‘Saving Private Ryan’ is a “horrific” movie Christopher Nolan can barely watch
Having never made a horror movie, it’s hard to gauge whether or not Christopher Nolan is a squeamish chap, although it can be inferred that the spooky side of cinema may not be his favourite.
While he’s admitted that he does hold a long-standing interest in directing one of his own, it seems unlikely that he’ll ever get around to shooting things going bump in the night when he tends to operate on a much bigger and more expensive scale than the average chiller.
Since he feels a responsibility to keep making massively budgeted films, he’s either not going to tackle horror, or he’ll make one that costs over $100 million, which doesn’t seem like a great idea when virtually all of the genre’s finest examples were made by thrifty folks who relied on innovation and ingenuity.
The thought of Nolan watching movies in his spare time might conjure images of him wearing his standard attire of a crisp suit and being perched in a gigantic leather armchair while sipping on a glass of brandy in his stately mansion, but that may not be the case, mostly because he loves the Fast & Furious franchise and Talladega Nights.
Even an expansive account of his favourite flicks reveals horror to be thinner on the ground than most other mediums, and while he did describe one picture as so “horrific” that it becomes difficult to sit through, it’s not a scary one. Not in the conventional sense, anyway, but in its own way, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is nightmarish.
“The film has lost none of its power,” he told Variety after Spielberg had handed him a rare print of his World War II epic when he was preparing to make Dunkirk, so that it was fresh in his memory and would allow him to guarantee that his feature would differentiate itself from that of another top-level auteur at the top of their game.
“It’s a truly horrific opening, and there are later sequences that are horrible to sit through,” Nolan continued. “We didn’t want to compete with that because it is such an achievement. I realised I was looking for a different type of version.”
The D-Day landing is the scene that comes up the most when talking about the horrors of war depicted in Saving Private Ryan, but everything from Vin Diesel bleeding out on the ground and calling out for help while his squad is under fire and unable to help to Adam Goldberg’s slow, agonising death at the end of a bayonet are equally powerful.
That wasn’t the kind of war film that Nolan wanted to make, but to make sure that he didn’t, he had to grit his teeth and power through another screening of Spielberg’s classic, regardless of how uncomfortable it made him feel and how difficult it was to watch.
