- Joined
- Jul 24, 2008
- Messages
- 33,627
- Points
- 0
This is what you will be doing when foreign country invades us while FTs/PRs leaving Singapore in doves....
<TABLE border=0 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%"><TBODY><TR><TD class=msgtxt>You forgot to mention that the Familee TRAITORs and its FAPee dogs would also be among the first to leave the Peesai at the first sign of trouble. They would probably have the whole air and naval force escort them and their FTrash pets out of Peesai while leaving behind a few hand guns for Sporns to kill themselves before the enemy comes in.</TD></TR><TR><TD> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
----------------------------------------------------------------
The Pacific debuts on HBO (StarHub Channel 60) today at 9pm.
Apr 3, 2010
Spoils of war
The team behind the hit World War II epic Band Of Brothers is back with a new 10-part series, with the focus this time on the battle that raged in the Pacific
<!-- by line -->By tiffany fumiko tay, in los angeles
<!-- end by line -->
<!-- end left side bar -->
Pacific band of brothers: A soldier's life for (from far left) Joseph Mazzello, Jon Seda and James Badge Dale. The trio (above) at the premiere of the show earlier last month. -- PHOTOS: HBO, REUTERS
View more photos http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/image/20100402/lifecombo.jpghttp://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/image/20100402/03life10.jpg
<!-- story content : start -->
Forget sprawling trailers, latte-bearing assistants and lavish catered fare. The actors in The Pacific - producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's follow-up to the acclaimed World War II miniseries Band Of Brothers (2001) - would have settled for just running water and beds.
In order to realistically portray the US Marines who fought in the tropical shade of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and open sands of Iwo Jima during the same war, the cast were put through a gruelling 10-day jungle boot camp that entailed intense combat simulations and precious little sleep before shooting began.
The US$200-million (S$279-million) 10-part production, HBO's priciest miniseries to date, debuts on HBO (StarHub Channel 60) today at 9pm.
It departs from its predecessor's European campaign in Band Of Brothers and instead follows the 1st Marine division as it battles the Japanese in the Pacific theatre following the bombing of US naval base Pearl Harbor in 1941. The division fought some of the toughest battles in the Pacific theatre, including Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Intertwined with the war campaign are the real-life journeys of three men: Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), John Basilone (Jon Seda) and Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello), whose memoirs were used as source material for the script.
In Los Angeles recently to promote the series, a lanky Mazzello laments that he went into boot camp expecting to be 'buffed up like the war heroes you see in movies', only to end up shedding 6kg.
'In reality, the guys who fought in the Pacific were emaciated. They were starving, there was so much heat and they were so diseased that they were just skin and bones, and that's kind of what they wanted for us.'
After the deprivations the actors suffered, Mazzello added wryly, the producers 'succeeded' in getting the look.
The series has big boots to fill, given that Band Of Brothers was both a critically acclaimed hit which was nominated for 19 Emmy awards (it won six, including for Outstanding Miniseries), as well as a ratings success.
But the cast were worried about more immediate problems on the set, chief of which were the physical deprivations of the shoot.
Sitting comfortably in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, the 26-year-old is all grown up from the kid audiences may remember in Jurassic Park (1990), but tells a joke with the same boyish grin.
'We're a bunch of actors.We thought we'd get up at 11 o'clock, have our cappuccinos and Danish and then go and do a little running. That's what a boot camp is, isn't it?'
Apparently not one run by Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine and de facto military adviser to Hollywood.
'We were digging ditches, carrying all this equipment on our backs and running through the jungle, and people are getting injured - somebody broke his collarbone, another guy fell off a cargo net and got stabbed in the foot. On top of that, everyone was getting heatstroke and fainting - because we're so undernourished and underhydrated,' complains Mazzello.
The brooding Dale cracks a rare smile as he chips in with an anecdote of Dye's disconcerting hardball tactics on Day One: 'He started yelling at us to put up these tents, and I don't know if you've seen 25 actors try to pitch tents, but it's a disaster.
'And he's picking up sticks and throwing them at you, then Tom Hanks came out of the jungle and gave this emotional speech. And it was a brilliant speech, I think I saw someone cry, but I didn't hear a word he said. All I could think about was this damn tent that I could not get up.'
While Seda, a former boxer, declares boot camp the most physically demanding experience of his life, he concedes that the torment was the foundation they needed to understand what the men they were playing endured.
'It made me realise that these guys weren't just fighting the opposing soldiers, they were fighting the elements as well - the jungle, the heat and the diseases that people weren't used to, being from America,' says the soft-spoken 39-year-old.
Their suffering did not end with the graduation from military hell - what followed was a muddy 10-month shoot in a battle to survive rural Australia's sweltering 40 deg C heat and tropical inhabitants.
'One day, they caught the second-most poisonous snake in the world, just hanging out where we're filming. And then, the flies,' Mazzello recalls, nearly knocking over a glass with his wild gesticulations.
'You're trying to shoot a scene, right, but these flies were like on steroids, - because not only were they huge and impervious to bug spray, but they also weren't just satisfied with landing on your face. They'd go up your nose or in your eye.'
In fact, there were so many insects that they had to be removed digitally in post-production, he adds.
While the guys quickly forged a camaraderie that helped them to cope with the physical battering, the material's psychological strain was harder to handle.
After all, playing real people is always a pressure, but re-enacting the actions of men who hail from what has been dubbed 'the Greatest Generation' for their stoic endurance of the struggles of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of war put an added responsibility on the actors.
Seda says: 'There were times where I'd walk on set and see the magnitude of what we were doing, and it'd just hit me that this wasn't made up, this happened. It was a bit over-whelming.'
Indeed, - behind the tired smiles and spirited jokes, the emotional toll it took on the guys remains visible.
Dale, who often referenced Leckie's memoir Helmet For My Pillow on set, explains: 'To have a book written in the first person of what you're about to go experience, to hear his voice in your head as you read it, you grow close. It really consumed us, it was like carrying another person around.'
He starts choking up for real as he tries to express his emotions.
'I'm sorry, I'm trying not to get too emotional here. This was a role that was hard not to take home with you at night,' he says between dramatic pauses, the intense gaze of a stage-trained actor tunnelling through the carpeted floor.
The weight was particularly heavy on Mazzello, whose grandfather served in the Pacific and died during the shoot.
'He knew I was doing it, and it meant everything to me that he knew we were gonna be honouring men like him and telling his story. It made it so much more personal,' he says.
Like Seda and Dale, he met the surviving family of the man he portrayed on screen and drew strength during particularly trying days from the obligation to do his character's legacy justice.
Fixing reporters with a determined stare, he says resolutely: 'When the m&d got too deep, the rain too heavy, the heat too much to take, I would stop and think about him and his family, and that helped keep me going.'
<TABLE border=0 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%"><TBODY><TR><TD class=msgtxt>You forgot to mention that the Familee TRAITORs and its FAPee dogs would also be among the first to leave the Peesai at the first sign of trouble. They would probably have the whole air and naval force escort them and their FTrash pets out of Peesai while leaving behind a few hand guns for Sporns to kill themselves before the enemy comes in.</TD></TR><TR><TD> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
----------------------------------------------------------------
The Pacific debuts on HBO (StarHub Channel 60) today at 9pm.
Apr 3, 2010
Spoils of war
The team behind the hit World War II epic Band Of Brothers is back with a new 10-part series, with the focus this time on the battle that raged in the Pacific
<!-- by line -->By tiffany fumiko tay, in los angeles
<!-- end by line -->
<!-- end left side bar -->
<!-- story content : start -->
Forget sprawling trailers, latte-bearing assistants and lavish catered fare. The actors in The Pacific - producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's follow-up to the acclaimed World War II miniseries Band Of Brothers (2001) - would have settled for just running water and beds.
In order to realistically portray the US Marines who fought in the tropical shade of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and open sands of Iwo Jima during the same war, the cast were put through a gruelling 10-day jungle boot camp that entailed intense combat simulations and precious little sleep before shooting began.
The US$200-million (S$279-million) 10-part production, HBO's priciest miniseries to date, debuts on HBO (StarHub Channel 60) today at 9pm.
It departs from its predecessor's European campaign in Band Of Brothers and instead follows the 1st Marine division as it battles the Japanese in the Pacific theatre following the bombing of US naval base Pearl Harbor in 1941. The division fought some of the toughest battles in the Pacific theatre, including Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Intertwined with the war campaign are the real-life journeys of three men: Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), John Basilone (Jon Seda) and Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello), whose memoirs were used as source material for the script.
In Los Angeles recently to promote the series, a lanky Mazzello laments that he went into boot camp expecting to be 'buffed up like the war heroes you see in movies', only to end up shedding 6kg.
'In reality, the guys who fought in the Pacific were emaciated. They were starving, there was so much heat and they were so diseased that they were just skin and bones, and that's kind of what they wanted for us.'
After the deprivations the actors suffered, Mazzello added wryly, the producers 'succeeded' in getting the look.
The series has big boots to fill, given that Band Of Brothers was both a critically acclaimed hit which was nominated for 19 Emmy awards (it won six, including for Outstanding Miniseries), as well as a ratings success.
But the cast were worried about more immediate problems on the set, chief of which were the physical deprivations of the shoot.
Sitting comfortably in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, the 26-year-old is all grown up from the kid audiences may remember in Jurassic Park (1990), but tells a joke with the same boyish grin.
'We're a bunch of actors.We thought we'd get up at 11 o'clock, have our cappuccinos and Danish and then go and do a little running. That's what a boot camp is, isn't it?'
Apparently not one run by Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine and de facto military adviser to Hollywood.
'We were digging ditches, carrying all this equipment on our backs and running through the jungle, and people are getting injured - somebody broke his collarbone, another guy fell off a cargo net and got stabbed in the foot. On top of that, everyone was getting heatstroke and fainting - because we're so undernourished and underhydrated,' complains Mazzello.
The brooding Dale cracks a rare smile as he chips in with an anecdote of Dye's disconcerting hardball tactics on Day One: 'He started yelling at us to put up these tents, and I don't know if you've seen 25 actors try to pitch tents, but it's a disaster.
'And he's picking up sticks and throwing them at you, then Tom Hanks came out of the jungle and gave this emotional speech. And it was a brilliant speech, I think I saw someone cry, but I didn't hear a word he said. All I could think about was this damn tent that I could not get up.'
While Seda, a former boxer, declares boot camp the most physically demanding experience of his life, he concedes that the torment was the foundation they needed to understand what the men they were playing endured.
'It made me realise that these guys weren't just fighting the opposing soldiers, they were fighting the elements as well - the jungle, the heat and the diseases that people weren't used to, being from America,' says the soft-spoken 39-year-old.
Their suffering did not end with the graduation from military hell - what followed was a muddy 10-month shoot in a battle to survive rural Australia's sweltering 40 deg C heat and tropical inhabitants.
'One day, they caught the second-most poisonous snake in the world, just hanging out where we're filming. And then, the flies,' Mazzello recalls, nearly knocking over a glass with his wild gesticulations.
'You're trying to shoot a scene, right, but these flies were like on steroids, - because not only were they huge and impervious to bug spray, but they also weren't just satisfied with landing on your face. They'd go up your nose or in your eye.'
In fact, there were so many insects that they had to be removed digitally in post-production, he adds.
While the guys quickly forged a camaraderie that helped them to cope with the physical battering, the material's psychological strain was harder to handle.
After all, playing real people is always a pressure, but re-enacting the actions of men who hail from what has been dubbed 'the Greatest Generation' for their stoic endurance of the struggles of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of war put an added responsibility on the actors.
Seda says: 'There were times where I'd walk on set and see the magnitude of what we were doing, and it'd just hit me that this wasn't made up, this happened. It was a bit over-whelming.'
Indeed, - behind the tired smiles and spirited jokes, the emotional toll it took on the guys remains visible.
Dale, who often referenced Leckie's memoir Helmet For My Pillow on set, explains: 'To have a book written in the first person of what you're about to go experience, to hear his voice in your head as you read it, you grow close. It really consumed us, it was like carrying another person around.'
He starts choking up for real as he tries to express his emotions.
'I'm sorry, I'm trying not to get too emotional here. This was a role that was hard not to take home with you at night,' he says between dramatic pauses, the intense gaze of a stage-trained actor tunnelling through the carpeted floor.
The weight was particularly heavy on Mazzello, whose grandfather served in the Pacific and died during the shoot.
'He knew I was doing it, and it meant everything to me that he knew we were gonna be honouring men like him and telling his story. It made it so much more personal,' he says.
Like Seda and Dale, he met the surviving family of the man he portrayed on screen and drew strength during particularly trying days from the obligation to do his character's legacy justice.
Fixing reporters with a determined stare, he says resolutely: 'When the m&d got too deep, the rain too heavy, the heat too much to take, I would stop and think about him and his family, and that helped keep me going.'
