Post your questions here for Part Two of "The Pacific" airing Sunday, March 21 at 9:00pm, only on HBO.

Hello Bruce

When writing for The Pacific, you have great source material in the books and well documented life stories to work from. But much of the actual day to day words and thoughts of the characters come directly from your pen.
How much influence does casting play in the writing of the characters? Do you rewrite scenes which seemed to work on paper but you realise wouldn't work so well with the actor playing the role? Does the particular character or physical traits of the actor influence your writing as the series is shot?
Thanks :)

Hi Bruce

Unlike 'Band of Brothers,' which follows an entire company, 'The Pacific' really seems to focus on just three of the men. How did writing 'The Pacific' compare to writing 'Band of Brothers'? Was it easier writing a war epic the second time around? Thanks!

Hi Bruce!

Since The Pacific is based on the memoirs of three different people, how did you fuse them together to create the miniseries?

Hey SimpleSimon. Yeah, the actors really influence the writing, once they have absorbed the characters. Not so much at the beginning of the show, but as we progressed, they had a lot of input into dialogue. You have to trust that they understand the men they are portraying. Quite often the actors would riff on the scripts and make scenes better. As for any physical characteristics dictating how characters are depicted...hmm...yes...once or twice we would change things to fit a character. A good example is Bill Leyden in Episode Seven.

Hi Bruce,

below are more questions from around the web!

1. The show has some of the most realistic violence i've seen in a film. how are you pulling that off?
- @jlowe_, Twitter

2. how did you establish the balance john being a hero and doing his duty? (it feels that way but i’m not sure why)
- denato-world, Tumblr

Hi Barett --

Band certainly helped "Train" me to write combat stuff. It also taught me how to research war and warriors. I knew which questions to ask and how to get the surviving Marines I interviewed to "open up" about their experiences in the Pacific campaign of the war. But in general The Pacific was much more demanding. Exponentially more research about the men and their battles. It was much harder to structure and took me almost 9 months to figure out. I had a lot of help from Hugh Ambrose, our historical consultant. The hardest part once we began the scripts was to make sure that the character arcs were consistent between episodes, and that the tone of the whole piece never wavered.

Cherry

WEaving together the three main characters was the key to the Series. I decided quite early to use the Miniseries Traffic as my model: disparate characters that might only tangentially connect who all express different facets of the same theme, in this case...the Face of War. In order to cover the entire War, I knew I had to pick men from the First Marine Division, as they served on Guadalcanal...Peleliu...and many of them continued on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Leckie and Basilone gave me the first half of the war. Sledge gave me the second half, with Basilone. I was then very fortunate early on in the process to discover that Eugene Sledge's best friend served in Robert Leckie's company. This serendipity allowed me to weave them together naturally. And Basilone really did march past Leckie's position at the end of Episode One!

Hey Weston --

1. The violence is pretty graphic...and it's nothing compared to what you're going to see in future episodes! The mandate from Spielberg and Hanks was never blink. To show it like it was. The prosthetics guys in Australia were fantastic and up to the gruesome task. As were the make up people and the effects crews. But having said that, It's important to note that none of this graphic violence is gratuitous. Every violent act has a direct and indelible impact on the characters and, therefore, hopefully on the audience.

2. Getting Basilone's big night right was a challenge. Most of everything written about him was and is BS. The reason we chose Basilone as a character was not only because he fought on the 'Canal and also Iwo Jima, but more importantly because he was such a misunderstood hero. We wanted to strip away the myth and get to the man. John was a sweet, charismatic mama's boy who truly never understood why he became so famous. Jon Seda has really captured the essence of Basilone. We did a lot of research and interviews with surviving witnesses of John's night on the 'Canal and hopefully we got the right balance of heroism and reality. For a really good description of his night read Hugh Ambrose's companion book, The Pacific. He did a lot of original and compelling research on Basilone.

Hey Bruce,

Many people, including myself, have been wondering why the episodes are shorter than those in Band. Once you get through all the intros and credits the actual run times of the episodes are relatively short. Did this have anything to do with the writing and the way you wanted it to flow or was there another reason such as cost?

Thanks!

Silt -

A lot of things happen to scripts between writing and airing. THere was never an intentional plan to keep the episodes shorter, certainly not cost, and you will see that future episodes are longer, although none are over 60 minutes. There were a few scenes cut out of the first two episodes which, as well intentioned as they were, didn't quite work when put together. I never realized how important Editing was to the story-telling process and that's certainly the case on the Pacific.

Hey Mr McKenna.

Just out of curiosity, why were the scenes of the coast-watchers that Leckie came across at Guadalcanal omitted from the series? Personally, I believe those scenes would have greatly enriched the Guadalcanal episodes.

Thank you.

Okay, I'll ask this one since other people are also wondering:

What surrounded the decision to leave the episodes untitled for this series? With Band of Brothers we had names like 'Carentan', 'Bastogne', 'Why We Fight', 'Points', etc. The Pacific seems to use nearly identical title cards at the start of each installment, but instead we just see "Part One", "Part Two", etc.

Can you comment on this?

Divine --

See my answer to Silt's question. To reiterate, sometimes even the best scenes don't play when you shoot them and then cobble them together into the narrative that you are trying to tell. There can be many reasons for this. Poor writing. Poor acting. Poor structure. Poor directing. Poor crew work or lighting. Bad weather. The Movie Gods frown on you that day. I think the decision was made that it was better to have a shorter episode than one in which we had scenes that didn't quite work, but which were "more historically accurate." This problem diminishes as the Series moves forward, and completely disappears by about the mid point.

Hey Matt --

yeah, we talked about this and debated it. The reasoning is that the show really is, even more than Band, one Ten hour movie split into ten parts. Because of this we wanted people to focus on each episode as a section of the whole. It won't matter in the long run. After you've seen all ten hours, you will forget that each hour isn't "labeled" by a name, and you'll refer to them by their parts. At least we hope so!

Wow that's a great information. Nice thoughts !!!
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