After the huge success of Saving Private Ryan in 1998, the film’s director Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks collaborated on an ambitious television project. They bought the rights to a book by historian Stephen E Ambrose that followed a single group of men, ‘Easy’ Company, in the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne, from training in the US, through D-Day, Operation Market Garden, the battle for Bastogne, and the liberation of a concentration camp, to the capture of Hitler’s Berghof in the Bavarian mountains. Ambrose’s book was itself based on the unpublished memoirs of Captain Dick Winters, the commanding officer of ‘Easy’ Company. The show was named after the book: Band of Brothers (2001).
HBO (Home Box Office) came up with what was then the biggest ever budget for a television project of $125 million for the ten-part series. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself encouraged Spielberg to bring this massive production to the UK, and it was shot almost entirely in and around Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire. A huge boost to the British film industry followed.
English actor Damian Lewis, as Captain Winters, led a vast ensemble cast who all went on a ten-day boot camp led by Dale Dye, a retired US Marine Corps Captain, to make the young actors believable as army soldiers. The series was magnificent and included anonymous interviews at the start of each film with veterans from ‘Easy’ Company, who were only named in the last episode. The series won seven Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody, among many other awards. In my view, Band of Brothers is one of the finest depictions ever of the Second World War on film, and still stands up superbly today.
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