Edward Burns on why ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was “the worst experience of my life”
A lot of great art requires sacrifice to emerge on the other side as the best possible version of itself, with Steven Spielberg leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of the immediacy and authenticity that would become a hallmark of Saving Private Ryan.
The D-Day landing scene is one of the most hauntingly spectacular sequences in cinema history, and the filmmaker’s insistence to shoot the story in chronological order was reflected and justified on-screen by the ensemble cast looking increasingly weary and dishevelled as the narrative progressed.
To convincingly portray a battle-hardened military unit tasked with ensuring their own survival and carrying out a mission to prevent Matt Damon’s character from becoming the final member of his family to be killed in action, Spielberg sent his stars to a boot camp for rigorous training. This intense preparation came very close to resulting in outright mutiny.
The director drafted in the military advisor and former Marine Dale Dye to teach his performers how to look, move, behave, and carry themselves as soldiers, which pushed them to the physical and psychological brink. Dye put them through the very same paces infantry soldiers would have been put through during World War II, and it was a nightmarish few days for everyone involved.
The instructor wouldn’t refer to his charges by either their real names or the names of their characters either, instead designating them as numerical turds. For instance, Tom Hanks was rebranded as ‘Turd Number One’, and so it would go in descending order down the call sheet.
Star Adam Goldberg admitted to Yahoo that “we were forced to be method whether we wanted to or not,” and the only way he found himself able to persevere “was to shut myself down and become this soldier”. He was hardly alone in that regard, though, and after three days, a majority vote had decided the Saving Private Ryan cast were going to quit their intense boot camp training.
Hanks had to make a last-ditch phone call to Spielberg informing him of the developments, with Dye stepping in to defuse the situation and justify his tough love approach by explaining to the cast how they “owe it to these people you’re representing on film to get this right, and in order to get it right, you’ve got to experience what they experienced.”
They didn’t walk away in the end, but Edward Burns was happy to refer to the rigorous regimen as “the worst experience of my life”. The miserable nature of their preparations was reflected throughout every frame of Saving Private Ryan, and it’s difficult to say it wasn’t worth it in the end when the film became the highest-grossing World War II movie ever made at the time, scooped the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’, and endures among many cast members – Burns included – as arguably the best thing they’ve ever been in.
