Former teen hearthrob Jonathan Brandis hoped to revive his stalled career after being cast in a serious, dramatic role in the film. He was reportedly devastated when almost all of his scenes were removed in the final cut. He fell into a deep depression, began drinking heavily, and killed himself the next year.
Jonathan Brandis played one of the privates but his lines were cut out of the movie. He is still in the movie, but only in a few shots. You can find his scenes on the "deleted scenes' of the DVD.
One of several films that were delayed by several studios due to the tragedy of 9/11 from their original 2001 Fall & Winter release dates. Other films included Danni collaterali (2002), Big trouble - Una valigia piena di guai (2002), Windtalkers (2002), We Were Soldiers - Fino all'ultimo uomo (2002), Showtime (2002), Formula per un delitto (2002), and La regina dei dannati (2002), which was also suffering from tragedy due to the passing of the films' R&B star Aaliyah.
One of the movie's credited writers, Billy Ray, reports that he never read the novel, "Hart's War," which is the basis for the movie. In The Dialogue: An Interview with Screenwriter Billy Ray (2007), he calls this revelation a "painful admission." But, he explains, by the time he came on the project, the screenplay had been through so many drafts that what was in the book itself did not matter much for his job of getting the screenplay to work. Ray says that one of the movie's producers, David Foster "constantly" sent him excerpts from the novel, advising him to include those particular things in the movie. But he implies that he felt no need to include something simply because it came from the novel. He then makes a point of saying he "admires" the novel's author, John Katzenbach and his father, Nicholas Katzenbach, whose time as a World War II prisoner of war was the basis of the novel. Ray explains further that he worked from the existing drafts and from the large amount of World War II research he did for the project, especially relying on the writing of Stephen Ambrose.