Battled Minds

Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman Combine To Create A TV Masterpiece: The Pacific

By Barb Oates

It's mid January in Pasadena, and Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are standing in a corner as HBO runs a promo reel to TV critics of its epic 10-part miniseries The Pacific. Hanks is beaming with pride. Then the lights go on and Hanks and Spielberg jump to the stage to begin fielding a firestorm of questions. The press conference culminates Spielberg, Hanks and Gary Goetzman's six-year project, which they embarked on not long after their award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers.

I ask Hanks what was running through his mind while watching the reel and he smiles. "It's funny," he says. "You hand it over and they always come up with new juxtapositions and connections because other people look at the material -- I was knocked out by it."

And so were we TV critics. From the opening score and title treatment you realize this project is unlike any other war feature film you've seen. Each one-hour episode begins with a much-needed narrative (provided by Hanks) that introduces you to Pacific isles you never knew existed, summarizing dates, locations and the battle stories that were about to unfold. The narrative takes just minutes and then it quickly moves to the human element of the war, depicting the real-life experiences of three U.S. Marines -- Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda). The series follows them from their enlistment to their first battle with the Japanese on Guadalcanal, through the rainforests of Cape Gloucester and devastation of Peleliu, across the bloody sands of Iwo Jima and through the horror of Okinawa, and ultimately to triumph and their return home.

Almost unbearable to watch at times, as the magnitude and the intensity of these battles was so bloody and devastating, the series doesn't waver in depicting the true human cost of war.

"I think what moved us to tell these stories based on these survivors, these veterans, was, in essence, to see what happens to the human soul throughout this particular engagement," Spielberg says. "These islands were steppingstones to the mainland of Japan. These islands were all steppingstones. And the warfare that we were trained to fight -- we weren't trained by the drill instructors stateside, except what they could glean from recent history. We were trained by the enemy, how to fight the enemy. They trained us how to fight like them. And because of that -- and I don't want to compare one war to the other in terms of savagery -- there's a level when nature and humanity conspire against the individual. And to see what happens to those individuals throughout the entire course of events, leading up to the dropping of the two atomic bombs, is something that was very, very hard, I think, for the actors and for the writers and for all of us to put on the screen. But we felt we had to try."

Hanks says the war in the Pacific is more like the wars we see today.

"A war of racism and terror, a war of absolute horrors, both on the battlefield and in the regular living conditions," says Hanks. "The challenges that we put forward to ourselves at the beginning of all of this was to take human beings and put them through hell and wonder how in the world they would approach the world when they came back."

Jon Seda plays John Basilone, one of our country's many heroes of the war. Seda found the experience to be utterly humbling. "I almost couldn't watch [the clip]. I got teary-eyed. We've kind of been living with this for almost three years now. It's really emotional.

"I'll never forget the first day of boot camp. Tom Hanks came out and gave a pep talk. He said a lot of great things. The one thing I remember the most that he said to us, and there was about a hundred, 200 of us at boot camp, some were big roles, some small, some who didn't even know what they were going to do. He said, 'Everyone here is just as important as the next. If you are in a scene and you're not saying anything, these things are so big and huge they are going to capture everything.' We all went through the same training. Everyone just gave 100 percent and brought their hearts to the set. They had the look and feel of what the war was doing to them. When he said that, it really inspired me.

"This isn't like any other job," Seda continues. "This isn't like making a TV show. When I signed on to do this, I wasn't thinking about what this would mean for me or my career or anything like that; it was just me trying to do the best I could and be the voice of Basilone. Watching that and seeing it put together like that, man, it's an honor. It's an honor to be a part of this."

And, it's an honor to be able to view The Pacific beginning March 14 on HBO (HD) and HBO On Demand March 15. New episodes air on HBO every Sunday.

Check out our complete Pacific Episode Guide