Bruce McKenna on the set of 'The Pacific' miniseries, going over the script with Ashton Holmes who plays PFC Sidney Phillips. Photo courtesy HBO / Andrew Cooper.

What I'm proud of is the truth of the show—what happens to the souls of men in war.

After Bruce C. McKenna wrote part of the HBO Band of Brothers miniseries, his writing career in Hollywood soared. His "Bastogne" episode won a Writers Guild Award and was a finalist for the Hamanitas Prize. In 2003, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks hired him to research and oversee the writing of a new epic miniseries, The Pacific, which debuts Sunday, March 14, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on HBO.

Band of Brothers may have opened doors in Hollywood, but McKenna already had an impressive resume. He was the first Western journalist to write about Pamyat, the Russian anti-Semitic movement that emerged after the breakup of the Soviet Union. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The National Review, and Arete. An article he wrote for the National Review led him to write a nonfiction book, The Pena Files, about the extraordinary life of Octavio Pena, the private investigator who has assumed multiple guises to investigate a Mafia empire, corruption in the IRS, and other high-profile cases.

With wife Maureen, McKenna also produced off and off-off Broadway plays. On March 9, he talked with HistoryNet in an exclusive interview about his career and especially his work on The Pacific.

HistoryNet: I have this image of your office. There's a hat rack in it, and every day you walk in and put on whatever hat you're going to wear that day—screenwriter, journalist, off-Broadway producer, nonfiction book author. How do you handle the transition from the special demands of one type of creative work to the others you've undertaken?

Bruce C. McKenna: It's all about the story. We all serve a story, whether we're journalists, screenwriters, producers—you have to have a clear idea of what the story is you have to tell.

Historians and screenwriters are storytellers, we just have different ways to go about it. I'm trained as a historian. I was in the Ph. D. program in Russian Intellectual History at Stanford for year. I had to pick the most arcane thing in the academy, but after a year I realized how arcane this was and that it really wasn't what I wanted to do. I dropped out of graduate school and became a freelance writer.

I'm a product of all my failures—hopefully, The Pacific isn't one of them. (Laughs.)

It was great to use my brain that way, but then I have to switch it off and become the storyteller.

HN: Of the 10 episodes of The Pacific, your name appears on seven, four of which you wrote by yourself, including the first two, and three more on which you share credit. What's it like as a writer to begin telling a story, hand it off to other people, then come back and collaborate with still more people to finish it?

BCM: It's challenging but also healthy. The structure of the show came out of my head. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks hired me to develop this story in 2003. I picked the books that would serve as the basis of the miniseries, picked the men in them who would be represented in the miniseries, picked the stories that would be told.

I also hired all the writers, and I insisted on hiring writers more talented than I am. Robert Schenkkan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (The Kentucky Cycle). George Pelecanos is an award-winning novelist and was nominated for an Emmy for his writing on The Wire. I couldn't do it all myself. You have to communicate to them what the story is you want to tell; then, you have to pass it on and trust them.

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