It was a desire to learn what happened to her father and other U.S. servicemen who were prisoners of war of Imperial Japan during World War II that led Jan Thompson on a 20-year quest to develop a film to help people understand their plight from their capture until their release in 1945 from POW camps in Japan, China and Manchuria.

The result of Thompson’s work was “Never the Same — The Prisoner of War Experience,” an 85-minute documentary narrated by Loretta Swit and featuring excerpts from prisoners’ diaries read by actors to give people an intimate profile of what the men went through.

Thompson’s father was a Navy pharmacist’s mate who surrendered on Corregidor but was not part of the infamous Bataan Death March in which more than 70,000 American and Filipino soldiers participated.

“The ship he was on was sunk the night before Bataan fell and all those sailors were ordered to go to Corregidor. Otherwise, he would have been on the March,” she said. “Bataan fell in April, and then Corregidor held on for almost another month and then it fell.”

Her father, she said, did not talk about his experience, and she and her brothers were very curious about learning what happened.

“When I became an adult, he had started to attend POW reunions,” she said. “I came across some family artifacts: his prisoner of war badge, some documentation and telegrams. I told him, ‘I want to go to one of these with you.’ That’s when I was hooked, and I met a lot of men. I just fell in love with them.

“I started interviewing people,” she said. “I knew it was going to be a difficult project right off the bat, because there’s not a lot of visuals; there’s not a lot of archival photographs or film footage, a lot that does exist is Japanese propaganda.”

Originally, her father, who was born on Dec. 7, was going to be the focus of the film, “but when I sat down to interview my dad on camera, he sort of clammed up. He wasn’t really good. He would not, in my view as a producer, have been able to sustain it. He’s in it, but he’s not a main character.”

Her father’s reluctance, Thompson said, led her the talk with other POWs, because one man’s story could not represent the experience of all the prisoners, who each had his own story or experience.

She interviewed 25 former POWs. Only three of that group are still alive.

“The survival rate (in Japanese camps) was almost 1 in 2, where is it was like two percent if you were in a German prisoner of war camp,” she said.

“It was disease, it was starvation, it was beatings, but then they were placed on what were called “hell ships,” which were very similar to how we shipped African slaves; (with prisoners) down in the bowels of the ship, and these ships were not marked,” she said. “So many of them were bombed and sunk with their human cargo. In the case of my father, he had to go on three, because two were sunk under him. Men suffocated and they went nuts because of the heat, because the first ship was in the tropics and the temperature was over 120 degrees.”

He father went first to Japan and then to China, where he and other POWs were liberated on Aug. 16, 1945, by Russian soldiers. The camp, Thompson said, was probably the last one liberated.

Swit said Thompson approached her to narrate the documentary.

“I had been trying to find a female narrator,” Thompson said. “ I envisioned a female narrator from day one because of all the male voices in the film, and had been turned down by many people.”

It was through a mutual friend, Francisco Lovato, whose father was among the soldiers who surrendered on Bataan, who introduced Thompson to Swit.

“Francisco recommended me because he approached me years before this to edit and correct his father’s memoirs,” Swit said. “We became friends, and I became interested in caring (for POWs), having read his father’s book, ‘Survivor.’ When Jan asked him if there was someone he could recommend, he thought of me and got in touch with me.”

Thompson was initially skeptical of getting Swit. After Lovato told her about the actor, “I started watch M*A*S*H, and each time, she’s screaming at Hawkeye Pierce, and I couldn’t hear her voice, and I was really concerned.”

Lovato, she said, assured her Swit “had a good voice. It’s a good low voice, because the narrator’s voice is extremely important in this film to help the audience get through.

“When I saw what it was going to be about with the memoirs and so forth with the pages of diaries being read, I asked Jan who was doing that,” Swit said, adding Thompson intended to use some students in her television production class at the University of Southern Illinois.

“I said no way. I called some of my friends, all of whom said ‘yes, absolutely,’ and as a result, we have a tremendous cast from A to Z, these incredible actor friends of mine and also care deeply and wanted to be a part of it.”

The cast includes Kathleen Turner, whose father, Thompson said, was a civilian in China taken prisoner by the Japanese in World War II.

Swit said she tries to be available for personal appearances where the film is being shown, “mostly because I want the guys to know this was not a one-shot thing, that I love and care about them, and I want everybody to see this documentary and learn about them and care.”

“You should see how they look when she comes in,” Thompson said. “The boys all love her. She cares about them and it really shows.”