Press

Atomic Magazine
Fall/ Winter 2001
By William Georgiades

World War Redux - Band of Brothers

The critically-acclaimed World War II television series by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg brings home the real-life story of Easy Company, from D-Day to Hitler’s mountain retreat, leaving bodies and buddies behind. Is war reality what America needs?

“Let’s get something clear right now. It is not boot camp. I get sick of it being called boot camp. It is military training for actors.” Even on the telephone, when Dale Dye suggests you get something clear, you come to attention. Dye is the decorated veteran combat Marine who over the course of 40 films, starting with Platoon, invented the now common practice of training actors to act like soldiers. He worked on Saving Private Ryan with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and worked with them again on Band of Brothers, the ubiquitous, highly praised ten-part television series that launched on HBO this fall, just two days before the September 11 attack on America.

Band of Brothers is based on the nonfiction bestseller by Stephen Ambrose and tells the true story of the soldiers of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. This American rifle unit did not single-handedly win the Second World War, despite the rapturous reviews and the overwhelming advertising the show has received, but where Zelig-like in their ubiquitous appearance at some of the most critical moments of World War II. Band of Brothers begins with the men’s training in Georgia in 1942, follows them as they parachute into France behind enemy lines on D-Day, as they fight on Utah Beach, in Arnhem, Bastogne, The Bulge, and go to take possession of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. The series was executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and cost $120 million to make, pretty much every penny of which you will see on screen. It is, to use the vernacular of today, a very big deal television production about a series of situations that were an unimaginable big deal. The show will not change the way you watch TV - you’ll still be sitting there staring at the box, after all - but it will stir, involve and move you in ways that made-for-television entertainment only occasionally has.

Easy Company was comprised of some 30 soldiers, which means the narrative has to follow 30 characters, which means that Dye had to whip that many actors into shape in the ten days before shooting began. The experience put Friends star David Schwimmer (Who has a small and not very physical role I the first two episodes) on crutches after he damaged his leg during training. But the point of the exercise, according to Dye, was to get the acting out of the actors and the soldiering into them, the better they could, as a team, salute the men of Easy Company. The training also created a bond between the actors and created a context. When training was over the real test about to come: ten months of shooting.

Filming began in March 2000 at Hatfield Studios in England, where much of Saving Private Ryan was shot. Aside from the 30 principals, there were some 600 people involved behind the cameras, and 1000 extras. Dye’s first job was to train 65 young men, and he tells me that of the 40 films he has worked on over the years, Band of Brothers was the most comprehensive training he has ever given.

Damian Lewis, a television star in England and one of the leads of the series (which is to say his character, Major Dick Winters, survived the war) was one of those men, and being a lead in the production didn’t mean too much in the beginning. “We were up at 6am with five miles runs, and then sit ups and push ups and squats and Dye standing above me saying ‘You better not give up on me Winters’. We were all absolutely exhausted by the end of it but we knew it was important,” he recalls.

Ron Livingstone, who was in Swingers and whose character Capt. Lewis Nixon is certainly the most interesting of the bunch, remembers loving the experience. “When I wanted to be an actor,” he says now, “it didn’t occur to me that the story is assembled ten seconds at a time and then goes in one direction: to the camera. Boot camp was the closest thing to why I’m an actor.”

Adds Scott Grimes (Party of Five), “Dale Dye is a genius. He made us really miserable. I could have been an actor and I’m outta here, or we could band together. By the end of it all, I loved him.” Grimes then says something that sums up the entire point of Dye’s exercise: “It’s fun to play war, but Dale Dye made it all very real.”

Not surprisingly, actor Neal McDonough (Silent Men, You’re Killing Me), who plays Lt. Buck Compton, concurs. “Through all the training I learned more from Dye about acting than anywhere else. Dale made us sleep and eat and live it,” he says.

Dye has a huge amount of affection for all the actors he worked with and talks in a low key way about his approach.

“I do the same thing any leader does for youngsters,” he says. “They all harbor the thought, ‘Could I hack it?’ So I appeal to that. I say, it’s right that you do this because the men who gave you the opportunity to do this work were dying at the rate of 1000 a month so salute them. And if you salute, do it correctly. You have to tell the truth. You have to know what the truth is. So I’m gonna beat the hell out of you.”

“One thing I did not want them to do was act. Just soldier. If you soldier it will be the best performance you ever give,” adds Dye. “Anything actorly would be unlike what those men would do. They would say “Skipper how should I handle this emotionally?” and I would say, “Soldier through it.’”

The training was crucial and it shows over the course of ten hours more dramatically than the $120 million spent on authenticity. Hanks is said to have been an absolute stickler for detail, from uniforms and military equipment to locations, dialogue and details. Not for this Hollywood representation of war the liberties taken by Pearl Harbor, U-571 and Saving Private Ryan - Band of Brothers would be authentic to the last tear and bead of sweat.

And so it was that the actors soon discovered their ten days of training weren’t just to give them flat stomachs and a vague taste of the inconveniences of a soldier’s world, but to prepare them for the next ten months of their lives.

“It was ten months of raining, marching through the mud and eating slop,” says Neal McDonough of the production. “We were picked up at 5am every morning in the dark and every day is was 1942 from sunrise to sundown for ten months. We played Bennie Goodman all day long and it made all of us into gentlemen because of this respect we had for the men we were playing.”

Respect is a word that comes up frequently with these actors. Rather than interpreting the characters to better suit their own career agendas, the actors uniformly seemed intent on honoring the men who fought and fell before them. The motivation they all appear to have was, ‘What did this man actually do?’

And the men of Easy Company were a fascinating bunch. The fact that every character is based on a real person made an indelible impression on the cast. Dick Winters, portrayed by Damian Lewis, is alive and well today and living in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Lewis remembers Winters telling him, “It’s my life up there.” Says Neal McDonough, “These are not like guys we know. They got shot at and never complained and I am so proud I got to know a man like Buck Compton. I’ve never been a part of something so important.”

Sgt. Donald Malarky, according to Scott Grimes who plays him, “was highly emotional and I called him on everything.” Ron Livingstone was not so fortunate, since the man he portrayed, Lewis Nixon, died six years ago of diabetes. Nixon is essentially the exposition character, the one who tells viewers where they are in the story. Livingstone adds that Nixon, an intelligence officer, “was an interesting guy. He was enigmatic, fairly ironic and a little ahead of his time in his thinking.”

Livingstone didn’t know much about the project when he first auditioned. “I thought, I’m not G.I. Joe, and movie officers are all crisp and the grunt soldiers all have New York accents,” he says. (Think of Edward Bruns’ gratingly false Brooklynese in Saving Private Ryan). But when Livingstone saw a picture of his character after he was cast, he was struck by the similarity.

“There’s a picture of Nixon lying in his bed and he’s drunk and the physical resemblance is uncanny,” he says. “They really went all out to cast guys with a physical resemblance.”

And the respect is returned in kind. Dye says that most of the men he has trained would have made excellent soldiers, and the soldiers themselves only offer one criticism of the ten hour show. They can’t believe they’ve been portrayed as using so many curse words. Killing, saving and fighting is one thing, but swearing is quite another.

The only cloud on the horizon on this sunny, honorably accurate history lesson by way of thrilling narrative is the fact that Steven Spielberg, the executive producer, chose, as with Saving Private Ryan, to shoot in England while ignoring the English or the allies efforts during World War II, a sort of starkly revisionist history lesson whereby America came in and saved everybody. Spielberg of course isn’t defending it at all and the actors are pretty well versed on the subject, having dealt with the vituperative British press for much longer then they were doing their boot camp bonanza.

“There was a definite animosity,” Grimes tells me about his time on the set, “and I talked to Steven about it and he said, ‘We can’t tell every story,’ Steven and Tom picked these guys and I do not think it takes away from anyone else.”

Adds Englishman Damian Lewis, “It’s incidental that it’s about Americans. Each nation had extraordinary young people. It’s more of a social history than a military history. It is history, it is not a fiction. These ten hours are a faithful representation of a history book. Easy Company was an experimental unit that achieved excellence. It was one of the best rifle units in the world at that time. They were the first paratroopers in U.S. history, and they suffered 156 casualties.”

Livingstone, the dissolute center of the sprawling narrative weighs in, saying, “You can’t predict what’s going to happen in Band of Brothers. It is true to all of that. This is not Hollywood.” He hesitates, then adds a closing thought: “It’s not to do with acting, it’s to do with time travel.”