Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks team up for HBO miniseries 'The Pacific'

PASADENA, Calif. — There was a certain inevitability about the production of the miniseries "The Pacific," according to Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg.

It was "inevitable that we would do 'The Pacific' with HBO because there was such an overwhelming response" to "Band of Brothers." And part of that was letters "that said, 'I was a veteran of the Solomans,' 'I fought at Tarawa,' and 'I was at Midway,' " Spielberg said.

"We got so many letters of veterans from the Pacific theater of operations asking us if we could acquit their stories the way we acquitted the stories of the European theater of operations."

Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who teamed up as executive producers of the 2001 miniseres "Band of Brothers" — which won a Golden Globe, a Peabody, the Humanitas Prize and half a dozen Emmys — have spent the past half-dozen years working on "The Pacific." This 10-part epic is, in many ways, the Pacific theater counterpart to the European theater "Band," but there are some fundamental differences.

"The main difference is our source material," Hanks said. "For 'Band of Brothers,' we had Stephen Ambrose's pretty magnificent, oral history — almost a piece of scholarship — in his book."

"The Pacific," however, is three intertwined stories pulled from three sources. There's Eugene Sledge's "With the Old Breed," which is "considered perhaps as great a combat memoir as has ever been produced. It is very personal, and it is very much written with his voice and with his perspective on life," Hanks said.

There's Robert Leckie's combat memoir, "Helmet on My Pillow," which is "really more like a prose poem about what it means to be young and alive and involved in a quite hideous adventure. And the story of John Basilone "is more or less taken from public record."

The miniseries follows the three Marines — Leckie (James Badge Dale), Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and Basilone (Seda) — from their homes to their first battle in Guadalcanal. To Cape Gloucester, Peleliu and Iwo Jima. To Okinawa and back home.

It's filled with shattering battle scenes, horrific violence and terror — a drama about regular guys thrust into an unbelievably tough situation.

(It's rated TV-MA — the TV equivalent of and R — for violence, strong language, nudity and sexual content.)