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They, too, shared a sense of "What is my country?" In this film you meet Jim Lewis, who like everyone else in the film is a real historical character. He never leaves the side of Stonewall Jackson because he has an allegiance to his home in the Shenandoah Valley, which he wants to defend. Now at the same time, of course, he understands he has an allegiance to the blacks held under oppression and under bondage. He's very conflicted.

How do you approach telling this story of real life?

One has to acknowledge at the outset that a motion picture is ultimately a work of the imagination. Otherwise, it can't live as entertainment. At the same time, I strongly believe that if you're doing a historical film, you have to do your homework. You have to find out what really happened and what didn't happen.

I have a responsibility to get it right. What I mustn't do as a filmmaker is add to all the folklore, mythology, tall tales, and exaggerations. I also cannot indulge in the perpetuation of caricature or bow to the whims of political correctness. The whole society has been infected by this kind of fear, whether you're in the media or mainline churches, that if you step out of the politically correct way you're supposed to talk about things, it could be a career-ender.

If my work is too influenced by the political pressures of today, I cannot get to where I want to go. I need to get to the 1860s. Even if the costumes and sets are great, we haven't taken one step from our own time. We need to go where those people lived and see how we are like them and how we are different.

My point is this: Let's look at this generation in their context and without judgment, lest we be judged by a future generation. We think we have it all figured out. We think we are smarter and more ethical than any generation before us. That is nonsense. We are figuring it out as we go just like other generations.

Human life is a continuum. There's no walls or dividing points. The Civil War generation is made of our great-grandparents. It's a continuum of life and a family of man over generations, borders, and time. As a filmmaker, ultimately I have to get to that time in their ethical, moral universe, and faith system.

We actually saw a startling parallel between our two generations as we were filming. On September 11, 2001, we were filming the Battle of Antietam, which is the bloodiest single day in American history. We had thousands of Confederates and Yankees all bloodied up and filming the battle. Then, we heard about the second tower. It quickly dawned on everyone it was not an accident.

We stopped filming and gathered the crew around, hundreds of people in the crew, thousands of re-enactors. I needed a bullhorn to be heard because so many people were there. When I reported what happened, you could hear the collective breath being sucked in.

What we talked about in those moments was that whatever we were feeling—shock, dismay, anger, grief, fear—was also felt on that day of battle. We were perhaps fortunate because we were working on a film about another generation of Americans that was sorely and severely tested over a period of years. Like us, they could not know what would happen the next day, and yet they endured. Perhaps those of us working on this film that day could take solace and strength from that.

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47