The Pacific s01e00 Episode Script

Getting to work on a project like this, to be a part of a story that's on the scope that this is on As an actor, it's a dream come true.
I've been making movies since I was five years old, and I've never seen anything like this.
The whole project, the process from the very beginning has just imbued all of us, I think, with a sense of respect for what these guys have gone through.
Get off the beach! Keep moving! It became a bigger project than just making a movie, and I hope we honor these men the way they should be honored.
As far as the story of the second world war goes, there's two very different perspectives.
The European theater which we've examined before, with "Band of Brothers," had a different D.
N.
A.
to it than the war in the Pacific did.
When "Band of Brothers" came out, many people who fought in the Pacific said, "What about us guys? "We did something too.
We made a major contribution.
" Colonel Puller, where you heading? Tokyo.
Care to join us? I don't know.
It's a ways, sir.
Write us when you get there.
I will.
It was very important for us to show how this war affected these men.
During the war, after the war, that really is something that we didn't get into as much in "Band of Brothers.
" But it's really a more personal and intimate story than "Band of Brothers.
" It's much more experiential.
When we began working on "The Pacific," We wanted to cover the entire war, but to do it in a way that was personal and compelling and dramatic.
Stand by the bow ramp.
Go go go go! Our miniseries focuses on three guys: Eugene Sledge, Robert Leckie and John Basilone.
Eugene Sledge wrote arguably the best memoir of combat anywhere, called "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.
" He was just a kid who loved war stories.
And when this war came around, he ended up getting a real taste of what war is really like.
John Basilone got the Congressional Medal of Honor and his life and his exploits were very well documented for us, and so we could follow them.
Do you wanna live? Get off the beach! Move! Robert Leckie was a writer before the war.
He wrote a magnificent piece of prose called "Helmet For My Pillow," which was about his experiences at Guadalcanal and Peleliu.
It's an honor to spend time on a character who was here and who lived it, and it's an honor to try to tell this story, and try to tell this story properly.
We wanted this to really be based on, you know, real people and real situations, because the marines were also fighting malaria and all kinds of the elements.
The natural environment was just as debilitating.
One advantage that we have on "The Pacific"-- we had it on "Band of Brothers"-- is the commitment of the actors.
They had a sense that they had a moral responsibility to get it right.
And part of getting it right is the research that we prepared for them, but also our military advisors and the boot camp that they went to.
We are proud to claim the title of United States Marines.
They went through a brutal period of training.
It was designed to be that way, just so they would understand what maybe the people they're portraying, to some extent, what they endured.
Boot camp was probably the most intense experience of my life.
- One, two, three.
- 9! - One, two, three.
- 10! Just stop.
Just stop! What's the matter with you? Captain Dye said it when he goes, "You're gonna hit walls out there.
" We never say the word "movie.
" We never say the word "actor.
" We use "the mission.
" I just remember saying to myself, "Am I training for a movie or "am I actually training 'cause we're going to war?" Fire! I was a college athlete, and I've been an athlete my whole life, and I've never had a stretch of nine days that was as brutal on my body.
Not too long into it, you forget about being an actor.
And then you forget who you are.
And then you just get into the discipline of all the different stuff that you have to do.
They came out of that boot camp different people.
I was there before they went in-- You know, Goatees, long hair.
They went in there and they came out different.
I'm telling you they came out different.
You feel invincible.
You feel like you can get through anything.
If you can get through that, you can get through anything.
Fire! You can't buy this kind of experience.
You know, given the nature of this project and how important it is to tell the truth Oh, sorry.
Vera.
Bob Leckie.
I'm your neighbor from across the street.
I know who you are, Bob.
The miniseries, "The Pacific," starts a few days after Pearl Harbor in the United States and spans four years from from 1941 to 1945.
I joined the marines-- Thought I'd do my bit.
Take care of yourself.
We wanted to be able to incorporate the home front, life at home, both before and after the war.
Because we had several characters that allowed us, we get a chance to see back home.
That had not been possible with "Band of Brothers," because the material didn't address it.
What have we done? We've gone respectable.
What John Basilone went through on-- at home-- It's a great story.
It's damn good drama.
I've reenlisted.
They can ship me out whenever they want.
The first battle that we examine is Guadalcanal.
Nothing prepares you for the moment that they say "action," and the jungle at night lights up.
The noise is actually thunderous.
And the flashes of light are blinding.
Here we go.
Positions, everyone.
The night battle on Guadalcanal was the night that John Basilone and just a few hundred marines were going up against an onslaught of thousands of Japanese who are gonna be crossing into their encampment.
Japs! Japs! Start falling in! We do a massive amount of research, so that we can try and get at the truth.
We really went through every inch of that battle, and everything that was written about it or known about it and tried to make that as authentic as possible.
And the shooting of it was rather intense, to say the least.
Action! And doing fights like this, you don't wanna do the TV version.
You wanna make it-- as every part of this project is-- as authentic as possible.
J.
P.
, cover me.
John, wait, what are you doing? John, what are you doing? ( shouts in Japanese ) With all the research that they had done, they pretty much had it down to exactly how it happened.
Then to actually be shooting it, to be in the middle of it, there are some moments when you could almost feel the presence of these men there with you.
It was pretty, you know, it was pretty intense.
Peleliu-- The battle that we're filming right here was one of the most brutal and misunderstood battles of the Pacific War.
Here we go, boys! Peleliu is a battle that's so key to what our vision of "The Pacific" is that it took three episodes for us in order to tell it.
We're out here today on the ocean shooting AMP tracks which would have troops and guns on them, coming off to do the attack on the beach.
Load and lock, gentlemen! Now the "colossus" that you're seeing in the background is actually a working barge.
And onto the barge, we've built the partial back end of an L.
S.
T.
Because we were able to find this barge that had the ramp in the back of it, we can actually have the AMP tracks driving out, going into the water-- you get all the natural sounds-- And we're shooting inside them so you see the troops reacting the way they really would.
So it's gonna lend a tremendous sense of reality to what we're doing, which is really what we're trying to do here, is make something that is real and accurate to what the true war in the Pacific was as we can.
Go go go.
Move out! This is our Peleliu beach set, which is up in Far North Queensland at a location called Rocky Point.
This end of our Peleliu beach landing is where Leckie comes ashore in his AMP track.
And Leckie has to land on a very heavily coraled area of beach, which is accurate to history.
- We gotta get off the beach! - I know, I know! - Leckie, we gotta move! - I know.
We gotta get off! The other end of the beach is what we call the Sledge end of the beach, which is much much sandier, much less coral, in fact.
Action! What I've wanted to do with Sledge's landing is to give you about three or four minutes of actual time that he experiences on that beach, knowing that the battle is going on before he landed, and will rage on for hours after he's passed from the beach on into the airfield, so that the audience can identify with his experience and to share the fright.
Sledge, god damn it, you gotta get your ass out of that hole right now.
Move it! - And cut! - Cut! We're trying to prepare this stretch of land for Peleliu, the beach of Peleliu, which is one of the worst engagements which marines had to face in their Pacific campaign.
The beach that we're actually filming on is very sandy, so we have to build all our coral and dress that into the location as well.
Also, you can see that we have a fortified bunker on the Leckie end of the beach, which is angled to strafe the beach as the soldiers come ashore.
The only way to stop this Jap artillery is to get into those hills, and the only way into those hills is across this airfield.
When we move, do not stop till we get across.
- You got it? - Aye, skipper! This is a recreation of the airfield at Peleliu that the Americans came across after they'd come up through the scrub from the beach.
These are recreations of buildings that were actually there.
We have the airstrip.
We have the power station, the administration block, air raid shelters, some bombed out timber buildings.
Third platoon, move out! We've got decorators who are researching different ways of making craters, and how to make them, dress them, and make them look real.
If you're gonna draw a pencil sketch of what life in Hades is like, I think you could do it from a photograph of the battle of Peleliu.
Corpsman! Hey, corpsman! And action! Get off the beach.
Keep moving! Iwo Jima is the site where John Basilone voluntarily returned to combat.
Even when he received the Medal of Honor, he never looked at himself as above his men, so much so that he demanded to go back and fight when he didn't have to.
You tell that tank to follow me.
- Aye, aye! - Move! Let's go! And cut! When I was first told that I'd be shooting the battle of Iwo Jima on the side of a mountain inland at the You Yangs National Park in Melbourne, I said to myself, "How are we gonna do that?" But they carved off the side of a mountain.
They brought in, I was told, $1 million worth of volcanic ash, and basically set up the exact replication of the mountain with respect to the various tiers of the volcanic ash.
And then of course, the larger shots of ships and so forth was all something that was done visual effects-wise in post effects.
But the majority of the shots worked without having to touch 'em.
The smoke and the intensity of all the fire and all the things that were going on-- you really felt like you were there.
I'm more proud of the Iwo Jima battle than anything I've ever been involved in.
Action! Clear the back line! Third platoon, get up on the rocks! You know, if you were gonna take the twin campaigns for the island of Iwo Jima and the island of Okinawa, you could probably say those were the absolute worst of the entire war.
K Company, cease fire! Not only the horror of actually being under fire, but everything else about that island was just absolutely miserable.
The battle of Okinawa presented a lot of challenges for the production because of the terrible conditions that the marines fought under.
Spread out! Spread to the left! The Okinawa landscape was something that we had to research very carefully-- Everything from the architecture through the color of the soil, the kind of rock geology that we see exposed through the earth.
We built a Japanese village.
We dressed it all out, and then we wrecked it.
We burned it, destroyed it before even the crew got there.
And after that, it was all about mud, pumping in water and making thick mud.
Every morning we would drench the set and then drive tractors over the mud just to churn it up and till it.
So it was a mess.
And then at night and sometimes in the day, we had rain towers, so it was always raining.
It was always muddy.
Okinawa was part of Japan.
They were viewing themselves as defending Japan, and the only way in order to get through the battle of Okinawa is to take every day that it requires and spend every life that it was going to take.
That was the only way to do it.
Okinawa had a profound effect on all of us.
It's a very intense episode.
It affected everybody.
And it particular affected the actors, and their performances reflect that.
Cease fire! Cease fire, God damn it! I told you to cease fire.
You're supposed to be observing.
I see you with a goddamn sidearm.
We were all sent here to kill Japs, weren't we? So what the hell difference does it make what weapon we use? I'd use my goddamn hands if I had to.
We're telling the story the way it was.
I feel we get inside our marines' heads, and hope that we tell the story that we would want them to have us tell.
I want you to meet some of the reason that we're doing what we're doing every day out here.
When the veterans come on set, they bring home the sense of responsibility.
The fact that we're doing this today and going over all of this again is really startling to me.
I just can't believe it's happening.
I am so proud and so thrilled that they have decided to make this thing.
I'm-- I can't express how I feel.
We'd all given up that this story would ever be told-- The real true story.
'Cause it was a nasty war, man.
War is a part of the human condition.
The question we ask in "The Pacific" is, "What did it do to its participants? "How can you survive? "How can you see what those guys did "and expect to just move on with things?" It's not about America versus Japan.
It's about war and how horrific it can be for everybody.
Every single person that had to go through that deserves to be remembered, and their story deserves to be told.
I can't imagine any human being going through a greater struggle than what these guys did.
It's brutal and it's honest and it's right there in your face, as it was for them.