Press

Radio Times Magazine
29 Sept – 5 Oct 2001
by David Gritten
Scans

In Good Company

Steven Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with the Second World War has resulted in Band Of Brothers, a TV series based on real life that is as epic as a movie. The $120 million ten-part series, filmed here in Britain, honours a resilient unit of paratroopers in the US Army. David Gritten talks to Spielberg and fellow executive producer Tom Hanks as they pay tribute to the veterans.

Steven Spielberg tells me he has been making films set in the Second World War all his life. Well, of course you have, I say. Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun, 1941, the Indiana Jones movies . . . “No, no,” he interrupts. “It goes way further back than that. When I was 12 or 13, I made two short 8mm movies with some friends. Escape to Nowhere was about Americans fighting Germans in north Africa. And Fighter Squadron was about a bunch of Second World War pilots.” he sighs. “I’ve been stuck in the forties for most of my career.”

Maybe, but never until now has Spielberg tackled the war in such depth. Along with Tom Hanks, he is executive producer of Band of Brothers, an epic ten-part series that traces the odyssey of Easy Company, a unit of US paratroopers from the 506th Regiment of the US army’s 101st Airborne Division. Their story begins at a training camp in the American South, follows them when they are parachuted into France in the early hours of D-Day, and then proceeds through Europe. It reaches a climax with their capture of Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s fortress at Berchtesgaden.

Why does Spielberg, 54, keep returning to this era? Because he effectively grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. His father Arnold served in Burma as a radio operator on B25 bombers. “I was fascinated by Dad telling war stories,” he says.

He believes it crucial that the generation of Allies who fought in the Second World War should be memorialized, especially as they are now ageing. “They’re rapidly leaving us, so it’s time to say something about those people again. We have to remember, the sacrifices that generation made allowed the 21st century, as we know it, to come into existence.”

In America, Band of Brothers has raised eyebrows because of its sheer scale: a shooting schedule stretching to a marathon nine months, a speaking cast running to 500 actors, along with an astonishing 10,000 extras. Caterers served between 600 and 800 meals on any given day. With financing by US cable company HBO (which also gives us The Sopranos and Sex and the City), its budget topped $120 million (£83 million) – a huge sum even for a big Hollywood movie, but astronomical in television terms.

The good news is that it was shot in Britain, mainly at a disused aerodrome in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Of its huge budget, 70 per cent goes directly into the pockets of its hundreds of British film employees; it’s comparable to the UK winning a major export order. So crucial was it for Band of Brothers to be shot here (rather than Ireland, the Czech Republic or Canada, which all lobbied to be used for locations) that Tony Blair spoke directly to Spielberg to persuade him that Britain was best. Spielberg was easily swayed; he hugely respects British film technicians, and has made several films here, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark 20 years ago. He also gets along well with Blair, and even gave the Prime Minister’s son Euan a job as a lowly production runner at Hatfield.

It is there that I run into Tom Hanks, directing Crossroads, the fifth of ten Band of Brothers episodes. Hanks has fond memories of this 1,100-acre Hatfield site: part of it doubled for the heavily bombarded French village in Saving Private Ryan, the Oscar-winning Spielberg film in which he starred. Saving Private Ryan is linked to this series in another way. It was developed from a minor episode in its source book – Band of Brothers, American historian Stephen Ambrose’s non-fiction bestseller.

For the TV version of Band of Brothers, the aerodrome proves even more versatile; its geography is rearranged with man-made rivers, dykes and forests. “We’ve re-created Holland, Georgia and the Ardennes forest here,” says Hanks. He flashes a grin from beneath his baseball cap: “Hatfield – the place that has everything!”

It also turns out that England still has several US military vehicles left over from the Second World War. “That’s no small thing,” Hanks muses. “For instance, you can’t find Sherman tanks in the USA. The American military brought this stuff over in the forties, and didn’t bother taking it back.”

The series came together for TV because after Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg and Hanks each optioned an Ambrose book they wanted to adapt for the screen. Spielberg owned the rights to the sprawling volume, Citizen Soldiers; Hanks had Band of Brothers, and convinced Spielberg they should collaborate on it. “Tom convinced me it had more to say than the other story,” Spielberg shrugs. “He was right. It did.”

In Hank’s episode, the main character in Band of Brothers, Major Richard Winters (Damian Lewis), leads a platoon of 30 men against an entire company of German SS troops. Arriving at the crossroads by Holland’s Lower Rhine, he encounters the Germans traversing a dyke, and single handedly shoots many of them, repeatedly reloading his rifle, before his platoon catches up to lend their support.

“We’re killing Germans today, mainly,” a young female assistant director tells me. Indeed: the entire mornings shooting is punctuated by rapid gunfire. But Hanks looks supremely relaxed, striding around the grassland, issuing instructions between takes. He whirls earplugs around one finger, donning them when gunfire began, and sounded a horn to signify, “Cut!”

The actors are nothing if not well prepared. They were put through a “boot camp” at the training facility loaned by the Ministry of Defense, under the steely gaze of Captain Dale Dye, an ex-Marine in his sixties with cropped white hair and a clipped verbal delivery. “We took two solid weeks to train them,” he barks. “It was very physical and exhausting but it really paid dividends. They came out of it with their chests swelling.”

Dye confesses that he” was worried that Steven and Tom cast an Englishman in the lead role. Then I met him. He’s an impactful young man. We’ve seen loudmouths before, but he’s in a Gary Cooper mould. I had trouble catching him out. He was terrific in training, busted his butt. I admire his stamina. He just goes. He’s like a wind-up toy . . . there’s something in that little ginger shit’s eyes.”

Dye recalls how the actors were only called by their script name. “we tell them, remember the guys we’re trying to honour. These kids are serious about doing a good job of representing the old guys, and God bless them for it.”

When the scene is completed to Hank’s satisfaction, a mud-spattered Damian Lewis stumbles towards me, looking dazed. “I’ve really screwed up my hearing,” he complains. “I should have had earplugs in, too.”

Though Lewis is English, he volunteers without even being asked to tackle a thorny issue that may vex non-American viewers: isn’t Band of Brothers just another example of Hollywood suggesting that the Yanks won the war in Europe single-handed? It’s a dishonourable tradition, dating back to Errol Flynn films.

“This isn’t about how America won the war, it really isn’t,” he says sincerely. “This is about following a group of young men and their experiences. It could be a crack unit from any company.” Spielberg was already aware of such sensitivities. Even before shooting began he issued a statement through HBO, proclaiming the production: “A combined operation, a true jumping-off point, just as it was in 1944 for the 101st and the thousands of Allied Forces.”

When I met Spielberg recently in the Hamptons, the chic coastal resort near New York where he and his family spend their summers, he was also swift to praise two British directors from Band of Brothers. “David Leland [The Land Girls] did a great job for us. He did some of the Ardennes and the Battle of the Bulge episodes, and they were beautiful. Richard Loncraine [Richard III] shot the second hour for us, all the night-drop scenes, the parachuting into Normandy. It was amazing work. I was envious.” Despite all this diplomacy, Band of Brothers remains an American work, something that clearly influenced BBC executives to show it on BBC2 rather than BBC1: this after the corporation paid a huge sum, variously reported as £5 million and £7 million, for broadcast rights. BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey was quoted as saying Band of Brothers was “too niche” and “not mainstream enough” for her channel. “Well, that’s a tremendous compliment,” Spielberg said when I told him of this. “We tried like hell not to make it mainstream. The BBC is right in that conclusion. The film attempts to tell the real story of these men, as opposed to a series of mini-dramas, with rising action in the first act and predictable climaxes in the third. It was made to order, but the order came from the veterans of the 506th, not by the rules of drama.” Spielberg and Hands appear to have gone out of their way not to pander to commercial tastes. “One philosophy says, let’s make sure everyone’s recognizable,” says Hanks. “The other approach is to say everyone recognizable brings a certain baggage. That was what we went with, but David Schwimmer was so dedicated to doing something different we weren’t about to penalize someone for being successful.” In any case, Schwimmer, who plays Ross in Friends, is only seen in the first episode at the training camp in Georgia.

Band of Brothers is careful not to glorify combat. Shot largely from a soldier’s eye view, it is muted in style, and the screen is often drained of bright colours. “It also takes concentration,” Spielberg says. “You have to be very attentive to it, because there are new characters coming in and out. Some of them only stay for a couple of hours, just like they did in real life, then they were shipped out or wounded, or killed. This is not like The Sopranos, with the same faces every single week. New faces come and go. But when you do something semi-documentary, not just in style but in content, then you’re not going to be making a mainstream TV series.”

Above all, he and Hanks hope Band of Brothers is a worthy tribute to the fighting men who are its subjects. “We owe it to them to acquit their stories with honour,” says Spielberg. “That doesn’t necessarily mean being commercial, and it doesn’t necessarily mean being mainstream. It simply means ‘with honour’.”