There were a great majority of the guys who were...
...what you'd just call good soldiers.
You could depend on them. They were always there.
These kids were from farms. They weren't paratrooping guys.
They wanted to be the best, to look and do their job the best.
It hadn't been done before. You're dropped at 1000 feet...
...which means if anything goes wrong, you die.
Once you've assessed the situation and how dangerous it is...
...and then you go and do something, that's true courage.
These guys were everything to each other.
In a way, they were more than family.
It is a story of courage and comradeship...
...endurance and sacrifice.
Executive producers, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and HBO...
...re-create the true story of Easy Company...
...an elite WWII parachute infantry regiment...
...in the epic miniseries Band of Brothers...
...based on the best-selling book by Stephen Ambrose.
They followed one group, from them signing up to the end of the war.
They were in Normandy on D-Day, fought in Holland...
...and were in the Battle of the Bulge. Very well-chronicled all the way.
The massive production spanned three years and cost over $ 120 million.
Primarily shooting on an 1100-acre back lot in Hatfield, England.
A 12-acre village set was continually modified...
...to portray 11 different European locations.
It's five times bigger than what we had on Saving Private Ryan.
We're in Aldbourne and Upottery in England, France, Normandy, Holland.
We're in Bastogne. We're all over the place.
The costume department provided 2000 German and American uniforms...
...including 500 pairs of Corcoran jump boots.
Twelve hundred civilian costumes were authentic vintage clothing.
On our project...
...every department has the best people you can find.
It's a first-rate production facility for re-creating the past...
...as well as the next generation of special effects...
...and computer-generated effects.
In some ways, it's intimidating, but it's also incredibly fun.
10,000 extras worked on the miniseries, which featured 500 speaking roles.
Everybody in this had the role as soon as they walked through the door.
We had this fabulous session where we said:
"Let's see how they relate to each other in different roles."
Steven operated the camera, and Tom staged the action...
...and we would mix and match different roles.
Steven was down with his video camera, filming. He asked me and another guy:
"When you say that line, can you move this way a little?"
We said sure, and the scene started.
Before you knew it was over, we were being shuffled out.
And the guy said to me:
"Did I just get directed by Spielberg?" I says, "Yeah."
Senior military advisor, Capt. Dale Dye, served as a watchdog...
...for military accuracy and trained the cast in a 10-day, actor boot camp.
When they portrayed something, when the director said, "You're exhausted"...
...or "You're frightened," they would have something.
Some sort of understanding of what exhaustion and fear mean to a soldier.
I wanted them to know that.
There's no way to do it but to put them in that position.
You're in barracks with the guys. The barracks smell like feet.
I remember going, "I'm never gonna make these 10 days."
Boot camp's exhaustive 18-hour days...
...were fiilled with physical training and military drills.
- Hold your fire! - There! Behind the house!
I want concentrated bursts of fire. Don't waste ammo!
- Go, runner, go. - Get them round the side as well.
We have somebody in here on the left-hand side.
See who he is. He's in a black coat.
- Got him? - Lipton, come with me.
Private, get a weapon on this guy.
Capt. Dye can tear you down...
...make you realize what you need to do...
...and then bring you right back up within a sentence.
"Now just shut up." Then you'd go do your thing and he goes:
"Sgt. Luz. Earn them stripes."
1940s-style jump training...
...included jumping from a 40-foot-high plane fuselage mockup.
So we climb up this tower. Some little woman walks up to me...
...and puts two little hooks around my waist.
She's like, "Okay, you're safetied in."
"What do you mean? I'm not safetied in."
She's like, "Go!" "I'm not safetied...!"
I jump off, "1-1000, 2..." What the hell is that?
The worst was sleeping in sleeping bags.
It was colder inside them than being outside.
Guys took off their socks to give others to stay warm.
You'd give your jacket to someone else.
You hit walls in boot camp.
These personal, mental, physical walls you have to go over.
Some guys, the first night, cried themselves to sleep.
We were there for each other.
I came out of the boot-camp experience doing anything for these guys.
We became soldiers. When I went into boot camp, I thought I was ready.
When I left, I felt like a different person.
It's like you did something no one could take away.
The same way that no one could take away what Easy Company has done.
To be a paratrooper in WWII, it was experimental and elite.
It was the first time it was being done.
Their job was unique in that they were dropped out of planes.
They had to be, in essence, one-man armies.
They had to bring everything with them.
Just the thought of being dropped in the middle of enemy territory...
...surrounded on all four sides...
...knowing that there's gonna be no help, it's just you.
There's a grit and a resolve they had to just never quit.
It was beat into them at boot camp, and they wouldn't quit then.
It prepared them. They didn't quit under the most dire conditions...
...that, really, any soldiers could've faced.
There was a scene at a crossroad, where we surprise Germans.
And it's just about a hundred Germans running away.
Then they start firing at us. We're popping off clips, having to reload.
Another German platoon storms down this hill and attacks.
All of a sudden, this riverbed just explodes.
All the way down. The ground's shaking.
I remember when I was reloading...
...that's when you're most vulnerable, because you can't defend yourself.
And I was having trouble because my hands were shaking.
I was thinking, "I'm gonna get shot in the head when I'm not looking."
Then you come out of it, and you go, "That's what it's like."
When you go through years of war with guys next to you...
...you're dependent on this person. Their small mistake...
...or their one heroic event can save or destroy your life.
You have to bond. If you're not one unit...
...you're not gonna necessarily survive, you know.
One of the most ambitious re-creations occurred in the fiirst week of shooting.
From a physical production standpoint...
...the most challenging scene was taking off for D-Day.
Hundreds of extras had to be accurately equipped...
...and uniformed and webbed and geared up.
As a paratrooper, everything you survive on, you must carry.
The amount of equipment they're carrying...
Getting on those planes with 100 pounds of excess equipment.
They had to be shoved onto these planes.
It was a tremendous feat of coordination.
We had four C-47 aircraft from the period that actually could work.
We had seven cameras shooting planes take off, all in different positions.
Cameras had assignments.
As soon as the plane passes you, you run here...
...so you can get the takeoff. Then get this aerial shot.
Then the planes will return so you can get a flyby.
Everybody had multiple assignments.
It was pretty thrilling to watch those old planes roaring around.
You knew that some of you wouldn't be coming back and some would.
I can only guess how those guys must have felt.
To get to the point that you can understand:
"Okay, this is the routine. I jump out of a moving plane...
...and I fall to the earth, and hopefully a chute opens.
And then the easy part is to grab my weapon and go kill people."
It's a totally different world.
They flew pretty much into mayhem.
They lost 1000 paratroopers before they hit the ground.
Planes shot down or being shot, just in their parachutes.
Guys were dropping at 500 feet. The ground is very close at 500 feet.
The pilots didn't know what to expect or weren't trained...
...for that amount of fire and flew too low, flew too fast.
Some of them flew too high and got scattered all just to hell and gone.
A-camera.
The special-effects department constructed a gimble.
It's a very large, hydraulic-driven apparatus that sits under the plane.
They can control...
...every possible axis of movement in varying degrees of intensity.
That thing is rocking, as if you were in a real plane.
We went onboard, and we said, "Show us how it works."
And he, very gently, did the controls.
Fool that I am, I said to him jokingly, "Come on, show me what you got."
It was an E-ticket ride.
My episode starts with the aircraft, the C-47s, full of paratroopers.
It starts with the guys jumping.
We decided we'd predominately keep with Winters...
...one of our main characters in the episode.
Eight seconds. That's all it took. Plane to the ground.
I'm gonna do it in about four.
Very dangerous, highly-skilled stunt I'm about to do.
We decided to follow him to the ground in one go.
From the time he jumps to when he hits the ground is one shot.
We do that by hanging him against blue with a lot of air being blown at him...
...so we can swivel and pivot him.
Then a camera crane is moving, representing a floating camera.
He's not falling at all. The aircraft is moving away...
...so it looks like he's falling. It's done in an optical process afterwards.
If you shoot someone against blue, the computer can remove the blue...
...and put whatever background you want: aircraft, sky, paratroopers.
We have our actor falling. The camera moves in, goes up to his face...
...Iooks down to the ground, looks back up to him again, all in one shot.
Let's go!
That looked real. Very good. Cut.
The look and feel of Band of Brothers was enhanced at Cinesite, London...
...using a revolutionary, all-digital fiilm-fiinishing process.
The technologies we pioneered...
...were really about electronic color timing.
It was about the ability to electronically control...
...all of the aspects of hue and color and to match them shot for shot.
There were instructions...
...about what the look of things had to be. It's desaturated.
It's as though you were back in the 1940s...
...with a 1940's camera, shooting stuff for real.
With postproduction and digital effects, we keep a consistent theme throughout.
Cinesite also provided many of the 700 visual-effects shots...
...that re-create Easy Company's experiences.
We're dropping into occupied Holland. Our job is to liberate Eindhoven.
We're re-creating the drop of thousands of troops.
This is the first shot of the parachute sequence.
We're looking at low-resolution models so we can very quickly and easily...
...lay out the look of the shots, speeds, animation and timing.
This is an individual soldier with a parachute.
There's animation on the soldier as he comes down, just to give life to it.
Then from this, we can render our resolution models.
In this case, we're taking Mike's CG, and I then layer those CG elements...
...over the live-action background which, in this case, is this shot.
What we needed to do is separate the background from the foreground.
So we create a matte, which would look like this.
And anything in the black area will allow the parachutes to be visible.
When they hit this white area, they'll disappear from view.
You give the impression of them falling behind the foreground elements.
All those details need to be achieved so you believe it really is happening.
Re-creating the battles...
...required up to 14,000 rounds of ammunition a day...
...utilizing about 700 authentic WWII weapons and 400 rubber prop guns.
Over here on the right...
...we have the M-1 Garand rifles.
On the opposite side, we have the Germans with the K-98 rifles.
This is a paratrooper version of the M-1 carbine.
That means it has a folding stock, which makes it easier to jump with.
This is one of our MG42s.
Roll, please!
That's an 88 flat-ground high explosive.
This is what would've been fired from the planes...
...when they went in on D-Day.
This is one of the rubber pistols that we'll be using.
Wherever possible, we'll use a rubber gun. When it's in its holster...
...it should look like the real thing. This is one of our rubber 5-0s...
...that we've just finished painting up.
We highlighted the rubber here to make it look a bit like metal.
Isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing?
I thought for sure that thing was made of total metal.
This is a Tiger tank.
We actually built this on a chassis of a T-34.
We've actually put wheel spats and hubcaps and things on...
...to make it look more authentic, like a Tiger tank.
All this sheeting is covered in this zimmerit finish...
...which the Germans use like a paste...
...which actually stops magnetic mines from being put on the side.
The turret works, and we will be having the gun firing...
...with the special effects, with the full ricochet.
These are some British army armored personnel carriers...
...which have the smaller wheels, which work very good...
...for the Panzerkampfwagen III. The big problem with these is that...
...we have to extend the length with one more wheel.
We got six wheels there and only five here.
The engine on these comes right at the front.
Obviously, it's in the wrong position. We will be cutting it off...
...right through there and moving the engine further back.
We are building, all together, six tanks and renting in four.
The scene we've just finished shooting is a major assault...
...on the American line in the forest in the Ardennes.
The battle was planned by Capt. Dale Dye, and we only shot it once.
This'll be a close-in, hole-to-hole fight...
...between Easy in these holes here and that infantry.
We have five cameras running, and because we had explosions...
...we had to make sure the stuntmen, the extras, the drivers...
...know exactly where they are and where their vehicles should be.
Action!
Here they come!
This is a big shot. It's one of the biggest ones so far.
By the time they completed shooting the third episode...
...the special-effects department had used more pyrotechnics than...
...Saving Private Ryan.
What we've developed here is an air hit. There's a system...
...that activates this valve here, that allows the blood...
...and the air...
...that's pressurized in here to come straight out.
And it blasts through the little cloth cloak that we put on here...
...and pushes the blood out at high velocity.
The great thing with this is, the actor can wear this, run around...
...and fire it himself from a button that we conceal up his arm.
You press this button, and off we go.
Action!
Cut it!
These things here, as you can see, are air mortars.
We bury these in the ground...
...and we use compressed air in the yellow tank there.
The air comes through the tank and out through this cone.
The cone, we fill with debris. We can put people right on top...
...and have them look like they're blown up...
...and there's no danger at all.
And it's an 88mm shell or a hand grenade...
...whatever we want it to be.
In addition to executive producing the fiilm with Spielberg...
...World War II buff, Tom Hanks, also directs part five.
I go home and I tell my parents:
"Yeah... Tom Hanks, you know, he's giving direction or whatever."
They're like, "Son, that's great!" "How was your work today, Mom?"
"Who cares? Tom Hanks is telling you to knock it off. That's awesome."
Cut. Sweet. Thing of beauty.
He knows all the characters. He knows who we should care about...
...and who we wanna see...
...and who's got something going on four episodes later.
What he absolutely is sure of is how he wants to tell the story.
We're gonna start with just your firing on the Germans.
But then on a cue, you're gonna see those 100 other guys coming.
Episode five lands squarely in the middle of our 10-part series.
Now we're dealing with a lot of combat veterans for whom...
All they want to do is get home. The only haven they have...
...is the company itself and friendships they've made...
...because the rest of the world really is not a pleasant place.
Part six and seven re-create a time when Easy Company...
...was pushed beyond human limits.
It is the moment that they became a band of brothers...
...because what they experienced...
...they could not relate to anybody who wasn't there.
The conditions in Bastogne were horrendous.
Freezing cold...
...no long johns, just a pair of socks and no mittens.
About 200 yards away, there's enemy fire coming right at you...
...and you have to stay your position for the next month...
...and try not to get killed and try to take more ground.
And most of the guys didn't make it.
These guys were losing limbs, dying for their best friends.
You've got no food, you're eating snow, and you're hallucinating...
...and everything's falling off because of frostbite.
That doesn't come close to what it really was.
The art department constructed the forest in a airplane hangar...
...using hundreds of real trees and 250 trees...
...created by the special-effects department.
We created our own trees...
...which are a mixture of fiberglass, like this one, hemp and latex...
...to give a shattered-tree look. And hard-foam trees...
...with a cardboard tube core that keeps the weight down.
The Germans set their timers on their mortar rounds...
...so they exploded in the treetops. The soldiers got shrapnel...
...from the mortar rounds and from trees being hit.
When we've got to do a tree being hit by mortars...
...like this one...
...we've got the tree section, and there's a hole in the middle here.
We put our narrow, full-size foam section of the tree...
...onto the stump, and we can blow the whole tree.
Do a big hit in the bottom, and the tree falls over.
Incoming!
Find a foxhole! Come on! Take cover!
We can have people as close as 5 feet.
Looks like the real tree has taken a major hit...
...and it's safe.
It took four weeks to dress the Bastogne sets with man-made snow.
What we use mainly is cellulose-base snow. It's like pure paper.
We mix that with polymers and certain plastics so we can have slush.
We're using more of that outside on the bombed-out towns.
The forest set is a composite of three different parts.
We're actually using a third of a million pounds of paper.
It's the biggest amount ever used on one set for anything.
It should be in the Guinness Book of Records.
Most of the machines are huge things. This is a lovely device.
We saw Ghostbusters and fell in love with the look.
I felt the snow wasn't glamorous enough, so we made these.
They're really great. You just switch them on...
...and that's snow.
You can turn the snowflakes so they're bigger or smaller.
You can dissolve it faster or slower.
This backpack contains... Almost like a children's bubble-bath solution.
Everything's rigged to make this thing give realistic-Iooking snowflakes.
In part nine, the production re-creates the reason...
...for the incredible sacrifices Easy Company made fighting World War II.
The episode deals with liberating a concentration camp.
That has a lot of personal meaning to me. I had family...
...who died in camps and also family who escaped Nazi Germany.
The most challenging scenes...
...are the scenes at Landsberg, the concentration camp.
Trying to capture what it must have been like to find...
...a concentration camp. Most of them didn't even know they existed.
But to see it in the flesh and to see so much dead flesh...
...was traumatic for a lot of soldiers. The first time you come here...
...and there's nobody here, it seems like a monument...
...to people who died in camps rather than a movie set.
I have a lot of personal emotion tied up in this episode...
...so it's very satisfying to be able to bring it to life.
The men in Easy Company were unquestionably heroes...
...because of their strength in adversity...
...their ability to come through...
...what must have been...
...Babylon to them.
They did a job that frightened them...
...that was bigger than them, that was overwhelming.
And they did it courageously and took care of each other...
...under extraordinary circumstances.
There's nobody like them. Or ever will be like them.
Elite.
The real Easy Company guys, they will never call themselves heroes.
But now that we're getting to play them, and people are calling us...
...Easy Company, we can say it for them. They are heroes.
These guys lived hell for years...
...for the betterment of the world.
Doing a movie like this, hopefully...
...is a small shred...
...of a sliver of a thank you...
...and a little piece of...
...information that we can pass along to others.
Don't forget.
Don't forget. It was really hard, and they did it so you don't have to.
It's an amazing program. I think this is really gonna be special TV.
All of us will watch this next year and be like, "Wow.
I miss those guys. I can't believe I was part of that."
We'll never be part of something like this ever again. Pretty amazing.