By Koraljka Suton
Born in 1946 in Ohio to a Jewish family, Steven Spielberg has grown to become what film scholar Lester Friedman describes as a “ubiquitous force and iconic presence in contemporary American popular culture.” Seeing as how his father was a veteran, the topics of war and the Holocaust were prevalent ones in the director’s childhood home, leading to a young Spielberg making short films inspired by World War II. And despite the fact that he evolved into a filmmaker whose oeuvre ranges from science fiction to adventure films, WWII has remained a preferred backdrop to many of his movies. He directed WWII combat films such as 1941 (1979), Empire of the Sun (1987) and Always (1989). He won his first Academy Award for the critically acclaimed Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993). And he produced Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006).
But there was one film that unexpectedly broke new ground, took the box office by storm and became an important reference point not just for HBO’s acclaimed TV series Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010) that Spielberg went on to produce, but also for war movies in general. Pictures such as Black Hawk Down, Dunkirk, 1917 and Hacksaw Ridge were all heavily influenced by this one film, be it by its cinematography, its grisliness or the plot devices used. I am talking, of course, about the second-highest-grossing film of 1998 that brought Spielberg his second Oscar for Best Director and that won four other Academy Awards out of a total of eleven nominations (but was snubbed for Best Picture by Shakespeare in Love). I’m talking, of course, about Saving Private Ryan.
In the year 1995, producer Mark Gordon had a meeting with Robert Rodat, a screenwriter whose scripts for the films Tell Tale (1995) and Fly Away Home (1996) he was a fan of. The purpose of their encounter—an exchange of ideas regarding potential film projects. In just a couple of weeks’ time, Rodat concocted the story of Saving Private Ryan. The inspiration came from a non-fiction book his wife had gifted him: Stephen E. Ambrose’s D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. Having read it, the screenwriter decided to visit a memorial monument in Keene, New Hampshire where the names of those who had died in combat were listed. What struck him the most was the fact that some of the deceased were brothers—he deemed the notion of losing more than one child “inconceivable.” So, he decided to turn one such inconceivable horror into Saving Private Ryan’s lifeblood. Rodat based his fictional Ryan family on the Nilands, four real-life brothers mentioned in Ambrose’s book, all of whom fought in the Second World War. While one of the brothers, a pilot, went MIA and was presumed dead, the other three took part in Operation Overlord, but were assigned to different divisions. This decision was made so that a potential tragedy could be averted seeing as how two years prior, five siblings that were serving on a US Navy ship all died when that ship sank. Sadly, two of the Niland brothers perished on the first and second days of Operation Overlord. Following their untimely deaths, the third brother was sent back to the United States, as a result of the Sole Survivor Policy. And in 1945, the brother who was presumed dead turned out to have become a prisoner of war. He was found alive and sent home.
In Saving Private Ryan, we follow Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) who, after having survived D-Day, gets tasked with a new deadly mission. Three brothers have all died in combat, so the fourth one, James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), is to be found and sent home. It is Miller’s job to assemble a team and do just that. “It’s like finding a needle in a stack of needles,” Miller proclaims. And the Captain is right. The men he chooses for the mission are his second-in-command Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore), religious sniper Daniel Jackson (Barry Pepper), combat medic Irwin Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), rebellious soldier Richard Reiben (Edward Burns), the embattled, but ultimately compassionate Adrian Caparzo (Vin Diesel), Jewish soldier Stanley “Fish” Mellish (Adam Goldberg) and staff assistant Timothy Upham (Jeremy Davies) who has zero experience in combat, but joins them as a German and French interpreter. Different as they all may be, they agree on one thing: the mission is FUBAR—fucked up beyond all recognition. Eight men, all of whom are someone’s children, risking their lives to save a ‘brother’ they have never even met so that he could be reunited with his mother. The question on everyone’s mind (besides ‘how is this fair?’): Is he really worth it? Better yet: is he really worthy of it?
After Rodat’s draft was approved by the executives over at Paramount Pictures, the screenwriter started working on the script and delivered it in 12 months’ time. The first person to be picked as director was Michael Bay, but he ultimately abandoned ship because he didn’t know how to tackle the material. Tom Hanks was given the script by a junior agent at the agency representing him, and the actor not only jumped on board with much zest, but also showed the screenplay to Spielberg. Seeing as how the actor and the director had been eager to work together on a project for quite some time, Spielberg was all in. What followed was Rodat’s Academy-Award-winning script undergoing 11 drafts of revisions.
Spielberg was the one who hired Scott Frank and Frank Darabont to do the rewrites (that went uncredited) because although the initial screenplay was very close to what the director had had in mind, there were still a few problem areas that needed tweaking. So, what did Spielberg have in mind, then? At first, he wanted to do an adventure film in the style of Boy’s Own Magazine, where the focus would be on the war department and its public relations efforts, but he ultimately decided against it after having interviewed WWII veterans as part of his research. In Spielberg’s own words: “I cannot tell you how many veterans came up to me while we were researching this film and said: ‘Please be honest about it. Please don’t make another Hollywood movie about WWII. Please tell our stories …’”
And that is exactly what Spielberg set out to do, crediting Ambrose as a historical consultant. The author later claimed the credit only meant that the contents of several of his non-fiction books were made into a film, seeing as how he neither contributed to the screenplay, nor visited the set. But he was more than happy with the end result, calling Saving Private Ryan “the first mature film on the subject matter” because other WWII movies offered a sanitized and glorified version of the landings in Normandy. But not Spielberg. What Spielberg did in the first twenty-five minutes of Saving Private Ryan was something that changed war movies forever, because it had never been done before. What Spielberg did in the first twenty-five minutes of Saving Private Ryan was show, in painstaking detail, the carnage and the horror that took place on June 6th 1944 during the D-Day landings of US foot soldiers. The shocking scenes that Marcus Power and Andrew Crampton describe as an “avalanche or gruesome mayhem, disorientation and death” in the book Cinema and Popular Geo-Politics, were shot in shaky camera so as to mimic actual WWII footage, and blood had been splattered on the lens in order for the viewers to feel the fear of the cameraman caught in the crossfire, thereby breaking new ground in terms of the representation of violence in WWII movies.
This makes it seem as if the film were a documentary being filmed at the battle scene, with Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński as combat cameramen. When describing his own experience directing that sequence, Spielberg claims to have indeed played one such role, rather than that of a director, with the purpose of finding out what the experience must have been like for the actual soldiers. As he told film critic Roger Ebert in 1998: “It’s easy to point out a couple of shots that are obviously very graphic, but it’s the accumulation of the sequence on Omaha Beach that’s supposed to help the audience understand the physical experience of combat. I didn’t want to do something I’ve done with many of my other movies—allowing the audience to be spectators. Here I wanted to bring the audience onto the stage with me and demand them to be participants with those kids who had never seen combat before in real life, and get to the top of Omaha Beach together.”
That is a goal he most definitely achieved. The uncensored, unglamorized, visceral visual-auditory depiction of the horrors of warfare is unlike anything audiences had seen thus far—absolutely gut-wrenching and shock-inducing, leaving us paralyzed, gasping for air and wishing for it to stop. Only it doesn’t. And no wonder the result was so realistic, since Spielberg went to great lengths to make it so. $12 million out of Private Ryan’s $70 million budget were spent on that sequence, shot over the course of 25 days (out of a total of 61 days). Sound designer Gary Rydstrom put more of an emphasis on the sounds of bullets whirring by as opposed to gunfire, because that was what veterans claimed to remember the most. The sequence was shot in Ireland and not in Normandy, seeing as how the French beaches no longer look the way they did back then. 1000 Irish extras were used. 30 amputees and paraplegics were hired to portray soldiers who had lost limbs. 400 crew members worked on the technical aspects of the sequence. Forty barrels of fake blood were utilized. Two real Higgins Boats from WWII were used in the scene. Tom Hanks recalls: “I was in the back of the landing craft, and that ramp went down and I saw the first 1-2-3-4 rows of guys just getting blown to bits. In my head, of course, I knew it was special effects, but I still wasn’t prepared for how tactile it was. The air literally went pink and the noise was deafening and there’s bits and pieces of stuff falling on top of you and it was horrifying.”
On Spielberg’s behest, the cast members themselves went through a strenuous six-day army boot camp led by retired Marine Capt. Dale Dye. Once there, they had to endure name-calling and exhausting physical tasks. The director not only wanted the actors to learn how to hold, clean and fire a weapon, but also “wanted them to respect what it was like to be a soldier.” And yet, one actor was missing out on all the hard work. Spielberg purposefully didn’t ask Matt Damon to take part in the boot camp because he wanted the other actors to feel resentful towards him, the same way their characters felt towards Ryan. And that is exactly what happened to Damon. In Saving Private Ryan, the protagonists aren’t rescuing Ryan and thinking it’s heroic. No, they are merely fulfilling their duty, despite thinking of it as idiotic. There is nothing sentimental about the way they accept and go about their mission. They are doing it ‘in spite of’, not ‘because of’. But they are doing it anyway, consequences and all.
The unrelenting realism that permeates Spielberg’s fictional story taking place during WWII, whether it’s realism in terms of the depiction of warfare or the portrayal of the mental and emotional toll the mission has on the soldiers, is one of the reasons why Saving Private Ryan is still widely considered one of the greatest war movies ever made. Many veterans have reported that the film’s opening sequence was by far the most realistic depiction of combat they had witnessed. Some couldn’t even watch the film in its entirety because of the scene triggering their PTSD, which resulted in the United States Department of Veterans Affairs creating a toll-free hotline for veterans and their families who were disturbed by the film. Apart from winning numerous awards and garnering even more nominations, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 2014. Spielberg himself was surprised the movie succeeded the way it did, thinking that nobody would want to see it after word got out about the film’s first twenty-five minutes. Little did he know back then that those twenty-five minutes alone would go on to single-handedly redefine the war movie genre and pave the way for many movies and TV series that were to come.
Koraljka Suton is a member of the Croatian Society of Film Critics and has a master’s degree in German and English. For her thesis, she did a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’ and ‘The Pacific’. Koraljka trained at a Zagreb-based acting studio for six years and fell in love with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg’s acting techniques. She is also a contemporary dancer and a Reiki master who believes in the transformative quality of art. Read more »
“This was the first sentence that told me everything. Giovanni’s character says ‘hey, think about the poor bastard’s mother.’ And Reiben says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a mother.’ And that’s the heart and soul of the movie.”—Robert Rodat for The Writers Panel podcast
Screenwriter must-read: Robert Rodat’s screenplay for Saving Private Ryan [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
FIVE-STAR GENERAL
Interview conducted by Stephen Pizzello, taken from American Cinematographer, August 1998.
~ ~ ~
Over the past half-century, World War II has been one of cinema’s favorite subjects, spawning a genre that rivals the Western in sheer breadth. Countless films have been made about the granddaddy of all global conflicts, a roll call that runs the gamut of patriotic, action-oriented epics (Sands of Iwo Jima, Twelve O’clock High, The Great Escape), searing documentaries (The Sorrow and the Pity, Shoah), biographical portraits of larger-than-life heroes (Patton, MacArthur) and villains (Hitler), romantic dramas (From Here to Eternity, Casablanca), spy thrillers (Saboteur, Eye of the Needle) revisionist satires (Catch-22), comedies (Mister Roberts), and even musicals (South Pacific).
Given the staggering number of pictures set during the “Good War,” it would seem that a fresh perspective on this monumental event would require the attention of a truly gifted auteur with a unique sensibility. Enter Steven Spielberg, who was recently named the “most influential director of the 20th Century” by Time magazine. Spielberg demonstrated an affinity for the era with 1941, the Raiders of the Lost Ark trilogy, and Empire of the Sun before stunning the world’s moviegoers with Schindler’s List, a masterful dramatization of the Holocaust. The filmmaker and studio mogul has returned to his favorite historical period with Saving Private Ryan, an intense, strikingly authentic epic which uses the bloody D-Day invasion as its backdrop.
Hollywood has rendered the pivotal Normandy battle before, most notably in the 1962 all-star CinemaScope spectacular The Longest Day, which earned Oscars for both black-and-white cinematography (by the team of Jean Bourgoin, Walter Wottitz, Henri Persin, and Pierre Levent) and special effects (Robert MacDonald and Jacques Maumont). But few filmmakers have demonstrated Spielberg’s skill with large-scale action and the mechanics of suspense, and the director maintains that his rendering of the Omaha Beach massacre is “as unflinching as Schindler’s List” in its depiction of wartime horrors.
Spielberg recently took time out of his busy schedule to answer AC’s questions about his latest celluloid adventure.
Why are you so drawn to the World War II era as a setting for your films?
I think that World War II is the most significant event of the last one hundred years; the fate of the Baby Boomers and even Generation X was linked to the outcome. Beyond that, I’ve just always been interested in World War II. My earliest films, which I made when I was about fourteen years old, were combat pictures that were set both on the ground and in the air. For years now, I’ve been looking for the right World War II story to shoot, and when Robert Rodat wrote Saving Private Ryan, I found it.
On the surface, World War II is a classic conflict between good and evil, but this picture addresses some philosophical issues which aren’t quite so clear-cut. The soldiers who are sent out to rescue Private Ryan are conflicted and openly critical of their mission.
From a historical perspective, the Second World War seems pretty cut-and-dried, or black-and-white. But inside a war, and inside combat, it’s technically chaotic and personally very contradictory. When we look back from the standpoint of history, we can say, “Oh yeah, World War II clearly set the good and bad apart from one another.” But inside combat, the issue is never that clear. To the soldiers fighting the war, it can be very confusing.
What are some of your favorite war movies? Did those particular films affect your approach to Private Ryan either visually or dramatically?
In terms of features, the World War II pictures that inspired me the most were William Wellman’s Battleground [1949], Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet [1951], and Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes [1962]. I didn’t really draw from those films aesthetically, but they made a big impression on me while I was growing up in Arizona and watching a lot of TV. I haven’t studied World War II films, but I’m very familiar with them because they were a part of my formative years.
In truth, on Private Ryan I tried to take the opposite approach of nearly every one of my favorite World War II movies. Films that were made during the actual war years never really concerned themselves with realism, but more with extolling the virtues of winning and sacrificing ourselves upon the altar of freedom. Those were the themes of many World War II pictures, which also were designed to help sell war bonds. I love those movies, but I think Vietnam pushed people from my generation to tell the truth about war without glorifying it. As a result, I’ve taken a much harder approach to telling this particular story. From a visual perspective, I was much more influenced by various World War II documentaries—Memphis Belle, Why We Fight, John Ford’s Midway movie, and John Huston’s film on the liberation of the Nazi death camps—than I was by any of Hollywood’s representations of the war. I was also very inspired by [photographer] Robert Capa’s documentary work and the eight surviving stills he took during the assault on Omaha Beach.
Your right-hand man, Janusz Kaminski, told me that the two of you like to challenge each other artistically and that your relationship sometimes takes on an air of friendly competition. Do you agree with that assessment?
I don’t see our relationship as being competitive. We are collaborators and friends, and we give each other tremendous emotional support. Because we have so much mutual respect, neither of us wants to let the other down. We’ve developed our relationship over the course of four movies together, and we’re about to do a fifth one, Memoirs of a Geisha. Janusz is the first brother I’ve ever had on a set; I feel closer to him than any other collaborator I’ve had in my career.
How would you compare your visual approach on Private Ryan to what you’ve done together on previous films? Do you consider this picture to be a departure?
The whole movie has a different style than anything I’ve done before. It’s very hard and rough, and in the best sense, I think it’s extraordinarily sloppy. But reality is sloppy—it’s not the perfect dolly shot or crane move. We were attempting to put fear and chaos on film. If the lens got splattered with sand and blood, I didn’t say, “Oh my God, the shot’s ruined; we have to do it over again”—we just used it in the picture. Our camera was affected in the same way that a combat cameraman’s would be when an explosion or bullet hit happened nearby.
About 90 percent of Private Ryan was shot with handheld cameras. How did that strategy influence your role as director? Did it affect the amount of control you had over the images?
I still had a lot of control because I was watching everything on video monitors; I could always do something over again if I didn’t like it. I was also recording the takes so I could pour over the playbacks to see if things were working or not. On Schindler’s List and Amistad, I had video assist, but no playback. Because we had so many physical effects working during the production of Private Ryan, every department needed to watch the playbacks to see if they were doing their jobs. On this film, I departed from my “purist” mode and brought in modern technology.
I understand that you didn’t storyboard any of the movie. That must have made things a bit challenging, given the film’s elaborate battle scenes. How much improvisation were you able to do?
I had a very strong screenplay, and the actors and I were certainly following that as a blueprint. But in terms of my approach to the combat sequences, I was improvising all of them. I just went to war and did things the way I thought a combat cameraman would have. I had a very good advisor for the battle scenes: [retired Marine Corps Captain] Dale Dye. He served three tours of duty under fire in Vietnam, and he was wounded several times. In order to capture the realism of combat, I relied on Dale, as well as several World War II combat veterans who also served as consultants.
One thing that really helped me was that we shot every battle scene in continuity. For example, I started the Omaha Beach sequence in the Higgins boats, worked my way out of the “murder holes,” moved on to the beach obstacles and the “sandy shingle,” and finally proceeded up the Vierville draw.
How did you handle the dangers of the battle sequences, which involved explosions, gunfire squibs, and other hazards?
We had crack safety teams and set safety supervisors, and our pyrotechnical work was supervised by some of the best powder men and women I’ve ever seen in the film business. We were slaves to their long-winded but necessary explanations of where the squibs and explosions were hidden, and we made completely certain that only stuntmen were positioned anywhere near an explosion. We had [approximately 750] members of the Irish Army helping us stage the retaking of Omaha Beach, and we kept them well away from the dangerous areas.
You shot the D-Day scenes at a beach location in Ireland. What kinds of benefits or drawbacks did you experience there?
I was a bit disappointed that the beach we used wasn’t as broad as the real Omaha Beach in France. I tried to use certain wide-angle lenses to extend the length of the flats on the sandy beach before the soldiers reach the shingle. I used wider lenses for geography and tighter lenses for the compression of action.
We were very lucky with the weather, though. D-Day took place in very inclement conditions, and many of the soldiers who fought there were seasick before they even reached the beach. During the four weeks that we were shooting the Omaha Beach sequence, which comprises the first twenty-five minutes of the film, we had very rough seas and bad weather—it was overcast about 90 percent of the time. That was a miracle because we were shooting at a time of year when there’s normally bright weather and the tourists are flocking. We were handed a huge break.
How did you balance the large-scale action with the human drama of the characters? The camera basically stays with the soldiers during the entire picture, but you must have been constantly tempted to set up epic, God’s-eye views of the battlefield.
I did a few of those, but not many. I tried to create a motivation for the God’s-eye shots by having a character holding the high ground to justify the point of view. There were a couple of times when I went up in an unmotivated way in order to show more of the action, but the movie is pretty much shot from the frightened viewpoint of a “dogface” who’s hugging the sand and trying to avoid having his head blown off.
You used a variety of techniques—stripping the protective coatings from your lenses, flashing the film stock, applying the ENR process and desaturating the picture’s colors—to give Private Ryan an air of absolute authenticity. How did those strategies come about?
To present war as “up close and personal” as we possibly could, we really deglamorized the technology we were using. The images we got involved a combination of several elements—film stock, processing, and a deconstruction of the slickness that you usually get with modern lenses. It was Janusz’s idea to strip the lenses, flash the film, and use ENR; it was my decision to desaturate the colors. I came up with that notion while watching the color 16mm Signal Corps footage that George Stevens had done during the invasion of France. I was very taken with the desaturated look of that film; I have a feeling it was shot on Ektachrome stock.
You also used 45- and 90-degree shutters instead of the usual 180-degree configuration.
Not all the time—we varied our approach. We used different shutters to create different realities, and we occasionally did speed changes in conjunction with shutter-degree changes. All of the special techniques we used were intended to make you feel as if you were right in the middle of combat, as opposed to watching it like an armchair civilian.
Why did you choose to shoot Private Ryan in the 1.85:1 format rather than a widescreen format?
To me, widescreen formats like CinemaScope were a Hollywood invention of the 1950s. I find widescreen to be an artificial aspect ratio, whereas 1.85 more closely approximates the way the human eye really sees, in the sense that we see as high to low as we do from side to side. If I had to make a choice, I’d rather see from high to low. I think the most human perspective is [the range] from 1.66:1 to 1.85:1. The slickest format for theaters is 2.35:1. I’ve chosen 1.85:1 for my last four pictures because they were intended to be more lifelike.
Your shooting ratio on this film was approximately 4 to 1, which is quite low. Was that mainly due to the fact that you had a lot of logistically complex setups that could only be done a few times?
Actually, some of the more complicated setups had a higher ratio, but our average for the film was about 4 to 1. I had great actors, an amazing effects crew and terrific stunt performers, so quite often I was able to get things exactly the way I’d envisioned them in the first three or four takes. I rarely walked away from a scene until I got what I wanted, and I’d say that I got what I wanted from those complex setups about 80 percent of the time.
Did you face any particular challenges during the editing?
Mike Kahn [who earned Academy Awards for his work on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Schindler’s List] was just wonderful in the editing room. His rhythms are the best in the world, and he tries to throw the audience off of their expectations. When you expect something to be sort of slow and clear in terms of a scene’s geography, you might instead get lost; at other times, you might feel as if you’re lost when you suddenly realize where you are and how you can get out of the jam. In World War II, the enemy wasn’t working from the same script as the Allies. The two sides had their own screenplays, and they were always improvising. I tried to be as improvisational in my production of a war film as wars are when they’re actually fought. We didn’t want to telegraph anything, and we also wanted viewers to be just as surprised as the combat G.I.s were when the enemy threw something new at them. I think some of that is the product of deft editing.
In addition to the Omaha Beach sequence, Private Ryan features a climactic battle scene in a fictional French village called Ramelle.
That was a very complicated sequence which took weeks and weeks to plan out on paper. We didn’t storyboard it, but we wrote it all out. Dale Dye got involved, and he really screwed my head on straight by reminding me not to let the audience down after giving them such a visceral experience in the Omaha Beach scenes. We had to properly bookend the picture, and this time more emotionally. Dale helped me a great deal by showing me the firepower of the weapons that the Germans were using, or what the effect of an artillery round would look like on the ground—and not by Hollywood standards, which is usually larger than reality. Every time I wanted a large fireball or explosion, Dale would ask me what round was fired to create that effect, and he would invariably say, “Go half that size; they were never that big.” He was a really good person to have around because he was able to scale the reality down to what he was accustomed to in Vietnam—just as the World War II veterans we talked to or had on the set could tell us what they were accustomed to.
Speaking of realism, it’s been widely reported that you put your key actors through a week of bootcamp hell during preproduction. What led to that decision on your part?
Dale Dye and Tom Hanks talked me into it. After I hired him, Dale told me he’d done that on other pictures, including Forrest Gump. To prepare for Gump’s few short scenes in Vietnam, Tom had gone through Dale’s boot camp. In retrospect, I think it was a good thing to do. The actors arrived both willing and able to win a war.
You’re known for working very rapidly during production. Was there any particular advantage to that kind of pace on this show? Did it lend extra intensity to the shoot?
Absolutely. We worked fast but carefully, and we wound up a few days ahead of schedule on this show. A war is fought fast, and I really wanted to keep all of the actors off balance. I didn’t want them to be able to read seventy-five pages of a novel in their trailer before they were called back for the second setup of the morning. I wanted to work fast enough so that they always felt as if they were in combat, they always felt as if they were under fire, they always felt as if they were in jeopardy. In order to keep the actors so involved in the story, I had to keep them on the set, which meant shooting the film even faster than I normally do. War doesn’t give you a break, and I didn’t want the production of Private Ryan to give them one either.
Steven Spielberg discusses the experience of making Saving Private Ryan and why he chose not to make “just another WW2 story.”
Behind the scenes of Saving Private Ryan. A must-watch.
Steven Spielberg gives a great interview, in which he also touches upon the subject of the difficult experience some viewers might have while watching his film. “If you can drive a car, you can see Saving Private Ryan. If you can fight in a war, as our boys did, at 17 years old in WW2, you can see the movie.”
As Saving Private Ryan was released in the UK, Spielberg sat down to have a brilliant chat with Mark Cousins for BBC.
A piece of film history at the palm of your hand: dive into this five-page meeting memo from 1997. [PDF]
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JANUSZ KAMINSKI
Born in the Polish town of Ziębice in 1959, cinematographer Janusz Kamiński has worked with a series of great filmmakers, such as Cameron Crowe, James L. Brooks, Judd Apatow, John Krasinski and Julian Schnabel, but his career has been largely defined by his most significant professional relationship so far: that with Steven Spielberg. Kamiński shot all of Spielberg’s movies since their first collaboration in 1993, and his work on Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan enriched his nightstand with two Academy Awards. It’s no coincidence that these same two movies were included in American Society of Cinematographers’ list of the best-photographed movies of the 20th century.
From working as a gaffer and shooting B-movies for Roger Corman, Kamiński became one of the most distinguished cinematographers of contemporary cinema, and Saving Private Ryan is nothing short of a complete visual masterpiece.
THE LAST GREAT WAR: ‘SAVING PRIVATE RYAN’
“When I read a script and like the story, I respond to it on an emotional level. I have a concept of who the actors are and where the story is taking us, and I then imagine how I can enhance the storytelling through visuals. The story automatically dictates how I’m going to light it. That may sound simple, but it’s not, because it’s my personal interpretation of a script that allows me to create the visuals. That interpretation is based on my own life experiences, aesthetics, education and knowledge, all of which help to shape my understanding of a story.”—Janusz Kamiński for American Cinematographer
The American Cinematographer published a great piece on Saving Private Ryan with lots of behind-the-scenes photos and a great emphasis on Kamiński’s perspective on the film. Well worth your time; it’s articles like these that motivate us to do what we do.
Make room in your schedule for this must-see 70-minute Janusz Kamiński masterclass at New York Film Academy.
If one masterclass isn’t enough, watch this fascinating interview moderated by British film historian Peter Cowie.
Janusz Kamiński talks about the experience of working with Steven Spielberg.
Learn from the best and absorb every word: Janusz Kamiński gives cinematography tips.
EDITOR: MICHAEL KAHN
“Michael Kahn can cut faster on a Moviola than anybody can cut on an Avid.”—George Lucas
The legendary film editor Michael Kahn has worked with Steven Spielberg on all of his films, with the exception of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. An icon of his trade, Kahn was nominated for the Academy Award no less than eight times, winning for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.
Watch this great interview with Kahn conducted for DP/30: The Oral History of Hollywood.
Recreating Omaha Beach: a window into the process of making one of the most memorable sequences in the history of cinema.
Music and sound in Saving Private Ryan: a conversation with John Williams.
Into the Breach is a captivating 25-minute documentary written and directed by Chris Harty.
SOUND DESIGNER: GARY RYDSTROM
The Chicago-born sound designer Gary Roger Rydstrom is one of the most significant masters in this field, with no less than twenty Academy Award nominations. Through the years, he worked on numerous monumental movies, such as Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Titanic, Minority Report, Bridge of Spies, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life… His prolific career established Rydstrom as a top-notch professional, and here he talks about his work on Saving Private Ryan.
SPIELBERG’S ULTIMATUM TO TOM SIZEMORE
Tom Sizemore, who played Sergeant Horvath on Saving Private Ryan, rejected Terence Malick’s offer to join the cast of The Thin Red Line so he could shoot Ryan in England and Ireland. However, as he struggled with addiction throughout his career, he recalled back in 2010 how Steven Spielberg essentially gave him an ultimatum to stay sober during the 58 days of the movie’s production. Basically, Spielberg told him he needed to get tested for drugs on a daily basis, and if he tested positive just once, even on the last day of shooting, “he would fire him on the spot and shoot all 58 days over again with someone else.”
Sizemore managed to keep his impulses in check, both because he wanted to keep his role on Ryan and in an honest effort to try to salvage his marriage. Spielberg’s tough approach paid off with dividends; the weary Sergeant Horvath is one of the more memorable characters in the film.
Here’s a collection of behind-the-scenes and publicity stills from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Photographed by David James @ DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Pictures. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
If you find Cinephilia & Beyond useful and inspiring, please consider making a small donation. Your generosity preserves film knowledge for future generations. To donate, please visit our donation page, or donate directly below:
