I was coming to the end of shooting on Indiana Jones IV when I was asked to go cover the war in he Pacific, more precisely, go to Port Douglas and Melbourne in Australia for ten months to cover the shooting of The Pacific, a ten episode TV series for HBO, being produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Having worked on Saving Private Ryan and A Band of Brothers I jumped at the chance to go back to covering a war. I must add here that I am not one of those very brave photojournalists who go out and risk all in a real battlefield.  In my sort of war, after six hours an assistant shouts, "Lunch for a half" and all the dead and injured get up and stand in line for (usually) very good food, with a full belly and a smile on their faces they then drop back down on the battlefield and play dead and injured again for the rest of the day. As for the shoot, every situation is made to look totally genuine, we have weapons firing, explosions going off, all rehearsed and well planned with safety for actors and crew a priority. Barked shins, torn clothes and the odd cuts and bruises are the worst it gets for most of us. Once again I did a lot of research into historical war images, a lot of colour was shot in the Pacific coverage, I had to re-create that look, thank you Alien Skin and Photoshop for your help there. Why Melbourne? During the war a lot of the US Marine Core was sent to Melbourne for R&R.  We shot in a lot of the locations where they were billeted. A quarry an hour's drive from the city resembled the war torn landscape typical of the Islands that the Marine Core fought on. Shooting The Pacific by David James Back to current issue