Josh Hartnett looks back at the making of 'Pearl Harbor' 20 years later

Josh Hartnett looks back at the making of the blockbuster film Pearl Harbor 20 years later.

Video Transcript

- Oy, Anthony, Red, you two are going to stay here and man the 50 caliber. Gooz, you're getting up to the next bunker. You're laid out to cover fire, all right?

KEVIN POLOWY: We are coming up on the 20th anniversary of "Pearl Harbor," the movie, obviously.

JOSH HARTNETT: Yeah.

KEVIN POLOWY: A major pinnacle in blockbuster filmmaking and also in your early career. What's the first most vivid memory that comes to mind when thinking back to making that film?

JOSH HARTNETT: Being a Hawaii, running around where the battle actually took place. Having that level of technical know-how and being able to see everything. This is before everything was done with CGI, right? So there were a lot of practical explosions, a lot of big things happening, a lot of airplanes flying over. And the orchestration of it was so intense. I feel like I was a part of something.

- Let's do it.

JOSH HARTNETT: It was one of those big, old-school epics, and a lot of it was happening practically. And they just don't make things exactly like that anymore. But it was fun. I can't believe it's been 20 years, though.

KEVIN POLOWY: Is that a pressure-filled situation, though, given the budget and the expectations and the hype surrounding that movie for you guys?

JOSH HARTNETT: Yeah, I mean, I'm one of these people that finds a way to make myself feel pressured anyway. I try not to. But any film, I feel like there is some pressure to make it work in different ways. But on that one, in particular, the fact that people were ultimately always going to hear about it because it was such a big budget, so much was riding on it. Financially, that took the pressure off trying to get it out there and get people into the theater, but it put a lot of pressure on the expectations for the actual film.

I didn't want to be considered the worst actor in the world. I was still trying to figure out what I was doing as an actor because I'd only done a few films, and I knew it was going to be worldwide, and I was going to be worldwide. Yeah, the pressure was just to not screw it up.

- I couldn't help what happened any more than you could.