The movie that pushed Steven Spielberg to the brink: “It was a mentally demoralising experience”
Steven Spielberg has been famously troubled by many of his productions, with the director discussing his beyond-challenging experiences on Jaws and Hook, with countless catastrophes stemming from over-spending, feuds between the cast and unreliable model sharks that kept falling apart.
Partly because of this, the filmmaker has earned a reputation as one of the greats, pushing the medium of film by insisting on using new techniques and locations that had never been used before in order to create authentic and immersive stories. But while this has undoubtedly paid off, it has also led to many sleepless nights and strained productions, with Spielberg describing one of the films that pushed him to the edge.
Many filmmakers have attempted to capture the horrors of war, with Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick extending their cinematic gaze towards bloody battles and brutal conflict in movies such as Dunkirk and Full Metal Jacket. However, there is one picture that is revered for its accuracy and non-glorified portrayal of war, helmed by Spielberg in 1998.
The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan immediately tells audiences that this will not be a typical Hollywood film. With a relentless and harrowing scene that follows the characters through clouds of shrapnel and endless bullets, Spielberg manages to articulate the inescapable horrors of this experience through a 25-minute dramatisation of the D-Day invasion.
However, while the director was certainly able to achieve his vision, it came at a great cost for the cast and crew, with Spielberg describing the straining working conditions and never-ending shoot that began to take its toll on him.
When describing this, Spielberg explained, “It was a mentally demoralising experience for us. Because we shot in continuity, from beginning to end. We were all reliving the story together. The last film I shot in continuity was E.T. I did that to help the kids understand where they were coming from and where they were going in the story. So literally yesterday was a page ago, and tomorrow would be a page later.”
The choice to shoot in chronological order is an increasingly rare one, with everyone involved being able to see the intimidating road ahead of them and the many days of work needed to shoot each page. When an average script is between 90-120 pages, this would be a very daunting task when shooting page by page. Given the film’s subject matter, the mood was unsurprisingly dark and ominous, with the weight of what they were shooting hanging over the cast and crew and the responsibility to do justice to the soldiers they were portraying.
Spielberg also had many personal stakes in the project, as he finally realised the stories that he had grown up hearing from his father and his friends, which became a lifelong fascination of the director. Bringing any story into the world is a demanding process, but working with such heavy subject matter and confronting a story that has been weighing on your mind for many years would push anyone to their limit, but perhaps this would always be the case for a story of this calibre.
