the shameful U-571, why is license-payers’ money being squandered on another Yank whitewash of history? Here we do get the Battle of Arnhem (albeit with Hanks Sr in a cameo as a British paratroop officer). And, while it is an essential fact that the majority of troops in the D-Day landings were British and Commonwealth, telling an encapsulated American story (one that put £80m into British coffers) is perhaps not a genuine cause for umbrage. The opening scenes of Pearl Harbor, which reportedly show American pilots winning the Battle of Britain, will take more flak.

On June 6, the premiere of Band of Brothers (the first two episodes) will take place at an amphitheatre on Omaha Beach, with the audience including international governmental representatives and ex-servicemen. The Brits will be taking a back seat there as well - though only because Blair will be on the eve of his own election D-Day. Spielberg has also optioned Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers, another Uncle Sam-in-Europe saga, and he will soon start filming Flags of Our Fathers, from the bestseller by James Bradley about the raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima.

Put that bloody light out. It’s far from over yet …