HBO, Hanks, Spielberg Reunite for War Epic

LOS ANGELES, April 25: Tom
Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman, the creative team behind HBO’s 2001
epic mini-series Band of Brothers, are set to begin work on The Pacific, a new
World War II mini-series for the pay-TV service.

Colin Callender, the
president of HBO Films, announced today that filming on the 10-hour mini-series
would begin this summer in Australia. “We’re proud to be reuniting with Tom
Hanks and Steven Spielberg to complete the story of the American combat
experience of World War II,” said Callender. “This epic miniseries is based on
the true stories of three marines whose experiences in the Pacific embodied the
unique nature of that theater of war, and dramatize how it profoundly differed
from the European front. This was a different sort of war fighting a different
sort of enemy.”

A companion piece to Band
of Brothers, The Pacific will be produced by HBO Films in association with
Playtone and DreamWorks Television.
The production will be based at Melbourne Central City Studios in
Melbourne, Victoria, with filming to take place in Melbourne, where U.S. troops
camped in 1943, and Far North Queensland.

The production is based on
the book With the Old Breed, by Eugene Sledge, as well as original interviews
conducted by the filmmakers and Hugh Ambrose, who is continuing the World War
II oral history work begun by his father Stephen E. Ambrose, the author of the
book Band of Brothers. It tracks the intertwined odysseys of three U.S. Marines—Robert
Leckie, John Basilone and Eugene Sledge—from the first clash with the
Japanese in the jungles of Guadalcanal, through the rain forests of Cape
Gloucester, across the coral strongholds of Peleliu, up the black sand terraces
of Iwo Jima, through the killing fields of Okinawa, to the return home after
V-J Day.