Oscar winners Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg joined WWII veterans at Utah Beach, Normandy, on the 57th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, to unveil their ten-hour TV epic Band Of Brothers.
But unlike the glitzy bash Disney recently threw for Pearl Harbor, the Band Of Brothers debut was a decidedly sombre event. A tearful Hanks addressed the crowd of former Allied soldiers following a remembrance service in which he placed a wreath on the US war memorial.
“As filmmakers, we hope to entertain those in search of a good story, educate those who are unaware of their own history,” Hanks said. “The truth is that we do all this knowing full well that what we show on screen illuminates only a fraction of the memories these men have carried with them for the last 57 years. We know we have missed details. We have rearranged times. We have altered geography and in so doing we have shrunken history by making history fit on to our screen and to our purpose.”
However, the Saving Private Ryan star adamantly defends the film's accuracy in the face of claims that the script downplays Britain’s involvement. When some critics attempted to lump the film with recent war blockbusters of questionable accuracy including U-571, Tom said: “I can only speak for Band Of Brothers and I know we tried extremely hard.”
Brit Damien Lewis, who plays an American in the film, echoed Tom’s sentiments, saying: “As a British actor I was as diligent as I could be to make sure the British were not seen as tea-drinking hoorahs.”
“This is not something that is neatly wrapped up in three hours,” says co-executive producer Hanks, who has a brief cameo in the film. “At the end of Band Of Brothers you can get the sense… that these guys had to go back to being cleaners and postal workers and construction workers.”
The $120-million series, based on historian Stephen Ambrose’s book of the same name, required 10,000 extras and was shot at Hatfield aerodrome in Hertfordshire. The mini-series co-stars just one recognizable name, Friends actor David Schwimmer, and debuts on cable TV station HBO in the US in early September, followed several weeks later by a BBC premiere.
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
