♪ ("BAND OF BROTHERS"
THEME PLAYS) ♪ ROGER BENNETT: Welcome back to the HBO official
Band of Brothers podcast. This is Roger Bennett. "I say 'flash',
you say 'thunder'." Episode one: "Currahee". An episode that takes us back
to Easy Company's inception, basic training
at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, all the way to Upottery, England
and the precipice of the allied invasion
of Europe. What we see during that time
is the men undertaking the grueling, grinding
transformation from individual, raw recruits into a fearsome collective. A process that begins
under the petty, sadistic eye of Captain Herbert Sobel, a stickler played
by David Schwimmer, who delights in charging
his underlings up and down
Currahee, the mountain that looms
over the edge of camp. CAPTAIN HERBERT SOBEL:<i>
How far up, how far down?</i> EASY COMPANY:<i> Three miles up,
three miles down!</i> ROGER: While revoking
weekend pass privileges due to any minor infractions. SOBEL:<i> What is this?</i> <i> Anybody?</i> LIEUTENANT LEWIS NIXON:<i>
Uh, it's a can of peaches, sir.</i> SOBEL:<i> Lieutenant Nixon
thinks this is a can of peaches.</i> <i>That is incorrect, Lieutenant.
Your weekend pass is cancelled.</i> ROGER: Those who endured Sobel's
tyrannical reign at Camp Tuccoa watched him unravel upon arrival
in England where the practical application
of the skills learned
Stateside were severely tested. SOBEL:<i> There should be no--
There should be no fence here.</i> SERGEANT WILLIAM EVANS:<i>
Um, we could go over it, sir.</i> SOBEL:<i> Really?
That's not the point!</i> <i> Where the goddamn--</i> <i> Where the goddamn hell
are we?</i> ROGER: Failure that allowed Luz
to dust off his best Major Horton
impression. T-4 GEORGE LUZ:
(IMPERSONATING MAJOR HORTON)<i>
What is the goddamn hold up,</i> <i> -Mr. Sobel?</i>
-(SOLDIERS SNICKERING) SOBEL:<i> A fence! Sir, um...</i>
(SIGHS)<i> God...</i> <i> A barbed wire fence!</i> LUZ:<i> Oh, that dog
just ain't gon' hunt.</i> (SOLDIERS STIFLED LAUGHING) LUZ: (YELLING)<i> Now, you cut
that fence</i> <i>and get this goddamn platoon
on the move!</i> SOBEL:<i> Yes, sir!</i> ROGER: And it was that
incompetence in the field that ultimately saw Sobel
transferred, and Easy Company fall
into the hands of their true leader,
Dick Winters. A man who oozes natural,
calm, emotionally intelligent, "follow me" leadership. Above all, this episode,
co-written by Tom Hanks himself, along with supervising producer
Erik Jendresen, directed by Phil Alden
of<i> Field of Dreams</i> fame, illustrates that bond
that Stephen Ambrose describes so brilliantly in his book,<i>
Band of Brothers,</i> "They would literally insist
on going hungry for one another.
Freezing for one another. Dying for one another." ♪ ("BAND OF BROTHERS"
THEME PLAYS) ♪ ROGER: My guest today
is the man who played Captain Lewis Nixon III, the intelligence officer
for the second battalion, 506 Parachute Infantry
Regiment, 101st Airborne
Division, a gent we first meet
on the cusp of D-Day walking around an English
air base, flask of scotch in hand, and he'd go on to become
one of only a handful of men
in the regiment to make three combat jumps.
A truly complex gent, a sage, deeply human warrior,
who felt the savagery of war, and perhaps because of that
kept a permanent stash of Vat 69 stowed away
in his footlocker. It's a joy to welcome the man
who made Lewis Nixon return to life,
Mr. Ron Livingston. RON LIVINGSTON: Thank you, Rog.
Appreciate it. ROGER: Ron, it is a joy
to be with you. I love your screen presence.
I admire your approach
to acting. You once said, "Every six
or seven years, you look in the mirror and you have
a completely different product." You said, "Oh, I guess
I'm in this business now." -RON: (CHUCKLING) Yeah.
-ROGER: When you look back on your<i> Band of Brothers</i>
experience, what business were you in
when you assumed the persona
of Lewis Nixon? RON: Well, it's funny,
because going into that, I was very much considered
a comedy guy. I was still trying to convince
people to give me a shot
on the drama side. I think, in a way, that ended up
helping. A lot of times, I feel like
what I end up doing in movies, if I'm in a comedy I end up
playing is straight, and if I'm in a drama I end up
playing it funny. (LAUGHS) I feel like I've kind of
made a career doing that. ROGER: Yeah, but you were
already well known, unlike many other
Band of Brothers actors, by the time the show
was being cast. You'd been in<i> Swingers,</i> you'd just played Peter
from<i> Office Space,</i> a cult classic slacker comedy. On the surface,
quite a leap from Peter Gibbons -to Lewis Nixon.
-(RON CHUCKLES) ROGER: From battling the office
copy machine to the allied invasion
of Normandy. But if you dig a little bit
deeper, there is a connection.
There's a haunted damage to both characters.
Do you feel that? Or did they seem equally
disconnected in your mind? RON: I came to 'em from such
different places, mostly because one was fictional
and one was historical. So, with Peter Gibbons
I felt like I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted with it. I felt a lot more pressure,
sort of, with Lewis Nixon. The scope of the thing alone,
you know, the fact that it's, "Oh, my God, it's HBO,
it's 130-million-dollar thing, it's Spielberg, it's Hanks," that gives its own actor
pressure, but beyond that, it was like,
you felt a responsibility that I was going to be
portraying a real person who, probably,
nobody had ever played before, and who knows if anyone
will ever play him again, so I wanted to get that right. ROGER: Your casting story is--
I mean, it's remarkable. You'd met<i> Band of Brothers</i>
casting supremo Meg Liberman when you'd worked
on an indie movie, <i> -The Rumor of Angels.</i>
-RON: That's right. ROGER: An indie movie,
whenever you talk about it, you always say, "No one
ever saw that", but that's how life works.
You'd met Meg, she asked you to come in
for the Band of Brothers
audition, can you take us in to your first
audition? 'Cause I've heard you tell
this story, and in stark contrast to every other bloody
cast member we've interviewed all of them threw themselves
into the minutiae of research, or brought army equipment
into the audition room. You essentially
Peter Gibbons-ed it. RON: The first audition,
I just kinda showed up and looked at the sides
for two reasons. Number one, I was on a holding
deal with Fox, I didn't think there was any way
in the world they were gonna let me out
to do it anyway, and the other one
was every war movie
I've ever seen, the officers always look
a certain way. You know, they have angular,
high cheek bones. Yeah, they're all blonde and--
I just thought, "No way I'm gonna get this."
So when I got the call back, and they told me
that I was now gonna go read
for Tom, all of a sudden now,
I felt like I had to take it a little bit seriously. So I rushed out
to the bookstore, I bought a copy
of<i> Band of Brothers,</i> and then, like any good actor,
I turned to the index to look for
the character's name so I could skip
all that other stuff, and the first thing
I opened it to, of course, was a picture in the middle
of the book where he's lying in a bed,
hungover, surrounded by all these bottles
after D-Day. In that second, "This is not
at all what I thought
it was gonna be, this is perfect.
Oh, I'm gonna get this." First of all, there was
a striking resemblance. Before, I just thought Meg
was really stricken
by my talent, -but now I'm like, "Oh, I look
like the guy!"
-(ROGER CHUCKLES) RON: But I kinda had a feeling,
and I went and I read for Tom-- ROGER: You once said that Hanks
was one of the actors whose personas you were, quote,
"Trying to assume and make
your own." You said, "In life, you desire
to be a young, cheap,
ersatz Hanks." RON: I had been ripping him off
for a couple of years... -(ROGER LAUGHS)
-RON: (CHUCKLING) Just sort of
early sitcom stuff, 'cause I didn't really know
how else to do it. I was a little conscious
that he might recognize deliveries as his own. ROGER: You said you never got
over being nervous around Tom Hanks,
so what was that like, to walk into that interview
with a bloke who is
one of your acting heroes? RON: I expect to be nervous
when I walk into interviews. I'm always a little bit nervous.
If anything, it's kind of a good
thing, it gives you a little extra
energy. Tom was so great at disarming
people. He's just really,
really charming. Where I got really nervous
with Tom was when I was actually trying
to shoot the thing, 'cause they'd put up
a shot of Tom. ROGER: How were you playing it
though? 'Cause the Ambrose book
describes Nixon as "a complex gentleman."
"Flamboyant." "Hard man to get out of the sack
in the morning," a great quote. "His father, fabulously wealthy, the product of Yale,"
"A big drinker." How did you analyze that
and then process it
into your portrayal? RON: He was an extraordinary guy and the rules didn't quite
apply to him. The rules that applied
to everyone else just didn't apply to him.
He had extraordinary privilege just from who he was,
and what his background was, and what his gifts were,
and he carried that. That was the key with him.
Having that entitlement. He felt comfortable
telling people what to do. -(VEHICLE ENGINE REVS)
-NIXON:<i> I mean, we're the only
unit in the group</i> <i> that's got the Germans
on the Germans' side
of the Rhine.</i> <i>If we'd have taken Antwerp,</i> <i>and I'm not saying that would
have been easy,</i> <i>we would be over the river,
well supplied,</i> <i>had the Krauts on their heels.</i> <i> Now, I just get Ike
on the phone.</i> <i> Are you listening to me?</i> RON: He had a beard,
they called him Blackbeard. I tell you what, Dave Heffron
and "Wild Bill" Guarnere came to visit us on set,
and I got to meet 'em, and it was when we were shooting
"Currahee", so I had, like, a day or two
of stubble. "So this is Ron,
he's playing Nixon." And the first thing
that Dave Heffron, as he looked,
and he goes, "Where's your beard?" And I was like,
"Well, I've got--" And he's like, "No, no, no, no.
That guy had a beard." And I was like, "Well, this is,
sort of, you know-- we're still in, sort of,
bootcamp, so I thought, like, we're gonna dial--" He's like,
"Nah, that guy wouldn't shave
for the Pope." ROGER: So you go on
through the Hanks audition, which you ace, into the big
mix-and-match, so that's the legendary audition with hundreds
of aspiring actors, a lot of nerves there, think of it as some sort of
Band of Brothers Lollapalooza, and so many actors have told us
they were trying out
for multiple parts. They had no idea what
was going on. But you, you were locked in
on Nixon. And while you were learning
your lines, you accidentally came across
the casting depth chart. Tell us what you saw, Ron. RON: (CHUCKLES) Because I was
only reading for one part, I had, basically, a lot
of downtime, and Meg said, "Ron, we can
put you in a room by yourself." So they put me in a little--
somebody's little office, and then they left,
just kinda sitting around,
twiddling my thumbs, -and I looked down
on the desk...
-(ROGER CHUCKLES) RON: ...and I see this grid,
and at the top of the grid are initials T.H., S.S., T.T.... ROGER: Tom Hanks,
Steven Spielberg, Tony To, the other legendary producer. RON: And then there's names
of actors going down the side, and, like, little check marks,
and pluses and-- My first thought was like,
"Oh, I should probably not
look at this, -this is probably not good
to look at."
-(ROGER LAUGHING) RON: I couldn't,
I just can't help myself,
I gotta look down. I go find my name, it has some
checks, it has some pluses, I felt good about it. ROGER: After seeing that,
you said you were just
exhilarated, and you threw yourself
into the role
in the mix-and-match in front of some audience,
as you say, Tom Hanks, Meg, Tony To, and Steven Spielberg.
Steven Spielberg, who is videotaping
your audition on the ground, working the angles.
I need to know, does that makes you nervous,
or did it just encourage you to turn up your performance
to 11? RON: It was entirely surreal.
It didn't make me nervous, any more nervous than I probably
already was. The thing that I noticed
about that is I could see
in that second why Steven is such a great
filmmaker, because he was on the ground, just the way
that he was operating with this little video camera,
just capturing the audition, he looked like a 17-year-old kid
making his first movie with a Super-8 camera. He had
that sort of joy. I was like,
"Oh, this guy loves it! This guy, he lives for this.
He was born to do this." I had one moment
where it probably
could've all gone wrong. The audition scene I did
was the one on the train where Winters asks what am I
gonna do without booze, and at the end of the thing,
the penny drops, and the punchline is... NIXON:<i> ...and I have a case
of Vat 69 hidden in
your footlocker.</i> RON: So we're doing this scene.
Tom Hanks is reading the other
part, and we get to the end
of the scene, and Tom's just looking at me. And I'm looking back at Tom,
and Tom's looking at me, and I'm looking at Tom,
and I see Tom's eyes get big, like a little alarm start
to creep in, and then I realize, "Oh, I haven't said
the last line yet. I haven't paid off the joke." So as if I had been
standing there like it was a mic drop,
and I'm just standing there holding the mic,
not dropping it. I remember, it was just kind of
this moment of, like, "All right, well I'll say it
now", you know? And I got probably the biggest
laugh out of Tom that I've got out of anybody,
'cause it kinda worked
perfectly. It was about half again as long
a pause as I would ever have
the balls to take, but it was extraordinary.
And I could see after that, I just knew, you know?
You just see the signs, 'cause the room is laughing,
Steven's smiling and nodding, you know, and it's like, "Okay,
I'm gonna go do this." ROGER: What do you think
they saw in you? You, a comedian. You, a son
of the great state of Iowa? RON: I had graduated from Yale,
which is where he went
to school. I'm not from that world,
but I had been around it. I knew of that world,
and I was invited into it and moved through it
a little bit. So I have a decent idea. ROGER: Before you left
for the production shoot itself, how did you prepare?
I saw that you spent time with field diaries,
intelligence reports. RON: One of the things
that I did is made a conscious decision
that I wasn't gonna look at a lot of World War Two history. I was gonna look at
Civil War history and World War One because those
were gonna be the stories that these guys grew up,
and when they thought of war, this is what
they were gonna think of. I tried to go into it
allowing some of these things
to surprise me. You know, Sherman tanks
were surprising. That stuff was cutting edge,
military technology. Parachuting was something
that hadn't been going on
for very long. It was cutting edge technology. The thing that I did that
was probably the most valuable is I got in touch with his wife,
Grace Nixon, who happened to live
in Sherman Oaks, so she was probably 20 minutes
from where I lived, and she was a rare gem
of a human being. She was his intellectual match.
I don't think I ever took a backgammon game off of her. -(ROGER CHUCKLES)
-RON: I met her for lunch, the first thing she did
when the waiter comes was she said, "I'll have water,
he'll have a cocktail." And I think she wanted to see
how I handled myself with a cocktail. I think
I passed that test, and so she was like,
"Yeah, okay, okay." ROGER: The real Nixon
had unfortunately passed away by the time production began.
He died in 1995, and he was an elusive character.
As I said, an Ivy League guy amongst hardscrabble characters, a guy of means amidst a unit
who are largely kids of the Great Depression.
Didn't even speak to Ambrose for the books, he didn't even
have that to go on. What did Grace-- What were
the biggest lessons about the character
that you learned from her? RON: Not so much anything
that she said, it's something when
you're in somebody's face where their presence is,
you get a sense of it. Like I'm in his library, so I see all the books
on his shelves. He was really into cooking. He was a gourmet French cook, so there's all these cookbooks
on the wall. She showed me letters
that he'd wrote her so I could see his handwriting. They traveled all over
the world, they didn't have kids together,
but Grace, I think, had been to Antarctica twice.
They'd gone everywhere. ROGER: There's a line I love
where you say, "When you look at the pictures
in Stephen Ambrose's book you can see how these characters
carry themselves. They carried themselves
like goddamn men." RON: (CHUCKLES) Yeah, they did. They did, they really did. ROGER: You then traveled
to England to prepare to shoot. Now,<i> Band of Brothers,</i>
one of the most immersive shows that I have ever heard about.
The length of the shoot, nearly a year,
the pre-production, the bootcamp, getting all
the actors together for a ten-day crash course
in military tactics and culture. RON: The thing that really set
apart<i> Band of Brothers</i> from any other acting experience
I have, it was the only time
I've ever had where it was kind of immersion. They brought
this Hollywood legend Dale Dye, military advisor. He had done<i> Platoon.</i>
He had basically done every major war movie
in the last ten years, and he's an amazing character.
He's a bit of a cross between The Great Santini
and Harold Hill, you know, he breathes fire
but I still to this day am not sure which, if any,
of his stories
are actually true. He was just a master
at spinning a yarn, and he really created
this environment where they were putting
us through it, and we were doing it
as the guys
that we were playing. When I was a kid, imagining
in my dreams what an actor was gonna be,
it looked like this. When you finally get there,
you realize it's all smoke
and mirrors. <i> Band of Brothers</i>
was the opposite of that. The bootcamp thing that we did,
it was all reality. It was 24/7 immersive. I always thought, military reenactor community,
I was all like, "What's that about?"
But I totally get it now, 'cause you really do develop
a feeling for these other people that lived in another time,
because you're putting yourself through some of the same things
that they went through. ROGER: This bootcamp,
every morning, a five-mile run at 6:00 AM,
nights, guard duty, stripping rifles,
night compass marches, sniper assault. How hard
were those ten days? 'Cause everybody laughs
about them now, but it's far more
than you normally sign up for when you take a role. RON: It is. Physically,
I was ready for it. When I told my grandfather
that I'd gotten the part, he just said, "Well, start
running now." He said, "Everything else
is a duck walk, but you'd better be able
to run like hell." And I did, and so, physically,
it was fine. The whole point, I think,
of it is to put us in a high stress environment
where we're forced to execute
things together without panicking. And I think
that's what bootcamp was intended to do
for the real-life military. So they just lifted that. Most of the difference was that
they weren't allowed to hit us. ROGER: You began bootcamp
as privates, but they promoted the officers
every couple of days, with every promotion,
privileges. Ultimately, Ron, you got
your own room. And as an officer, you had
a slightly different experience of bootcamp than the men.
A lot of actual responsibility, you had to oversee exercises,
organize the men, march them. How long did it take to settle
into that role, to embrace that pseudo position
of authority? RON: They didn't want you
to have time to settle into it. It's really another brilliant
part of why I think the show worked the way it did. Usually, you have
assistant directors that come around and say, "Oh, hello, can I get you
a coffee? We'd like to invite you
to come stand on your mark
if you're ready." And this didn't work like that.
The guys that were playing the platoon leaders
would be told what their platoon needed
to execute and accomplish, he would tell the squad leaders,
the squad leaders they would do it. There was one night,
I think the night that they moved the officers
all into a room together, so, like, you had to pick up
your mattress, you had to bring your mattress
with you, all your stuff. They had given us a break,
everybody was kinda beat up. They had said,
"We know you're tired, a lot of people
are nursing some injuries. If we're gonna give you
tomorrow off, we want you to just get
your gear all out, lay it out, get everything squared away,
and just take some time." So we go and start to do this,
and 25 minutes into it... -(ROGER CHUCKLES)
-RON: ...they come in
banging garbage cans, saying, "Let's go! Let's go!
Out front!" And we had, like, three minutes
to pull it all together, repack all the stuff
that they had just told us
to unpack, and run out where they took us
on an all-night march, and it was brilliant, 'cause it specifically
sets you up for, in a couple of the episodes, especially
the Battle of the Bulge run, it's obviously not
that experience, we weren't in the Battle
of the Bulge, but it's analogous,
you know what I mean? It's analogous enough
to be able to go, "Okay, right. I remember
what that felt like when we had to do that.
Now I have an idea of how to play how he would." ROGER: It was an incredible
conceit by the producers. This bootcamp led to a bunch
of actors genuinely feeling the bond of men who are about
to go to war together. There's a beautiful story.
Private Tipper, he had to field strip an M1,
and it took him an age. So, one of your trainers
ordered you, as his squad leader, Ron, to get into the push-up
position, hands in a diamond,
and stay there until Tipper finished. You tell us what happened. RON: As his squad leader,
I was responsible for making sure that he got it,
which he had. He did it beautifully.
He was no problem until the chips are down,
and then he started fumbling
with it. And I'm in the push-up position,
and Frank John Hughes, he gets down in it,
swipe the slow clap, you know? (CHUCKLES) And then all
the guys are down, and Tipper eventually gets it. -ROGER: How did that feel?
-RON: It felt really good. It felt like
we were doing something, 'cause the truth is
we didn't really have to know what we were doing,
which I'm sure we didn't. We just had to believe
that we did. And at that point,
we were believing it. We'd all drunk the Kool-Aid. There was another moment, we're looking for
the abandoned railway, and we had no idea
how an abandoned railway looked. So we found it, didn't realize
we were there, ranged another six or seven
miles, looking for what
we thought an abandoned railway
would look like, and found something, but now,
we were miles away from the camp and we're late, and we've got
like twenty minutes
to get back, right? And everybody is exhausted,
and it was a moment where I just realized it's gonna be
really embarrassing if Nixon, the F-2, and his squad
got lost out in the woods, and is late for chow. And so, I just started screaming
at guys, and, like, going, "Let's go.
We're double-timing it." And Frank John Hughes,
who I think had a four-inch
blister on his heel already, just looked at me and said,
"Yeah." And he, like, started getting
the other guys to do it. And Frank John is there for you.
Frank, man. I love you, Frank. ROGER: Nixon.
Different from the men. And you were different
to the other actors from the beginning in that
before bootcamp began, the producers singled you out
to watch you, Ron Livingston, to make a video diary,
which you did. RON:<i> My name is Ron Livingston.</i> <i> I'm playing a man named
Lewis Nixon.</i> <i>He was the intelligence officer
for Easy Company</i> <i> in the Second World War,
506 Parachute Infantry Regiment,</i> <i>and I shot a video diary.
Here it is.</i> ROGER: But it allowed you,
by making it,
to drop out of line. Where others had to march,
or execute a grueling exercise, you could just say,
"Nah, I'm videotaping." Did this privilege inadvertently
let you gain insight into Nixon, just the improv,
maverick nature of the man? RON: Any time you have
a big ensemble like that, they always say that
you don't play the king, you just walk on stage
and everybody else plays
that you're the king. And it had that effect.
When Tony asked me to do it, I didn't feel like
I could say no, but it was sort of, like,
"I gotta prepare-- I don't have time for this.
Can't they get somebody
for this?" But no, Tony said,
"Dale won't allow any outsiders
in his bootcamp, so it's gotta be one of you guys
and we picked you." So, like, "Yeah, okay.
All right." What I discovered when I started doing it
is exactly like you said. It was kind of like
having a hall pass. Like I just had my own personal
hall pass that allowed me to go pretty much anywhere
I wanted to, as long as I had the camera
and pretended that I was filming
something, I was allowed to do that. And it made the other actors,
especially a lot of the British
guys who were playing background
roles and non-speaking roles, they didn't read the book,
they don't know
who's playing who, it just kind of gave everybody
the idea that, "Oh, this guy Nixon
is different. The same rules
don't quite apply to him. He's got something important
that they gave him to do. He's doing something important." (CHUCKLES) "So we don't need
to know about it. We don't wanna get in the way
of it." That's very much what Nixon did. That's a little bit
of what the job of the F-2
Intelligence Officer is, because his purview
is trying to ferret out where the enemy lines are
and process all the intel
that's coming in. So yeah, I really ended up
enjoying that experience. Especially after, I think,
the very first time I tried to do it,
like a video log, which is what they suggested, and talk about what
I was going through, and my feelings, I spent ten seconds trying
to do that, and I'm like, "I'm not--
I can't. There's just no way." ROGER: (CHUCKLING)
The Ron Livingston assigned
to the best bit. RON: No. I can't do it.
I said, "I'm just gonna document what I see and what
everybody else is doing, and then that's gonna have to be
the experience." You know, 'cause who gives a--
You know? Who cares what I think and feel? -Nobody cares.
-(ROGER CHUCKLES) ROGER: There's a great line
in your bootcamp video diary where you remember your mom
saying to you, like all moms, "If someone told you to jump
off a cliff, would you do it?" And you said on the video diary,
"Yes. If Dale Dye, the military advisor
to<i> Band of Brothers</i> told me to jump off a cliff,
I probably would." At the end of your video diary,
Dale Dye said something unbelievably beautiful. DALE DYE:<i> The truth is in you.</i> <i>And the truth will come out
of you.</i> <i> Through your eyes,
through your actions,</i> <i> through your gestures,
through your handling
of weapons,</i> <i> through your wearing
of the uniform, everything.</i> <i> The truth is there!</i> <i> Let it shine, boys.</i> <i> Let it shine.</i> <i> Make the world proud
of Easy Company,</i> <i>and the world will celebrate
our forefathers,</i> <i>the people who wore this uniform
for real.</i> <i>We've got that chance, folks.</i> ROGER: This bootcamp
was the place where you became the characters,
where you lost that sense of Hollywood self, where you became
deeply connected to 1940s everyday heroes. Can you talk about that
identity awareness? RON: When recruits enter
the military, they enter as recruits, and they come out
of basic training as soldiers. Now, what happened in that
amount of time? They didn't fight any wars, they're running around
doing physical exercise and they're training
on something, but there's something about
the fact of saying, "All right, you have now
transformed from recruits. You are the thing
that you thought you were trying to be." It's like a moment of saying,
"You know what? It doesn't matter
if we're ready. We're as ready
as we're gonna be, and we're as ready
as anyone else is gonna be. So, let's go do this." ROGER: You were Lewis Nixon. Damian Lewis
was cast as Winters. Where and when
did you first meet? RON: We first met, I believe
it was at Camp Longmoor in the UK, which is where
we trained. They imposed on us
from the start that we were to refer
to each other by character names
and character names only. ROGER: So he was Winters
from the very beginning? -RON: He was Winters.
-ROGER: Was he bringing
the American accent -even off set?
-RON: He was.
He came in with it. You know, he was working it.
And it was good. If I didn't know,
I wouldn't catch it. I knew he was British though. I just knew that
'cause I knew it. And I did have a little bit
of an American snobbery thing of like, "They're really
gonna give this part... They couldn't find an American
to play this part?" ROGER: They're even outsourcing
the jobs of American heroes now! RON: Yeah, although I guess
we were on their home turf, so I don't know
if we were taking their jobs or they were taking ours.
It all came out in the wash. ROGER: Nixon and Winters were two such different
human beings in upbringing, in prior life experience. How do you understand the core
of their internal connection? Were they friends?
Were they siblings? Was there a rivalry,
a competitive spirit in it? RON: It was definitely
all of that. I remember, Dale Dye, he did
a thing where, in the beginning,
we were divided up into platoons and squads,
and he put Damian and I in the same squad, but he made
me the squad lead. Right? So now, I'm in charge
of waking Damian up
in the morning. I'm above him. And then that's something
that's going to change throughout the course of it. And it was a really interesting
clue to me... that it's like, "Oh, I see.
Nixon kinda came in as this hotshot, privileged
golden boy, and Winters passed him
on the track." That had to have colored
his experience of it. I think there was a lot
of that sibling, friend rivalry that's part of any deep
and abiding love. ROGER: Did you feel closer
to Damian than the other actors? RON: You know, because it's just
an odd quirk of the way
it worked, all the English guys
would clock out and they would go home
to their girlfriends
or their wives, and the Americans would all
get funneled back into the living quarters,
and we're in London, we don't know anybody. So, most of the time was spent
by the Americans with each other,
just because nobody else wanted to talk to us.
And within that, it broke down
all the married guys who had families and kids,
lived over on the West End, 'cause they have little flats
with kitchens and they would get together
for play dates and do dinners together.
All the young guys that were single were out
in big mobs hitting all the clubs,
and most of my time was spent with the three or four guys
that were not married, didn't have kids,
but did have significant
relations, so we weren't really
on the prowl. So it was sort of like,
"What do you want to do?" "I don't know, want to go
to the pub again?" "Sure." You know? ROGER:<i> Behind the Music
for Band of Brothers</i> is a film that still needs
to be made. RON: Yeah. ROGER: The central conflict
of episode one is that between Sobel,
David Schwimmer, and Dick Winters. DICK WINTERS:<i>
At 10 hundred hours,</i> <i> I followed your orders
to the minute.</i> SOBEL:<i> I changed that time
to 09:45.</i> -WINTERS:<i> No one told me, sir.</i>
-SOBEL:<i> I telephoned.</i> WINTERS:<i> I'm quartered
with a family</i> <i> that has no telephone.</i> -SOBEL:<i> And sent a runner.</i>
-WINTERS:<i> No runner found me,
Captain.</i> SOBEL: (SCOFFS)<i> Irregardless,
when given a task</i> <i>to perform by a ranking officer,
you should've delegated</i> <i>your task of latrine inspection
to another officer.</i> <i> You failed to do so.
Were I to let such a failure</i> <i> of duty by my own X.O.
go unpunished,</i> <i>what kind of message is that
to the men?</i> WINTERS:<i> I performed my duty
as I was ordered, sir.</i> SOBEL:<i> And I disagree.</i> ROGER: At boot camp,
is it true that the producers made you
wary of David Schwimmer in basic training?
He was, what, six years into his star turn
as Ross from Friends, and so the producers
treated him like a star. They gave him his own room,
his own privileges, and kept him away from you
to build a natural distrust,
a distance. ROGER: That's how they set
it up. They definitely kept David
as a star apart. Somewhere in the range
between mind games and analogy. By the way, he was fantastic as part of the boot camp
experience because he was really
inhabiting the character of Herbert Sobel. Like, he was really
being shitty to us. (CHUCKLES) Like, he was in it.
He was doing it. He didn't mean it perhaps,
but it really sold. All of it helped.
All of it went into the plot. He's a fantastic actor. ROGER: You talk about
Schwimmer's acting chops... When Sobel drives off the base
having just been reassigned, that look of mournful sorrow
in his face, it is the saddest Ross Geller
of all time. The real Sobel story
is actually incredibly dark. The trauma
of his war experience, and Easy Company experience
in particular truly haunted him.
He tried suicide, and after his death,
his son turned up at an Easy Company reunion
to find out why the men did what they did.
And in Ambrose's book, the paratroopers all relate
the extraordinary closeness that they experienced,
many of them attribute it that it was first created
both by the technical skills Sobel drilled into them,
but also the unity that was built into them
by detesting Sobel. SOBEL:<i> Name.</i> JOSEPH LIEBGOTT:<i> Liebgott,
Joseph D., sir.</i> (GUN CLICKING, RATTLING) SOBEL:<i> Rusty bayonet, Liebgott.</i> <i>-You want to kill Germans?</i>
-LIEBGOTT:<i> Yes, sir.</i> SOBEL:<i> Not with this.</i> (FLIES BUZZING) SOBEL:<i> I wouldn't take this
rusty piece of shit to war!</i> <i>And I will not take you to war
in your condition.</i> <i> Now, thanks to these men
and their infractions,</i> <i> every man in the company
who had a weekend pass</i> <i> has lost it.</i> RON: It's such
a complicated dynamic. You know, I hesitate
to say much about it or try to put any kind
of spin on it, just because of the way
it played out. It's definitely true
that it wouldn't have been Easy Company
without Herbert Sobel. He really made it what it was. Even if he wasn't the guy
to carry it into combat. And those aren't always
the same guy, you know, George McClellan
in the Civil War did an extraordinary job of building the union army,
and a terrible job of fighting with it.
But damn if he didn't build it. ROGER: Well, that conflict
is at the heart of an episode which is perhaps the most
light-hearted of the entire series. Most of the men
are still living in the moment, they haven't quite grasped the stakes of the conflict
they're about to enter. Indeed, one of the only
characters who's figured it out already
is Lewis Nixon. Now, fans talk about
the raggedness with which you play Nixon
towards the end, like a man whom the war
has scooped everything out of. But even in this first episode,
Nixon, he's got an awareness compared to the naivety
of the privates and the stoicism of Winters. They haven't even been
to war yet, yet Nixon's
already waxing nostalgic about civilian life. NIXON:<i> Five o'clock in New York.</i> <i> Four o'clock in Chicago.</i> WINTERS:<i> Happy hour, huh?</i> NIXON:<i> Yeah...</i> (CHUCKLES)<i>
Happy hour.</i> <i> Couple drinks,</i> <i> then an early dinner
before the theater.</i> <i> Civilized place
for civilized men.</i> WINTERS:<i> Should've been born
earlier, Nix.</i> NIXON:<i> What?
And give up all this?</i> ROGER: Where does that ability
to be one step ahead always, for Lewis Nixon, come from? RON: I think part of it,
for him, was just that's the way
his mind worked. He grasped things a lot sooner
than people around him did. He had had an extraordinary
education, I think he traveled the world, he had a strong grasp
of history. For me, as an actor, that was definitely
a conscious-- I realized that in the script, Lewis gets to be a little bit
the voice of-- I get to see it a little bit from the perspective
of the audience, forward in time,
who knows how this ends. Who sees where this is going. Again, that relates back,
I think, to his job as the intelligence officer,
that's his job, is to try to see where
it's going. He always sees the whole board,
and carries the board
in his head. And just has the ability
to do that, to keep that. Me, as Nixon, having that contemplative
background and Damian grounded
in the present and looking to the future.
That gave us a lot to play with. ROGER: Nixon's journey
through<i> Band of Brothers</i> is remarkable to witness. And I don't want to get
too far ahead of ourselves. with spoiler alerts here. He's a man who shows such wit, such energy,
in episode one. NIXON:<i> Sobel's a genius.</i> <i> I had a headmaster
just like him in prep school,
I know the type.</i> WINTERS:<i> Lewis,
Michelangelo's a genius.</i> <i> Beethoven's a genius.</i> <i>You know a man in this company
who wouldn't double-turn</i> <i>Currahee with a full pack</i> <i> just to piss
in that guy's morning coffee?</i> ROGER: And then the war trauma,
coupled with his personal life disintegrating at home,
sees him end as a ground-down, jaundice--
Almost a cynic. NIXON:<i> What do you think
I should write to these parents,
Dick?</i> WINTERS:<i> Hear what I said, Nix?</i> <i> -You've been demoted.</i>
-NIXON:<i> Yeah, demoted. Gotcha.</i> <i> 'Cause I don't know how
to tell them</i> <i>their kids never even made
it out of the goddamn plane.</i> WINTERS:<i> You tell 'em
what you always tell 'em.</i> <i>Their sons died as heroes.</i> NIXON:<i> You really still
believe that?</i> WINTERS:<i> Yeah. Yeah, I do.</i> <i> Don't you?</i> (NIXON SCOFFS) ROGER: And you see
photographs of two-term presidents
before and after they serve, and they appear to have aged
two decades in that time. Nixon, in<i> Band of Brothers,</i>
did that before the viewers' eyes. Emotionally, what was it like to go through that arc
yourself as Nixon? RON: First, I'm gonna give
credit where credit is due. Some of it was the makeup
department, did an extraordinary job
of hollowing out the eyes, making us appear a little more
gaunt, a little more ragged. We weren't entirely
on our own. Some of it was just
the shooting schedule. We shot episode one,
"Currahee", first, when we were all bright-eyed
and fresh. And a lot of those later
episodes we shot last, and after we'd been grinding
it out for eight or nine months. And then some of it, I think,
was just the nature of the subject matter. The job that they did creating
the concentration work camp in episode nine... the phenomenal job
that the art department did of building that place,
it's very sobering. The image of it,
and being there, is very sobering,
but there are no ghosts there. If you go to the real one,
I feel like there are ghosts, and the birds don't sing,
and you feel it in your soul. This one, it's there,
and you see it, but you don't feel it in
your soul quite the same way. But just the way it looks
is enough that you can't even walk
around, look at it, and imagine it
without it draining you just to consider the magnitude
of what was done. ROGER: How did the experience
of playing Lewis Nixon, as a human being,
how did it change your role in ways big or small? RON: I never called anybody,
"Sir," before<i> Band of Brothers.</i> And I haven't stopped calling
people, "Sir," since. So there's some silly ones,
that you just pick up. I feel like every job,
it seeps into you. And this one
was extremely powerful, just to my strength as a person.
I was, I think, 32 or 33 or something like that.
But I came back with a lot more,
sort of, gravity. I was grounded in a way.
Before, there was so much, "I gotta prove myself,
I gotta make it. I gotta get my break,
and then I gotta do a great job on my break."
And I went to<i> Band of Brothers</i> feeling like that.
Like, "I gotta do the thing!" And I came back feeling like,
"All right, yeah, what's next?" I haven't since had that
young-man energy going into something. ROGER: When you watch it now,
what do you experience? Do you think about your
performance? What do you think about
your own passage of life? RON: (CHUCKLES)
It's funny, I've only sat down to watch
it top-to-bottom maybe six or seven times.
I catch pieces of it, if it's on, I'll get sucked in,
and I'll watch it for a while. I used to say this thing where,
any project I'm in, the first time I see it,
I'm only looking at my hair. The second time I see it,
I'm only looking at my acting. And the third time I see it,
I can get a sense of how good of a movie it is. And I would say
with<i> Band of Brothers,</i> going back 15 or 20 years,
now it's kind of like watching home movies
because you see yourself at such a younger time.
And it's that way, when you watch home movies,
you know that's you, right? But you know you're not
that person anymore. That's a person that you
have a relationship with. I'm a lot more generous
to that guy on screen when I watch him now
than I was when I watched it then.
Because I felt close to it. Now I have moments
of looking at it going, "Man, I was really good in that. I'm not really good
in everything, but I was pretty good in that." ROGER: (SIGHS)
The conveyer belt of life, Ron. <i>Band of Brothers</i> has become
a cultural phenomenon. It is so much bigger now than it was when it came out
20 years ago. Ron, how do you understand that? RON: I think everything
kind of grows in time. If it can stay relevant,
and if it can stand the test of time,
then it only grows. Just by the nature
of when it was aired, our first episode aired
September 9th, two days before 9/11.
Those two things are kind of inextricably
intertwined for me because you're just ready,
you're excited about your show, you're watching the thing,
there's the videos of the guys saying,
"We were attacked." And then two days later,
the Trade Towers come down and the United States
has had an attack on its soil. I think everybody was cracked
wide-open for a couple of years
and<i> Band of Brothers</i> just kind of sits in that
experience that kind of goes hand-in-hand
with it. ROGER: Ron Livingston,
thank you for honoring the memory of Lewis Nixon, and sharing your journey
with us. RON: Thank you.
Thanks for having me, Rog. SOLDIERS: (SINGING)
♪<i> We fall upon the risers ♪</i> <i>♪ We fall upon the grass ♪</i> <i>♪ We never land upon our feet
we always hit our ass ♪</i> <i> ♪ Mighty, mighty,
Christ Almighty ♪</i> <i> ♪ Who the hell are we? ♪</i> <i> ♪ Bim, bam, goddamn,
we're in the infantry! ♪</i> ROGER: Ron Livingston
as Captain Lewis Nixon. Just a wonderfully layered
performance in a series full of them. Next episode,
we join Easy Company aboard that formation
of C-47s headed for Normandy, and talk episode two,
"Day of Days." WINTERS:<i> That night,
I took time to thank God</i> <i> for seeing me through
that day of days.</i> <i>And prayed I would make it
through D plus 1.</i> (DISTANT GUNFIRE) WINTERS:<i> And if, somehow,
I managed to get home again,</i> <i>I promised God and myself
that I would find</i> <i> a quiet piece of land
someplace</i> <i>and spend the rest of my life
in peace.</i> ROGER: We'll speak with the man
who used those words to lay the foundation
of what's in store for Major Dick Winters
and Easy Company for the rest of the series.
He's a writer of episode two, "Day of Days,"
the great John Orloff. JOHN ORLOFF:<i>
If you can't make a guy dropping</i> <i>into Nazi-occupied France,
with nothing</i> <i>but a fucking trench knife,
and by the end of the day,</i> <i> he has taken four
105mm German cannons</i> <i> and saved hundreds
if not thousands of lives...</i> <i> If you can't make that
dramatically interesting,</i> <i>then you need another job.</i> ROGER: Make sure
to subscribe to HBO's official<i>
Band of Brothers Podcast,</i> wherever you get your podcasts. And please, rate, review,
and share. And a reminder,
as if you needed one, that you can watch
"Currahee" and every single
episode of<i> Band of Brothers</i> on HBO Max right now.
Until next time... -SPEAKER:<i> Currahee!</i>
-SOLDIERS:<i> Currahee!</i> (CHEERING) ♪ ("BAND OF BROTHERS"
OUTRO THEME PLAYS) ♪ ♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
