The Oscar-winning director who can’t stand ‘Saving Private Ryan’: “I would have shot Tom Hanks”
Almost every cinemagoer, cinephile, or even casual audience member would agree that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is a stone-cold classic, perhaps even a masterpiece, and one of the greatest war movies of all time. However, every film has its enemies, even one as good as this.
In this case, Spielberg’s five-time Academy Award-winning epic, which became the highest-grossing World War II feature and held the title for almost 20 years until Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk came along, has a pretty high-profile nemesis: a generation-defining filmmaker with three Oscars of their own.
Since the picture has barely aged a day, and remains as immediate and visceral now as it was back in 1998 when the D-Day sequence stunned viewers into submission, Saving Private Ryan has also developed a timeless quality, and it’s hard to imagine there being a period in the near-to-distant future where it isn’t regarded as one of the best of its kind, and perhaps even Spielberg’s magnum opus.
However, not only did it fail to find a fan in one of Hollywood’s most outspoken, incendiary, and cantankerous auteurs, but the criticism came from a place of knowledge and experience. After all, Oliver Stone was an infantry soldier during the Vietnam War, was wounded twice in battle, and earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for valour.
Those experiences shaped Platoon into another one of cinema’s all-time classic war stories, and also gave him the platform to call bullshit whenever he saw something he didn’t like. During a conversation with John Milius for Moviemaker, the Conan the Barbarian director recalled the sword and sorcery favourite’s screenwriter having an adverse response to seeing Spielberg’s boots-on-the-ground film for the first time.
“I liked the beginning of Saving Private Ryan,” Milius said. “I thought it was extremely well done, and I asked Oliver what he thought of it. And, of course, he came through with flying colours and said, ‘I would have shot Tom Hanks.'” Why? Because he thought the actor’s John Miller was terrible at his job.
“For people who haven’t seen the movie, Hanks drags his poor platoon halfway across France looking for one soldier, which is ridiculous in the first place,” Stone explained. “Practically every single member of his platoon is killed. What I’m saying is, once you start losing men, and eventually most of your platoon along the way, any leader’s credibility is going to come under question.”
Based on his military experience, “Men don’t die for officers or sergeants when it makes no sense.” Tying that specifically to Saving Private Ryan, he opined that, in the real world, “They would’ve taken control of the platoon and, if necessary, killed Hanks.” It’s just a movie, but he didn’t stop there. “But the mission in the first place was not real; a product of a screenwriter’s mind,” Stone elaborated. “In other words, this was a wholly hypothetical situation, which allowed for a false heroism.”
On the plus side, he did acknowledge that the Omaha Beach landing “is very powerfully done.” Once that’s out of the way, though, it lost him completely: “After that, it becomes a ridiculous, old, Frank Sinatra kind of World War II movie.” Just when you thought it was impossible for anyone to hate Saving Private Ryan, Oliver Stone rides to the rescue.
