[MUSIC PLAYING]
So I think the first thing is to say
these are not storyboards.
Because storyboards are essentially
graphic representations that you lay out first
that then decide what editing.
This is what we call the episode board, which tells you--
running North, South, North, South, North, South--
what's in that episode once we've done it.
This is essentially the table of contents of the script.
And we bring this out for the people
that have come into the editing room to look--
the scholars, the veterans, and most important,
the warm bodies.
So they can look and say, oh, I fell out here.
Or I didn't understand this.
We've done this for every film since "The Civil War."
And they're color coded to an extent.
This sort of salmon is the two times we have a title.
This is-- if it's yellow, it's Americans in Vietnam
or talking about Vietnam experiences.
The green are in South Vietnam or Vietnam.
The red is North Vietnam once it separated.
And I look.
And I see a wonderful balance.
This inhalation, this exhalation,
this respiration of different modes, different locations.
And that, to me, says that this episode is
doing what it should be doing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Key to creating a kind of Russian novel of a story,
with all these plots and subplots and different levels
of characters, is how you introduce them
and how you introduce the themes.
It's very interesting in Episode 1 that most of the exposition
is sort of general.
It's not specific.
They're people you're going to learn about.
And the audience got that immediately.
That I was being forced ahead to meet somebody
that I'm going to want to know much more about.
So in fact, a good deal of Episode 1
was resisting the temptation to stop
and fully set something up.
What is set up is the geopolitical recipe
for a disaster.
And what the presidents-- mostly Truman and Eisenhower--
have done to either help or turn a blind eye to a developing
quagmire that they could have easily put an end to.
But I realized what we lacked was what our film was going
to be about, which was the intimacy
of the American experience in Vietnam.
Because there were all these moments
when something happened--
what we have in here, in here, in here, in here--
you begin to be invested with a set of Americans who
are-- all these stories are going to be told again,
or some variation of their story again.
Some will be hugely significant characters
in almost every episode.
Some will be important characters all the way through
but not necessarily every episode.
And it was a really effective device
to say to mainly an American audience,
we've got skin in this game, even in this early setting.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So Episode 2 is a pretty interesting episode.
This was our problem child from the very, very beginning
to the very, very end.
It defied our ability to figure out how to make it work.
And then all of a sudden, you know, six months,
seven months before locking, it suddenly came together.
And we figured it out.
The key to it was the level of the introductions of people.
So just to tell you something, this John Musgrave
and his nightlight-- talking about being
out on a reconnaissance thing at night
and having to squelch the radio as people
are trying to check to see if he's awake.
And what he is is not only awake but he
can hear the breathing or the chattering of Viet Cong right
nearby.
It's terrifying to him.
What it does is it's somebody you met first episode.
He's coming back.
And he's talking about the anguish of a soldier.
And it has the ability to put you in at an intimate level.
From the Battle of Ap Bac on to the end, it ran smoothly.
This had no structure whatsoever.
And what we did is we put Musgrave in here.
We put him here.
We brought him back another time.
We introduced a few intimate people,
including the journalists.
And we made Kennedy a character throughout.
His words echo throughout the whole episode.
And so you begin to realize that on that skeletal structure
of getting to know some soldiers,
getting to know the President, getting to know
the journalists, that all the other stuff that
seemed unformed and incoherent suddenly cohered together.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
These early episodes are essentially
doing some table setting.
And then somewhere in Episode 2 we
switch from table setting to introducing our main characters
and our main themes.
I think it's important to understand
that we insist that each episode stand alone
and have its own arc.
But we also need the arc of the entire series.
So if you can imagine an hourglass,
each of these episodes is getting--
I mean, we cover 103 years in this first episode.
We cover three years in this second episode.
And the next episode is going to be a year and a half.
So that by the time we are in Episode 5 and 6,
we are intimately mostly with our characters
on the ground in Vietnam and not worrying
about geopolitical stuff.
We are just in the horrible meat grinder of war
and what it does to human beings.
And so it is a very careful and calibrated introduction.
We meet people when they're in high school.
We know what their parents did in World War II.
We know what happened to them in boot camp--
not everybody, but a few signal people.
And then we move them along.
So we're beginning to fold in the ingredients of this.
And as those ingredients go in, just because you're
showing the geopolitical situation in the White House
or in Hanoi, or in Moscow or Beijing secondarily,
you're beginning to understand what the larger themes are.
So you're intimately involved with
the North Vietnamese soldiers, Viet Cong guerrillas,
and the American soldiers, and the people
at home worrying about them or protesting,
beginning to protest about it.
And you're beginning to get the largest thing.
And what happens is you have a non-didactic meeting
of theme and individual story.
And that's where you want to be.
You don't want some stuff to feel
like lessons and some stuff to feel like, oh,
that's great stuff.
You must be doing the lessons out of obligation.
It's organic.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So the final column is upside down.
And that's when we take out a scene.
And it may be that we replace it with a different scene.
I see that we have Ron Ferrizzi, who we met in Episode 1.
He's a helicopter pilot.
And we do a little bit more on his biography.
It didn't really work in Episode 2.
Nor did the nurse that comes in, Joan Furey--
her growing up.
And so what we did is we merged these biographical sections
into when they later appear.
Where they came from, what their father did,
what neighborhood he came from-- we needed to know about them.
And we try these experiments of whether they might work.
This maybe gets into the book.
Or maybe it's just not there.
And this is the awful, awful triage of what we do.