“Turds, you will carry that shame with you”: the heart-to-heart that saved ‘Saving Private Ryan’
By the time Saving Private Ryan had even reached its first day of shooting, the cast already felt like they’d been through the wars, at least as much as an actor can.
Obviously, a bunch of thespians being put through their paces for a few weeks at boot camp had nothing on what World War II soldiers went through before they’d even been deployed on the battlefield, but it was arduous enough that almost the entire ensemble agreed to stage a mutiny.
The film’s military advisor, Dale Dye, had broken them down so badly that they were ready to quit, and Tom Sizemore had a particular issue with Dye refusing to address them by name, opting instead to refer to them as numerical turds. Once they’d reached breaking point, they almost unanimously decided to quit.
Almost unanimously, because Tom Hanks, who’d been designated as ‘Turd Number One’, talked his co-stars down from the ledge, convincing them to stay the course, and ensuring that Steven Spielberg wouldn’t be forced into making wholesale casting changes because his actors couldn’t hack the training.
Meanwhile, Matt Damon was doing virtually fuck all, and that deliberate sense of resentment that the director wanted to create seeped perfectly onscreen. Once Hanks had sweet-talked the rest of the gang into persevering, a late-night campfire chat with Dye saw him dig into the psychological aspects of being a wartime soldier that they needed to represent onscreen.
“You establish a bond that might be closer than your relationship with your wife back home,” Giovanni Ribisi remembered. “You go through two years of training with this guy, you’re telling him secrets, he’s your confidant. And the day comes, it’s showtime, you step out of the bush, and he gets shot.”
Or, as Dye put it, “He drops like a wet sandbag. You go to him. He makes one gasp, pukes a little bit, and dies. He’s your best friend. What do you feel?” The actors made their own suggestions on the emotions they’d be feeling in that moment, which their taskmaster summarily dismissed as, “Bullshit, bullshit, and bullshit.”
“You feel joy,” he told them. “You feel joy that that guy got it and you didn’t. And shortly thereafter, shame. And, turds, you will carry that shame with you for the rest of your life.” That was the exact moment everything clicked into place for the Saving Private Ryan cast, with Dye’s chilling words informing how they’d approach their characters.
Not long before, they were all willing to down tools and walk away from the movie entirely, but a heart-to-heart about the harsh realities of not just fighting in a war, but the shame of surviving one, changed everything.
