(gentle music) - Once it's a shooting war, as with Lexington and Concord, it's a war, there's no doubt about that, but independence was not in any way officially on the table as a goal of the Americans at that point.

The idea of independence was still controversial.

The official position was that the fight was essentially for redress, for let's get back to the way things used to be back when things were good, when you left us alone.

- Making a film about the American Revolution poses instantaneously some pretty obvious challenges.

First of all, there are no photographs or news reels, and so it forces us to recalibrate in every sense of the word how we're going to use imagery to tell a very, very complex story.

So live cinematography becomes hugely important, as it always has been for us.

But in this case, our traditional aversion to reenactments, we actually had to lean into.

- Some of my favorite footage in the film are the very high up drone shots where you're seeing the reenactors, and it's incredible.

You just, you could be a bird in the sky looking at what's happening.

(gunfire popping) We haven't worked a lot with reenactors, and these reenactors were an extraordinary part of our process.

- [Ken] We have worked with dozens and dozens of groups all up and down the East Coast.

- We spent a lot of time with them before we had cameras on to learn from them, and they are fastidious in how they study.

Where they go, how they move, what they're reading.

They get really into it.

- We film them very impressionistically.

That gives us an ability to see the war but not see their faces and be disturbed by kind of modern context, and the reenactors give that kind of intimacy.

- [Sarah] We would find ways to film the big reenactments that they do every year or two, and then work with small groups of them to try to demonstrate what it was like for a soldier in his group of five guys in the middle of a blizzard going up a mountain.

And we did that.

And Megan Ruffe, our extraordinary producer, just toughed it out with Buddy Squires, and I think it's some of the most unusual live cinematography that we've ever filmed.

- There is a kind of mystery and a poetry to the reenactments that helps tell the story and helps fill in for the absence of photographs.

You begin to have a visceral sense of what happened when you see people, just feet going through mud or snow, or hands trying to warm themselves by the fire or gripping a musket.

They help you realize what it's actually like.

(shot booms) - A shot rings out.

No one knows where the shot came from.

(gunfire popping) That leads to promiscuous shooting, mostly by the British.

(gunfire popping) It's not a battle, it's not a skirmish, it's a massacre.

- We shot all over the East Coast and beyond.

Colonial Williamsburg, Saratoga National Battlefield, Yorktown.

These places are preserved to look as much as they could like they did then.

- The film is a celebration of the vast, beautiful landscape of North America.

We were able over the course of six or seven years to film in every part of the 13 colonies in almost every season, imagining fighting a war at the hottest, most awful, humid months in the South, to the coldest, most horrific freezing temperatures in the North.

That all happened.

- One of the great improbable forces in this film is weather.

I walk where I live in New Hampshire out every day, and I suddenly realized where I was walking was little changed from the 18th century world that this is taking place, and so I would start taking movies.

There's snow storms that I filmed in, and it's that wonderful textural quality in the film.

- America is this huge continent.

There's tornadoes, there's hurricanes, there's winter storms.

Turns of weather that we know are coming for weeks on end hit the people of the 18th century completely by surprise.

They're not just fighting each other.

In a profound way, they are fighting the American climate and geography and topography, and this is a difficult place to conduct a war.

- One of the great archives of the time that are accurate archives of the time are the maps.

The French made maps, the Brits made maps, the Germans made maps, we made maps.

- We are using more maps in this film than in all the other films combined.

When we think about what animates a story that we wanna tell, maps take on huge significance.

We have CGI three-dimensional maps.

We've taken these beautiful works of art archival maps to show intimacies in the midst of these grand schemes.

It's been exhilarating, challenging but exhilarating, and I think that one of the constants for me throughout the process was mastering the complexity of the story.

- [Narrator] The American plan called for two small, noisy, diversionary feints to draw defenders away from the attack's real targets.

Meanwhile, Arnold and his men would circle around Quebec City from the north while General Montgomery would approach from the south.

Together, they would storm the citadel's steep walls.

- We want to convey in the most direct and honest way what it was like to experience the birth of our country in violence, not just all those great inspiring ideas.

(gentle music)