Dan Snow's History Hit - Band of Brothers

Episode Date: December 5, 2021

HBO's Band of Brothers remains one of the greatest mini-series ever made. 20 years after the award-winning series debuted, Dan speaks to Robin Laing who played Edward 'Babe' Heffron about life on set, how they created an entire frozen forest inside an air hanger during a sweltering August and his close relationship with the real Babe Heffron. They're joined by writer John Orloff who tells them about being approached by Tom Hanks and writing two of the most crucial episodes in the series: 'Day of Days' that see's the paratrooper regiment drop into occupied Normandy and 'Why We Fight' about the Lansberg concentration camp. A must-listen for any Band of Brothers fan!Dan Snow's History Hit is up for a 2021 Pod Bible award! Vote for us to win best informative podcast here: https://podbiblemag.com/pod-bible-poll-winners-2021-vote/. Thank you from Dan and the History Hit team!

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Band of Brothers is 20 years old this fall, this autumn.

It was first broadcast on HBO in September the 9th, 2001. There we go, the series won an Emmy and Golden Globe Award in 2001 for best miniseries, as you'd expect. It's based on the historian Stephen Ambrose's book of the same name, Band of Brothers. And it follows the journey of Easy Company, part of the 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment

of the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. As they train in the US, they jump on D-Day, they fight through every major action from then until VE Day. It's obviously a series that many people listening to this will rank among the best TV they've ever seen. I'll never forget watching those episodes 20 years ago, particularly from that moment where Lieutenant Spears runs across that farmyard, that terrifying shrapnel infested hellscape to shout some instructions at some of his men who are having a momentary lapse. It's packed, packed with extraordinary depictions of the Second World War. It was also packed with brilliant actors for whom

it was a springboard to brilliant, brilliant careers. In this episode of the podcast, I'm going to talk to one of those actors, Robin Lang, who played Bob Heffron. And I'm also going to talk to John Orloff, a writer on the series, a Second World War fan, for whom, as you'll hear, this was his dream assignment. So it's going to be a good one, folks.

It's a special episode, this one. You're going to love it. If you want to watch programs about D-Day, if you want to watch programs about World War II in Europe, I've got a place where you can go. I've got a safe place where you can go and watch those shows in peace and with the sophisticated commentary of real historians, not the breathless voiceover that you might find on a mainstream channel. Just go to HistoryHitTV. HistoryHit.tv is the web address. It works in America. It works in Canada. It works in Micronesia. Wherever you're watching your TV online, whether it's smart TV,

on your devices, you can watch History Hit TV. Head over there, you get 14 days free if you sign up today. Historyhit.tv, folks. Go and check it out. In the meantime, though, here's the very brilliant John Orloff and Robin Lang. Robin, thanks so much for coming on the show. Not at all. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Now, like so many people, I watched you back in the day, my mind blown by the scale and ambition of that drama. But tell me who the character was that you were playing and also your real life interactions with him. I played a man called Edward Babe Heffron. Everyone knew him as Babe,

which came about because when he was born, one of his older brothers couldn't say Edward. So he just called him Babe and that just stuck with him for his whole life. He was from South Philadelphia, sort of Irish extraction. He was a very, slightly shorter than me. He was a very short man.

I think was given a dispensation because of a vital work that he did on ships. But everyone else was going and he decided, I think he got his dispensation and just kind of, he said he tore it up and just put it in the bin. And off he went with everyone else who was going on this. I guess what, as someone late teens early 20s must

have seemed like a great adventure with no benefit of foresight as to what was to come. You must have been so nervous meeting him back in the day. Yeah that was quite a it was a nervous moment meeting him for the first time we'd spoken on the telephone a number of times which in itself wasn't easy because he wasn't a man to be found in his house. He was a man who liked to get out and about. He always used to say, you won't find me dead in bed. And he was always up, out and didn't come home until quite late at night. I don't mean late, late at night,

but I mean late in terms of me being able to phone him from Britain. So I eventually pinned him down at sort of two o'clock in the morning British time when I spoke to him the first time so we'd spoken on the telephone and then eventually I met him on set he and Bill Garnier came and visited us while we were filming I was shooting that day and I arrived quite a number of people had already been speaking to him for a while And I arrived and someone said Oh Mr Heffron, you know

This is Robin Lane who's playing you, you know And I said to him Well, it's real nice to meet you finally babe I'm babe, you know And he said Oh great to meet you kid Why don't you let me hear your accent And I said

Oh I actually I was just He said I'm just messing with you kid I'm just messing with you and that kind of set the tone for our relationship really it was always a lot of fun we had some great conversations and some great nights out that night in fact was the first of many and on that amazing set which at the time was unprecedented for the kind of accuracy, the ambition of it, especially for TV. Were they going like, hey, it wasn't like that, you know, stand a bit more like this. I mean, what was the interaction with them like? If you ask them about things, you know, specifics like that, would you have done this? Would you have stood like that?

They say, well, no, we wouldn't have done that in the day. You know, you would do this and you would never do that. But only if they were asked. They were very aware that it was a drama and that it was based on the book that Stephen Ambrose had written and they weren't precious about it you know sometimes you would mention a scene that you'd already filmed and so it was done and they say oh yeah yeah yeah of course he didn't say that and you're like what they knew they'd been checked in with by the producers and writers so they knew that things would be attributed events and dialogue would be attributed to different people you know

your character babe comes in as a draft as a replacement and in the same way that like as an actor you must have done that as well was it weird like did you feel like you were a little newbie going in with a grizzled group of veterans when you went on set? It did feel a little bit like that. And I think that was by design by Captain Dye and the cadre. I think that was their plan to create this hardcore who went through the two week boot camp, which was a pretty grueling process that they went through. And my boot camp was just a single day, you know, learning about the weapon that I was to use and doing some basic field maneuvers. And so, yeah, when people arrived, they were given a slight side eye by the veterans of the of the televisual campaign. I was afforded a slightly easier ride because of who Babe and Bill had become.

because of who Babe and Bill had become. They weren't the spokesmen for Easy Company, but they organized a lot of events and they went around schools talking to kids and they were very active in that kind of thing, working with school kids and organizing the reunions and things like that. So they had become really big figures. So because of that, I was afforded a sort of, by proxy almost,

a kind of slightly warmer welcome. But I was still made to, you know, there was the things they would do. If you left your weapon lying around, someone would steal your weapon and then someone would point out to Captain Dye, they would say, hey, where's babe's weapon? And I'd say, it's right, oh, you know, and he'd be like, right? Come on, half-ran, drop and give me 20. And you just had to get down and do it.

And you would get some people who'd say, no, no, no, I'm not doing push-ups, you know. And that went slightly against the grain because they'd all had to do it at boot camp. So there was that kind of feeling that if you did your bit, then you were kind of accepted and part of the group then. What was it like filming? I mean, the Bastogne scenes that we all remember so well, the cold and the snow.

I mean, how challenging was that to film? Emotionally, it was quite tough. Physically and geographically, it was a very controlled environment. It was an aircraft hangar. They built the forest within this aircraft hangar. hangar they built the forest within this aircraft hangar and then i think i'm right in saying they it's still the biggest painted canvas ever used they stretched a canvas all the way around the perimeter of the aircraft hangar with this perspective forest going off into the distance if you blindfolded someone and took them into the middle of the aircraft hangar and then took

the blindfold off said where are you they'd say i'm in the middle of a forest somewhere green and verdant in the middle of winter i'm not quite sure what's going on the biggest issue was that it was august i think it was a hot summer and we were in a metal aircraft hangar which heated up very quickly and all of us were acting cold which involves making yourself shiver and the last thing you want to do when you don't want to get even hotter than you already are is sit and do pretend shivering so on more than one occasion the shout of cut would come and you say did I forget a line and they, no, there's sweat running down your nose. We just need to mop that up. So that was a challenge on occasion.

But the challenge of existing in that arena and believing what was going on around you in order to facilitate your acting, it was no challenge at all because it was all there. It looked incredible. And when trees are exploding and the ground's exploding and you're running full pelt and that's just madness around you there's kind of no acting required really you're just trying to get where you're going not in one

piece I don't want to overstate any element of danger but everything's catered for in terms of the reality of the situation for you to just get on with your work you lose your best friend who you promised to look after it sounds like it wasn't hard getting into character for that because it sounded like it was very immersive yes it was mark who was there who played john julian even when he wasn't in shot he stayed for the scenes so he's lying there kind of in pieces and the machine guns are firing and the squibs are going in the ground

and you're just trying to do justice to an event. It's interesting you mentioned that particular event because that was one of the scenes that I was particularly determined to do justice to. I really wanted to get right because losing John Julian was had a big impact on Babe and I don't want to say he didn't get over it but it really stayed with him because they were really close and they had made that sort of pact with each other that if one of

them went the other one would get the other guy's stuff and make sure it got back to their parents as Babe says you know I'm supposed to get his stuff and bring it to his ma it was important for me that that was properly done justice to i like to think we did we achieved that the other scene that i think must have been really hard to achieve is the concentration camp it's so difficult to recreate that let alone try and act and it must have been a huge challenge though yeah i remember the first day of being taken to that set and you came up you actually see it in the show they drive along a sort of woodland track and so you're there's these tall trees either side of you and and then you come out into this opening and it's a full-size concentration camp just in the middle of a forest

in hartfordshire it was really quite stark and it was dressed you know there were a lot of extras a call must have gone out for very very thin people so there were a lot of extras and various other animatronics and things like that but there were also just piles of these bodies just these dolls you know these mannequin really realistic and lifelike dolls um sort of littered about the place and it was really it was a quiet week generally my memories of the whole shoot are of the battle scenes and fun and having a laugh and, you know, the camaraderie and all that. But that week was a really different week and stands out in my memory of the shoot. Everybody was very respectful and I think affected in different ways by that week.

Did you know when you were part of this what impact it would have? No, no, I genuinely had no idea. I knew it was a story about a particular company. I knew they were real people. During the audition process, I read the book and I thought, wow, you know, these are an incredible bunch of guys. And I knew it would be a big show because it was HBO, but I don't think anyone could have predicted quite the impact it's had on,

I think, on the popular conscious. But also for each actor, I think on the popular conscious but also for each actor I think personally I doubt very much if any of us have been part of a job that's had the same impact it's completely unique you know and not just in terms of your career you know that's undeniable when you look at the people who the two big stars back then were Donny Wahlberg and David Schwimmer. And you look at the cast now and it's a sort of roll call of Hollywood leading men and screenwriters and television directors. And it's incredible. But on a more personal level, I think the impact it's had is unparalleled.

We all have relationships with the families. None of the men are left, but we all have relationships with their families. I'm very good friends with Babe's daughter, Tr Trish we are regularly in touch and we visit each other she comes to Scotland and stays with us and she brings family of hers nieces and there's a kind of generational ripple effect and then the inter-caste bond as well we're all still in touch the UK guys have a whatsapp group and a picture popped up yesterday of lieutenant harry welsh hubler shifty had gone out for lunch because bull randleman was in town pete mccabe who plays hubler he said uh god i haven't seen mike for about 18 years and

after about five minutes it felt like i'd only seen him about three weeks ago. And it's always like that. I reconnected with some of the guys, maybe 2016, and hadn't seen them for the best part of 15 years. And we just picked up where we left off. And it sounds slightly cliched, but it's not. We really did just pick up where we left off. Because we were together eight months. And it was quite an intense period to exist together any other scenes that are particular favorites of yours especially part of oh to be part of um the baseball field at the end

there's something quite joyous about that and there's something sad because within that sequence in the show they remember all the people who didn't who didn't make it it's a joyous scene but it has a kind of melancholy to it as well as far as I recall they just let us play baseball and I think they'd kind of long lensed quite a lot of it so they shot things from quite a distance away and so they've captured some really nice moments in it there's a lovely shot and it's Rick Warden and Donny Wahlberg Lippton and harry welsh sitting on the jeep of a car and they're absolutely killing themselves laughing and i've asked rick i said what was said he said i can't remember he said we were just having a laugh but they're just as

something really really touching about that sequence i find it really sort of uplifting and as i say a little bit melancholic at the same time. Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. It was better than its Top Gun volleyball equivalent. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about Band of Brothers on its 20th anniversary.

Hello. If you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast. From the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11, we reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world. I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists, and experts from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force, and there wouldn't have been a

waterloo. It would have been as simple as that. Revolutionary technologies. By the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries disregarded these communities' health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place in trillion dollar wars, or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history.

we're on the front line of military history. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hear me, sir? Yes, hello. Thanks for for doing this how are you doing good and excellent thank you hey robin good evening john good to see you good to see you it always disturbs me when one of the actors speak with their original accent it's a little like whoa john of course john we should discourage i mean actors shouldn't be allowed to speak anyway,

surely, unless- Well, exactly. Unless they have well-written dialogue. John, you're kind of Hollywood royalty, right? Tell me about you and your family's relationship with the silver screen. I'm fourth generation Hollywood. My great-grandparents were a radio team,

very popular during World War II in America called Fibber McGee and Molly. And it was sort of a radio sitcom team. And then their son married my grandmother, who was a B-movie actress in movies like The Big Sleep. And then my father was a commercial director. My brother's an Academy Award winning sound mixer. So yeah, I'm full tilt, family business. And you also, you have a passion for World War II, right? Always have been. Always been obsessed with World War II. As a kid, my favorite movies were, you know, Patton, Guns of Navarone. Yeah, World War II films were what I loved. What a dream. In the 1990s, someone comes to you and says, we're going to spend the most money

that's ever been spent on a TV show, and we want you to write the whole thing. It's going to be about the Second World War. I mean, it must have been unbelievable. Well, I begged for it, quite frankly. I had been having meetings with Tom Hanks about a whole other project, and I had said, oh, I hear you're doing this World War II thing. And he was like, no, no, no, never going to happen. We have one writer writing the whole show, this chap, Eric Jenderson, but thank you for your interest. And then another meeting or two meetings later, Tom suddenly says out of the blue, hey, you still want to work on Band of Brothers? And I'm like, yes, please. And he immediately says, well, do you want to write the D-Day episode? do you want to write the D-Day episode? Uh, okay. And so that's how I got involved in band. And then after I wrote Day of Days, Tom read it and said, okay, you want to write another one?

And I was like, uh, sure. How about, uh, the concentration camp episode? Uh, okay. Now, remember, these are my first paying jobs in Hollywood. It's 1999, about four or five years after Schindler's List and only one or two years after Saving Private Ryan. So I'm being asked by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg to do the D-Day episode, which is, you know, Saving Private Ryan has the greatest D-Day sequence in history, and then do the concentration camp episode. So it was quite daunting. Yeah. But you nailed it, man. Don't worry about it. Oh, thanks. Phew. The relationship with the veterans seemed to be at the heart of what you guys were doing. I mean, did you spend time with them? How did that work as a writer?

Yeah, I spent a lot of time with them. The first thing I did when I was hired was went to one of their reunions in Denver, I think, and spent the weekend with Babe and Wild Bill and Compton and Malarkey and Lipton, basically trying to remain coherent while they kept on drinking. I don't know how much Robin has mentioned how much Bill and Babe could drink, but they could drink anybody under the table and were totally stone sober. By that point, I already knew I was going to be doing the Braycore Manor D-Day sequence. So my focus was very directed to tell me about Braycore Manor. So I was talking specifically to those guys. And then in a parallel track, I was talking to Dick Winters. Dick never went to the reunions.

I think he only went to one or two in 40 years. And so Dick and I would talk on the telephone. So the veterans were a constant source during pre-production and writing and production and even post-production. Totally involved the whole time. So if you're writing a show set further back in time, they're not alive, it must be a bit more free. Like, is it almost like constrictive when you're trying to write a show and you've got these guys in your head, you've also got the audience and you don't know how far to push things and how kind of naughty to make them.

I like limits. It forces your creativity. And I sort of like to say Dick Winters dropped into Nazi-occupied Normandy in the middle of the night with nothing but a trench knife, and by the end of the day had captured and destroyed four 105 millimeter cannons. Now, if you can't make that interesting and dramatic, then maybe you should be doing something else. I mean, what do you have to make up? What do you have to push? It's all there. So if you pick the right story to tell, you don't have to make stuff up. I will never forget watching that sequence, that scene. And it's a great honor to meet the guy who wrote that. That's very exciting.

What are your two or three favorite scenes that you're proudest of? Be boastful for a second. Manor sequence as a single bit of filmmaking and writing. You know, it might not feel like it was written, but every single shot was written. Every single moment in that 20 minute, 25 minute sequence was written. And I'm super proud of it. They show it at Sandhurst. They show it at West Point. I'm very, very proud of that. I guess equally the drop sequence, nobody had ever seen anything like that or even understood what that was like. So to share that with an audience I thought was really special. And then I guess finally, when Nixon in episode nine, Why We Fight, when Nixon goes to the concentration camp in Landsberg, the second time when he sees the German civilians burying the bodies and locks eyes with that woman. I'm very proud of that whole

sequence. Just got one more for you, John, and I'll bring you just a question to both of you to finish up with. So John, Masters of the Air, now everyone's super excited. I know it's embargoed. I know it's top secret, but give us a little something. What's going on with Masters of the Air? Well, I've been working on it for eight years. We are finishing filming by Christmas. We've been filming since April and it's really big. It's very, very big. We have air battles where there are 1,500 airplanes in the air. It's very big. Yeah. And the basic premise is this is about fighters, about bombers. What's going on? We follow one bomber group from July 43 to VE day. And I can say this, that bomber group, real bomber group arrives in East Anglia in June of 43 with 36 airplanes, 36 B-17s, goes on their first mission July 24th of 43. 10 weeks later, 34 of the 36 have been shot down. Right. That's insane.

Yeah. Now, let me bring Robin in just for one last bit of interaction. Robin, just for both of you, what is it like being part of the graduating class of Band of Brothers? Is it something with pride? Is it occasionally like, geez, I've worked in other projects, you know? I mean, I have other aspects of my career.

Not for me. No, not at all. I think I said this to someone recently. You know, I've played other historical characters, but I've. I think I said this to someone recently. You know, I've played other historical characters, but I've never got to hang out with one of them. And I've never been sort of nominally responsible for their legacy in a way or their memory. And so, no, it's afforded me, as I mentioned earlier,

professionally a great many opportunities, but personally it's enriched my life in ways that I could never have imagined when I was going to those hotel rooms to that sounds really dodgy uh those hotel rooms to meet Tom Hanks for auditions um back then it was a big job and now it's a point at which my life changed irrevocably, for the better. How about you, John? What impact has it had on you? Everything. It changed my life. Like I said, it was my first paying job in Hollywood. But more than that, it was the most important thing I'll ever do, and the most rewarding, and the most

rewarding and the most emotionally relevant in my life. I think of those guys almost all the time. And we just mentioned masters, and it's a big difference because we're making masters, but none of our characters are alive, and I've never met any of them. And it's a very different experience than sort of being the caretaker of a story of men that you know, as Robin just said, you know, it's different. Knowing Dick Winters and these guys and telling their stories, right, it becomes very, very personal. And to then be part of something that has this wider impact is really spectacular. I mean, about two or three months ago, I'm shooting in England right now, and I was at a pub, and a 30-ish year old English veteran from Iraq and Afghanistan, couple of tours at least, was having a beer next to me and heard that I had worked on band

and interrupted and said, you know, Band of Brothers got me through my PTSD when I got home. And that's not a normal television show. Yeah. John, I can see you wincing every time Robin speaks because he's speaking words that you haven't put in his mouth. But is it a different thing when you're the writer? Because your hard work, your late nights, presumably come way before filming starts.

Robin's intensity comes from being in that big warehouse covered in fake snow. Do you have the same intensity, do you think, when you're on location? Or are you a bit more detached once filming is underway? Oh, God, no. Not detached at all. In fact, some of the biggest fights and arguments happen.

I've got a box full of pink, yellow, green, purple, salmon, goldenrod pages to attest that the work is never done of the writer. Ever. Yeah, it's just constant. You're part of it. And it's both frustrating and rewarding. You know, I had an experience where I was on the set for episode two, but not on the set for episode nine. So I've sort of had it both ways, and they're equally frustrating. I'm sure. Well, listen, guys, thank you so much for talking to me and spending time on the 20th anniversary. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. This is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.