Paris — Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, inspired by their award-winning film Saving Private Ryan, return to the D-Day beaches in June to unveil their latest World War Two epic — a multi-million dollar TV series.

Band of Brothers, a true-life tale tracing the dramatic exploits of a U.S. army unit as it fights its way across Europe, had a $120 million budget and is being billed as one of the most expensive television programs in history.

The series will receive its premiere in an auditorium seating 1,000 people to be built beside Normandy's Utah Beach, the scene of some of the fiercest D-Day fighting.

The screening is set for June 6, the 57th anniversary of the 1944 landings by allied forces on the heavily defended Channel beaches of German-occupied France.

"We decided that an extraordinary story and project like this demanded an extraordinary premiere," Richard Pepler, the executive vice-president at U.S. pay-tv network Home Box Office (HBO) which funded the 10-part extravaganza, said Wednesday.

Filmed in Britain last year over eight intensive months, Band of Brothers features some 500 speaking parts, employed 10,000 extras and was put together by eight directors.

The 1998 picture Saving Private Ryan won Spielberg an Oscar as best director, and left the director and Hanks hungry for more war drama.

They decided on adapting a best-selling book by Stephen Ambrose, which focuses on a small group of soldiers in the U.S. army's 101st Airborne Division.

The story follows the men of Easy Company through training and onto D-Day when they parachute into France behind Nazi German enemy lines. It climaxes with their daring capture in 1945 of Hitler's fortified mountain retreat, the Eagle's Nest.

WALK-ON PART FOR HANKS

Realising that such a huge story could not be told in one feature-length film, Spielberg and Hanks suggested it as a 10-part television serial and quickly got HBO on board.

In a change of role, Spielberg and Hanks executive produce Band of Brothers, while Hanks also directs an episode — not an entirely happy experience by his own admission.

"I'm much happier being on the other side of the camera," he tells series web site, http//members.aol.com/amblin55/BOB.htm.

Hanks's acting in the series is limited to a fleeting walk-on part.

HBO spared no expense when it came to special effects. By the third episode of shooting, more pyrotechnics had been used than in the entire production of Saving Private Ryan, while more than 130 tonnes (300,000lb) of paper was used to create snow for a single forest set — a record, HBO say.

The production managed to save money by shunning stars.

With the exception of Friends favorite David Schwimmer, the cast consists of virtual unknowns, but HBO executives insist that this was an artistic rather than financial decision.

"It is important that people don't just see this as Hollywood. We want to make people understand that had they been born 75 years earlier it would have been them going off to fight," Anne Thomopoulos, who oversaw Band of Brothers for HBO, told a news conference in Paris.