The “horrifying” movie scene that traumatised Quentin Tarantino: “I was shaken”
Having faced plenty of criticism over the years, whether warranted or not, about the levels of graphic violence in his films, Quentin Tarantino shouldn’t have too many issues watching any movie that features acts of carnage or barbarism, especially with his love of low-rent genre fare.
However, a scene that shocked him to his core wasn’t from a B-tier slasher, an exploitation horror, or one of the countless revenge flicks he grew up watching, but an awards season contender and record-setting box office hit that was directed by one of the best filmmakers in the business.
Not just any filmmaker, either, but one that Tarantino called “perfect,” a “master movie-maker,” and the brains behind the picture he called “possibly the greatest movie ever made.” Most people know that Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is his all-time favourite, but in this case, the two-time Academy Award winner was talking about a ‘movie’ as pure, unbridled cinematic entertainment.
The film in question? Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and the sequence that left the Reservoir Dogs creator with his jaw on the floor? The D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan, and he wasn’t the only one. Tarantino revealed before the 1998 masterpiece had even been shot that Spielberg told him he was going to “create the greatest taking of Omaha Beach ever,” and that’s exactly what he did.
It’s undoubtedly one of the greatest onscreen moments in the Indiana Jones and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial architect’s arsenal, with style meeting substance in a haze of blood, bullets, and authenticity that made audiences feel like they’d been parachuted into the thick of the action themselves. As for Tarantino? He was absolutely staggered.
“Spielberg is doing something unheard of with the opening of this movie,” he told Samuel Blumenfeld. “When you watch the sequence of the landing, it’s no longer possible to look the same way at The Longest Day, or even Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One. I was shaken in a similar manner by Schindler’s List.”
For someone like Tarantino, who’d always dreamed of making his own World War II movie, which emerged a decade later as Inglourious Basterds, Spielberg rewrote the rules. “Saving Private Ryan made me aware of some issues raised by the cinema of war that I was unable to ask on my own,” he continued.
“The idea that 40 men on a boat are exterminated in seconds by a volley of machine gun fire is terrifying,” and Tom Hanks felt the same way on set. “Can you imagine the most atrocious carnage? Obviously, yes. Except throughout that scene, you are persuaded to attend the worst slaughter in history.”
The slow and brutal death of Adam Goldberg’s Mellish at the hands of an enemy soldier, which Spielberg made up on the spot, was another moment that caught Tarantino’s eye. He hates war movies “where they show a soldier killing his opponents without sweating, as if it were insignificant,” which isn’t the approach Saving Private Ryan‘s director adopted, and it only enhanced the agonising tension.
It’s hardly revelatory for Tarantino to describe Saving Private Ryan‘s D-Day opening as one of the most haunting scenes he’s ever seen, because millions of cinemagoers felt the exact same way when it stunned them into submission on the big screen, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate.
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