A Lifelong Fascination With WWII

“I can honestly say I’ve been making World War II movies all my life,” Steven Spielberg reflects with a rueful grin. “I’ve been stuck in the 1940s for most of my career.”

In four decades of making films, though, it’s fair to say Spielberg has never before tackled World War II in quite such depth as now. Along with Tom Hanks, he is executive producer of “Band of Brothers,” a 10-part miniseries that debuts on HBO this weekend.

Shot mainly in England (Spielberg’s favorite movie location) with a reported budget of $120 million, “Band of Brothers” follows the fortunes of a World War II infantry unit throughout the European campaign. Their story begins when they undergo rigorous basic training in Georgia in 1942. They parachute into France on the morning of D-day and traverse the war-torn continent, finally capturing Hitler’s fortress Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden.

The series is based on writer-historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1992 volume of the same name--the story of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Spielberg fleshed out a minor incident in Ambrose’s book to create “Saving Private Ryan,” his Oscar-winning 1998 feature film.

“I’m very proud of ‘Band of Brothers,”’ Spielberg commented. “I’m very pleased with it, I really am. But it’s semi-documentary, and when you do something that is semi-documentary, not just in style but in content, then you’re not going to be making a mainstream television series.”

He mused on these matters in a quiet back room of a restaurant in the Hamptons. He; his wife, actress Kate Capshaw; and their family have a second home nearby, where they spend three months of every year, including much of each summer.

Spielberg had just returned from a family vacation on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, away from the pressures of Hollywood. He had been under the gun to finish shooting his next movie, “Minority Report” by early July, and learned his new film “A.I.” proved a major U.S. box-office disappointment.

For all this he seemed low-key and rested, especially in the Hamptons, where rich New Yorkers, clad in expensive, carefully ironed leisure wear, walk around tensely, fretting at the effort of looking relaxed. Spielberg simply threw on jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap.

Still, he knew he was addressing a legitimate concern about “Band of Brothers,” namely: Will a sizeable TV audience tune in to watch an unfolding drama that unsparingly details the horrors, loss and tragedies of war, as well as the heroism, action and bravery?

The problem does not seem to faze Spielberg: “We tried like hell not to make it mainstream, and that’s why it’s not on ABC or NBC or CBS. If we’d wanted to make a mainstream movie about the 506th, we’d have done it for one of the major networks, not HBO.

“The film attempts to tell the story of this band of brothers, 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.”

And he concedes “Band of Brothers” may not be easy viewing, in any sense of the phrase: “It takes concentration. You’ve got to sit with it, and you have to be patient, because there are new characters coming in and out. Sometimes they stay for a couple of hours, just like they did in real life, then they were shipped out or wounded, or killed. It’s not like ‘The Sopranos,’ with the same eight faces every single week.”

He noted that a couple of characters in “Band of Brothers” remain on screen throughout the series: “But everybody else comes and goes. So [the audience] has to be very attentive to it.”

Certainly the casting in “Band of Brothers” makes no concessions to pandering to a mass audience. The major role, that of the heroic Capt. Richard Winters, went to Damian Lewis, a relatively unknown British actor.

David Schwimmer, from the cast of “Friends,” appears in an early episode that details the unit being trained in Georgia, but then disappears from the narrative. Hanks, one of Hollywood’s major leading men, directed one episode and wrote another, but contented himself with a cameo role as a British paratrooper.

Spielberg recalled that he was considering making a series of another Ambrose book, the weighty “Citizen Soldiers.” But Hanks had it in mind to produce “Band of Brothers” and suggested to Spielberg that they should collaborate. “Tom convinced me it had more to say than the other story,” Spielberg said. “And he was right, it did.”

The two men share a fascination for World War II, the soldiers, airmen and sailors who fought in it, and that era. “I’ve done ‘1941,’ ‘Empire of the Sun,’ the three ‘Indiana Jones’ films,” Spielberg said. “‘Saving Private Ryan,’ of course, [and] ‘Schindler’s List’ was from that time.”

Yet for him the fascination goes all the way back to his childhood. Spielberg, 54, grew up in the shadow of World War II. His father, Arnold, served in Burma during the conflict, as a radio operator on B-25s, and his wartime memories deeply affected young Spielberg.

“The 8-millimeter movies which I made when I was 12 or 13 years old were about that war,” he recalled. “The first, ‘Escape to Nowhere,’ was about Americans fighting Germans in North Africa.

“My second was 45 minutes long, black-and-white, no sound, 8-millimeter, was a film called ‘Fighter Squadron,’ about World War II pilots. I went out to this airport, Sky Harbor in Phoenix, Ariz., where in the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s they still had World War II airplanes sitting on the tarmac. The people out there let me get into them with my 12-and 13-year-old friends and pretend we were flying them for the film.”

Still, it’s “Band of Brothers” that engages Spielberg at the moment. He was particularly impressed by the contributions of two British directors, each of whom took charge of an episode.

“David Leland did a great job for us. He did some of the Ardennes and Battle of the Bulge episodes, and it was beautiful work.

“And also Richard Loncraine [“Richard III”], he did some wonderful things. He’s so underrated and talented. For the second hour, he shot all the night drop scenes, all the paratrooping into Normandy. It was amazing work. I was envious.”

Spielberg has no plans to make “Band of Brothers” the last World War II story he commits to screen.

He still harbors plans to adapt Ambrose’s “Citizen Soldiers” for film. And at some stage in the future he hopes to direct a feature based on a book Ambrose is writing about Iwo Jima.

Spielberg remains convinced that World War II was the defining event of the last century, and feels it important that the generation of Allies who fought in it should be remembered.

He is aware that this generation is rapidly aging and will not be here much longer.

“It’s time to say something about those people again,” he said. “My father is still with us, 84 years old and healthy, thank God. But we have to remember that what that generation sacrificed allowed the 21st century to come into existence. Without them there would not be a 21st century as we know it.

“We owe it to them to acquit their stories with honor.

“And sometimes ‘with honor’ doesn’t necessarily mean being commercial, it doesn’t necessarily mean being mainstream.

“It simply means ‘with honor.”’

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“Band of Brothers” begins Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO with Episodes 1 and 2. The remaining eight episodes will air on consecutive Sunday nights at 9. The network has rated the first night TV-MA-VL (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17, with special advisories for violence and coarse language).