Interview with Steven Spielberg
Q: What is it about the World War II era that appeals to
you?
STEVEN SPIELBERG: Growing up, my father, who fought with the 490th
Bomb Squadron in the China-Burma-India Campaign, regaled me with
wartime stories, all of them unglamorous. He spoke of patriotism
and the call of duty. He talked about the tedium, the typhoons, the
low morale. Not the kind of things you would say would make a good
movie someday. But, he was there and he made his contribution to
what we now call 'The Greatest Generation'.
Q: Why did you want to do another miniseries about World
War II, on the Pacific?
SS: When Tom Hanks and I first decided to adapt Stephen Ambrose's
Band of Brothers into a miniseries, I remember thinking at the time
that it would also be great to pay tribute to the veterans of the
Pacific theatre of operations. My father and my uncle, who both
fought in the Pacific, had the same idea, and after Saving Private
Ryan came out and Band of Brothers played on HBO, they asked, What
about the boys on the other side of the Atlantic? You're
celebrating all those guys from Europe! We did something too! We
also got many letters from veterans congratulating us on those
projects, but asking for recognition for their efforts, too.
Veterans from Peleliu, Pavuvu, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, the
Solomons, Wake Island, Midway.
Q: Was it important to base The Pacific on real
experiences?
SS: We just didn't want to make this apocryphal; we wanted this to
be based on real people, real events in real history. Our soldiers
were battling an enemy that fought by rules that we had never in
our military history encountered. And if they survived that, they
still had to contend with malaria, yellow fever and the malaise of
existing in a hostile natural environment.
Q: Could you tell me briefly what The Pacific is
about?
SS: The Pacific is about the souls of men. It's the story of the
corruption of the human spirit, and the private war that all of
those soldiers had to fight to save themselves from what they were
witnessing and what they were engaged in. It's about their struggle
to find some salvageable fragment of humanity after these horrible
four years were over and the war ended, and how they were able to
come back to America and start their lives over again, and
basically form our generation, the baby boomers. It's about how
they were able and, in some cases, unable to relinquish these
stories to their own kids because of some of the horrors that they
witnessed.
Q: Did you want The Pacific to be, in part, an homage to
all the men that fought in the Pacific?
SS: The Pacific is, of sorts, an honor roll of valor and sacrifice.
We wanted people to remember those specific men depicted in our
story, but to also understand that it's not just about this handful
of American soldiers, it's also about the hundreds of thousands,
the millions that we don't get to see in this miniseries, who
fought just as valiantly and just as hard and suffered the same
losses. So this is about all of them, and we hope that our cast is
representative of all who fought in the Pacific in World War
II.
Q: Do you think The Pacific shines a light on some of the
unbelievably brutal conditions these men had to experience in
combat?
SS: Yes, I think the audience will see the malaise of being in an
environment so foreign to anything the soldiers had ever before
experienced. More than the fighting, more than the loss, it was the
conditions that these young men were under the boredom, the tedium,
the relentless rain, the mud, the biting insects, the malaria. You
know, unlike the Dutch and the French countrysides of the war in
Europe, the jungle has no face, it's a ubiquitous organism.
And you can feel like you've been ingested by this organism, like
you've been swallowed whole. So the jungle becomes just as much an
enemy as the soldiers you're fighting against. The jungle killed
many good soldiers during World War II and in our film, it becomes
a Hieronymus Bosch landscape. I think our directors and our writers
did a really good job of putting all that up there on the
screen.
Q: The Japanese soldiers were an enemy unlike anything the
Americans had ever really fought before. How were they so different
from the Germans and the European front?
SS: Well, the Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death
before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were
the aggressors in World War II. For the most part, everybody who
fights in war fights to survive. But the Japanese had a different
tactic in fighting. The Japanese generals sent waves and waves of
soldiers large phalanxes similar to those used during the
Revolutionary War and the Civil War straight into the ranks of
American Marines, unmindful of the heavy number of Japanese losses.
The Japanese attacked our lines with an overwhelming disregard for
survival. Because our lines were so spread out, it was very hard to
fight that kind of a battle. And the Japanese were very willing to
sacrifice themselves for their Emperor...and for Bushido.
Q: Was the goal of 'The Pacific' to show the truth about
war without glorifying it?
SS: Actually, we restrained ourselves. We pulled ourselves back
from what we could have shown, what these soldiers actually
encountered, things that they actually observed, but we had a line
we wouldn't cross. But The Pacific is brutal; it's honest and it's
right there in your face... as it was for them.
Q: What was it like working with Tom again? Did you share a
common vision for this miniseries?
SS: Tom and I are sort of our own Band of Brothers. As
director-actor on Saving Private Ryan; then we did a tour of duty
on Band of Brothers; and then we repeated it on The Pacific. I
think we share the same patriotism in trying to honor the genre of
WWII and The Greatest Generation of veterans that defended our
God-given and hard-fought freedoms and prevailed.
