(instrument playing) - That's cool.

(bright music) - One of the big elements in all of our films is the music.

We set out to try and imagine what was the sound of North America.

So there's obviously classical and baroque influences, there are folk and traditional influences, there are religious influences, there's the music that free and enslaved black people were listening to, there's the range of Native American music and voices, and how do we put that all together?

- So I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I worked in Colonial Williamsburg.

I'm really happy that I had the opportunity to walk and experience something that came before that mattered.

I played the fife, I walked in shoes with buckles, I wore knee length pants and stockings.

One song that you'll hear in the film is a song called "Over the Water to Charlie," which came right out of my fife syndrome sheet music.

We only have that song, I realized later.

Because one of the main characters in our film, John Greenwood, had kept his sheet music from the war and it was transcribed from that by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and we got some of the professional musicians to rerecord it for this film.

- [Person] I was so fond of hearing the fife and drum played by the British.

That somehow or another, I got an old split fife and fixed it by puttying up the crack to make it sound.

And then learned to play several tunes.

I believe it was the sole cause of all my travails and disasters.

- I was saying maybe...

I mean we have the arrangement from Dana for the quartet in F. I was thinking maybe with you guys it might nice in D?

Okay?

- Yeah.

- And like how kind of... (instrument playing) (Johnny snapping) - We are extremely fortunate to work with a wonderful music producer, Johnny Gandelsman, who helped us corral and figure out and curate all the different musicians and music that we recorded for this series.

And then Rhiannon Giddens came in and Yo-Yo Ma came in and a wonderful Tuscaroran woman, Jennifer Kreisberg came in.

Dave Sierra wrote some of the most beautiful original music for this series that he's ever done.

Some of it really inspired by Hide and Handel Bach and the classical harps accord music of the time and some of just the dissonant, lonely, scary sounds of war.

And we made a soundtrack that reflects the unique sounds that were thriving in North America in the 18th century.

- This is narration 6.094, take one when you're ready.

- When the time came to choose the first president under the constitution, George Washington was the only choice and won the vote of every single elector.

He was inaugurated in New York City on April 30th, 1789.

- We have a cast of first person voices that bring to life what the country sounded like.

- We read with Joe Keery, Josh Hutcherson, Alden Ehrenreich.

- Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson.

- [Samuel] I need not point out the absurdity of your exertions for liberty while you have slaves in your houses.

- Sir Kenneth Branagh, Damien Lewis, Paul Giamatti.

- Morgan Freeman, Jon Proudstar, Laura Linney.

To hear Maya Hawke read Betsy Ambler's words and to bring life to what we found was incredibly gratifying.

- Thomas Paine is a great voice throughout the film.

Brilliantly read by the unbelievably talented Matthew Rhys, Josh Brolin as George Washington, Jeff Daniels as Thomas Jefferson, Liev Schreiber as Nathaniel Green has made one of the great performances in any film I've worked on.

- [Live] People coming from home with all the tender feelings of domestic life are not sufficiently fortified with natural courage to stand the shocking scenes of war.

- And what they do is they read off camera, these diaries, these letters, these journals, these military dispatches, the newspaper reports, and all of a sudden you realize, they're real people, they experience things the way I do.

- We're just so lucky that all these people offered of themselves, their time and their experience, their expertise, their skill to tell our story, our history.

- They lent their craft, they got really into it, they love bringing history to life in this way, and we're really lucky to have worked with all of them.

(bright music ends)