It’s a sobering statistic: Every day, we lose 900 veterans of World War II. And with their deaths, we lose their stories, and the connection to a time that revolutionized America. In an effort to preserve those stories, the new 70,000-square-foot wing of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans opened on November 6 with a state-of-the-art 4-D Solomon Victory Theater. Playing on the 120-foot screen is the interactive film Beyond All Boundaries, which was produced by two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks.

Hanks, who has perhaps done more than anyone in Hollywood today to help tell the stories of the war with the film Saving Private Ryan and HBO series Band of Brothers. With Beyond All Boundaries, Hanks and his production team have created not just a film, but an "experience," he says, using narratives from soldiers, journalists, and home-front workers to illustrate the sacrifices made during the five years the world was at war. The 40-minute production actually took longer to create than the war itself, with special effects that take the viewer from the inside of bombers to the cold, snowy depths of the battlefield. Hanks’s goal was to make an impression: to give the viewer a chance to look beyond the familiar black-and-white portrayal of WWII and see that these were real people, living their lives in a period that would change them forever.

Traveler assistant editor Janelle Nanos spoke with Hanks about the making of the film, the museum’s role in revitalizing New Orleans, and how his travels to former battlefields have informed his perspective on the war.

After starring in and producing major Hollywood films about World War II, you spent five years researching and producing the film Beyond All Boundaries for the museum. What new things did you learn about the war in the process?

World War II has entered into a mythic realm as far as everyone understands it. It’s all about flickering images of black and white, long-ago heroes and horrors. The more that it becomes like that, the less connected it becomes to where we are today. You can look at great moments in history and see that history is nothing more than human behavior. And human behavior doesn’t change, the nature of mankind doesn’t change. No matter how much more we learn or how much more enlightened we become, wars still come about. Because somebody thinks “I want more,” someone thinks “the other side isn’t human,” someone thinks that “we’re superior to them,” or someone thinks “we’re entitled to this and we don’t have it.” And out springs the most base aspect of human nature, which is racism, terrorism, atrocity, and entitlement. Now that happened in World War II, and doesn’t it sound familiar? It seems as though you can say the same thing about where we are today, and yes, by the way, we are fighting a war and it is in some ways a global one, and we are facing the same things. The connections from World War II can be illuminated as part of today.