The one movie scene Tom Hanks hated watching: “The blood drained out of my body”
It stands to reason that the hardest-to-watch scenes in cinema history are much easier to stomach for the people who were there and watched them unfold on set in real-time, although Tom Hanks would have something to say about that after being left shaken to his core.
Actors are used to the blood, guts, tears, trauma, death, despair, madness, and mayhem that movies use to generate an audience’s visceral and emotional reaction because it’s all part of the job. Sure, they might have to plumb certain emotional deaths or put themselves in a specific mindset to aid their performance, but at the end of the day, they tend to have more distance from the finished article than the average punter.
However, that wasn’t the case for Hanks, who found himself lumped squarely into the same camp as everyone else when Steven Spielberg decided the one thing Saving Private Ryan was lacking was a death scene powerful and agonising enough to throw a blanket of silence over even the most packed of auditoriums.
The legendary director had already planned to plunge his captive audience into the thick of the action by kicking off the classic World War II story with an unforgettable depiction of the D-Day landings, but as principal photography progressed and his overarching vision for his future Academy Award-winning epic took shape, he started to feel like something was missing from the third act.
Settling on Adam Goldberg’s Stanley Mellish as his victim of choice, Spielberg concocted the actor’s death scene on the day of filming. It’s one of the most haunting moments in Saving Private Ryan, especially when Jeremy Davies’ Timothy Upham is lurking just outside the door as a German soldier slowly plunges his blade into Mellish’s chest and the life slowly evaporates from his eyes, but he’s too much of a cowardly piece of shit to do anything about it.
“I made that up on the spot,” Spielberg admitted to The New York Times with a sense of ghoulish pride. “Believe it or not, I chose the Jewish soldier because all the other squad members were accounted for, and I’d already shot their whereabouts.” Hanks hung around to watch it happen, and he instantly regretted it.
“The blood drained out of my body,” he recalled of Mellish’s spur-of-the-moment final stand. “I could not believe what he had done.” Spielberg had started the day’s work blissfully unaware that he would craft one of the most emotionally affecting deaths in his entire filmography. Hanks was in the exact same boat, but after he’d hung around beside the monitor to watch his friend and regular collaborator at work, he was left wishing he’d never bothered after it chilled him right down to the deepest recesses of his bones.
