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The man who made that statement was Warren Langley, a 1965 graduate of the Air Force Academy. Two and a half years ago Langley flew from Chicago and showed up at Mock and Sanders' Santa Monica offices with a couple of fellow alumni. He was sporting long hair and Guatemalan friendship beads and handing out business cards that listed his occupation as "Wizard." (He is a computer/finance/math whiz: Six months later, he became president of the Pacific Stock Exchange.) Langley and his friends didn't discuss politics. They had seen Mock's "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" (which Sanders co-produced), a moving portrait of the woman who designed "the wall" of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. They thought the wife and husband who captured the soul-cleansing essence of Lin's art -- and won an Oscar for it -- could get the POWs' story out and get it right.

Their gamble paid off. "Return With Honor" is a nonfiction film with a sustained purity and potency few fictional Vietnam War films match. Mock has absorbed Lin's talent for cathartic forms that crystallize complex, painful experiences. Mock and Sanders' film, like the wall, has a knife-like lucidity that slices through sentimentality and leaves unadorned emotion in its wake.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

As a rough-hewn vet says of the wall near the end of "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision," "Return With Honor" makes memories spring to life. Yet this movie speaks with equal force to people who are too young to remember the war or those who were vehemently opposed to it. The POWs come off as matter-of-fact, unself-conscious and keenly intelligent patriots. Upholding their oath of duty and their code of conduct, they pushed thoughts of loved ones out of their minds (missing their families made them vulnerable) and stood up to lacerating punishments and heart-piercing deprivations. The movie isn't about their politics. It's about survival and transcendence. In the ecstasy of their release, and the composure, often bordering on serenity, in their interviews, the POWs convey the beauty of integrity.

A cadre of Air Force Academy alumni had already sponsored an oral chronicle of their schoolmates' POW experiences. These 39 bound volumes became Mock and Sanders' initial source material. When I talked to them before the movie's San Francisco premiere, Mock remembered, "You had to wonder, 'Who are these people?' Their voice was so deep and fundamental."

Mock and Sanders translated this collective voice into film. The result has electrified viewers in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. (With Tom Hanks' sponsorship, the movie is now rolling out nationally.)

Enduring protracted physical and psychological torture for up to eight years, these men learned everything about the methods of the enemy -- and themselves. In contemporary interviews, they recount their tests of body and spirit: the North Vietnamese rope treatment that strapped them into contortions and upped their pain to the point that they passed out; the information blackout that prevented them from learning of momentous events. Word of the moon landing leaked out only when they saw it on a postage stamp.

But the POWs also let us in on how they communicated -- through tapping, grunts, spits and sneezes. And they explain the regulations that maintained group discipline and pride. Mock and Sanders show how the oft-derided harshness of military training, including the hazing of underclassmen at the Academy, prepared these reluctant heroes for an agonizing crucible.

From the start, Mock and Sanders' approach meshed with the alumni's desire to make this saga work for a mass audience without adulterating it in any way. Says Sanders: "We knew it was very important to let these men tell their own stories. There would be no narration. And we wanted to make it as a theatrical movie; we didn't want to make it have anything to do with television, whether in length or in tone. We shot in Super 16, which blows up beautifully into 35 mm, and wide-screen and Dolby."

Starting pre-production in April 1997, the team confronted a daunting task of research and organization. They were trying to cover a huge subject in standard feature length and they had promised to complete their work in a year and a half, for the 25th anniversary of the men's return to the States. Mock plunged into the best books she could find on the POW experience, while Sanders hastened to get right into the filming of the interviews.

Out of roughly 500 survivors, they filmed 29 former POWs, basing their selections partly on who could fill in chapters of the story -- tales of escape and leadership, or of the temptation of taking early release (which the North Vietnamese offered for the purpose of propaganda). Mock says "two-thirds of them were anecdotally selected, based on research, based on reputation and based on hunch. Every one of them was as candid and articulate and funny and human as you see in the film -- it was interesting for a group to be like that."

Sanders explains that to be a fighter pilot, "You have to be superior mentally, physically, motivationally; you have to be a strong person. And that certainly helped them when they were shot down." But as Air Force ace Robbie Rissner testifies in the movie, for all their skill and training as a group, no individual could predict how he'd deal with terror and intimidation.

Mock and Sanders photographed the interviews elegantly and simply: "Against a black backdrop," says Sanders, in order "to equalize everybody, so you wouldn't be thinking of who lived in a nice house or what books he was reading or what pictures were on the wall." In addition, they used "high-frequency fluorescent lights that flicker so fast that they don't seem to flicker at all; they gave out no heat whatsoever and produce a very soft light." Without any explicit visual underlining, the men seem to radiate humanity.

More important, Sanders continued, he and Mock eschewed pre-interviews in hopes of capturing "the spontaneous reaction. If someone has told you something once, it's lost its edge. A lot of times people don't know what they're going to tell you; things come out that they haven't thought about for 20 or 30 years, or maybe never thought about. And it comes out fresh. Out of an hour and a half of filming you're hoping to get five or six powerful moments. On this film, in some cases, we got 15 or 20."

They guided the pilots into critical areas, but they set up their sessions (in Mock's words) less like journalism and more "like therapy. It was like, 'Take us through the experience of being young and idealistic as students and ending up in the Hanoi prisons, then tell us how you got through that.' We grew to understand what their frame of mind was, what they believed and what they thought was going to happen."

"Starting with how they got into flying," says Sanders. "And that was totally disarming -- all of them relaxed and started smiling, because flying was a joyous thing. They all were teenage boys who wanted to fly."

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