Many members of the film team had personal connections to the war. How did that influence the experience, and were you able to incorporate those stories into the film?

They started off with the theme: The cost of the war: the human cost; it cost time; it certainly cost money, political capital, the whole bit. That’s what struck me about the concept from the very beginning—that Beyond all Boundaries would convey the sense of what it took to get through the war. It moved an entire generation from one way of living to another. When I was growing up, everyone who was about 40 years old, and even younger, talked about the war as a peak in their experience. There was before, during, and after the war. They all went through profound changes through those three acts in their experiences. That was only five years or so. They were young, and they went places they’d never gone, did things they’d never done, and saw things they’d never seen. And they did so because the world was at war.

You used some rare footage from the war in the film. What does that that footage depict?

A lot of footage hasn’t been seen before. Because of the sheer volume of it, much was put away, and no one had ever found it. The team also created some computer images of what it would have been like to be in the nose of a B-29 or something as horrible as the firebombing of Tokyo. That attack killed over 100,000 people, whose main sin was that they were residents of Japan. Never mind what they thought of the war, or how much they might have hated it or supported it. Or how much they might have wanted to wake up in the morning and get through the day. The point of Beyond All Boundaries is to find those elements and moments as they exist in actual film or can be created with authenticity to land in the consciousness in a different and, if possible, brand new way.

There are over 250 special effects in the film—and in the theater itself—from snow to rattling seats to a watchtower that emerges on the stage. Is there any one in particular that still gives you chills, even though you’ve probably seen the production, what, a thousand times as of now?

The use of the pure graphics of planet Earth is impressive to me. They found a way to communicate the scope of where all these things happened. The world is a very big place, and yet it was united and made closer by way of the war. There’s also an image that comes out of the war in Europe in the Battle of the Bulge, in which you can barely make out a very, very cold soldier trying to stay warm as the snow falls in a dark wooded forest. And you think that man looks very lonely and miserable. All that was part of the image.