How ‘Saving Private Ryan’ killed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s passion project: “I began panicking”
Since that’s the way the business has worked for decades, it was fair to assume that after Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan had become a critical, commercial, and awards season favourite, not to mention an instant classic, the rest of Hollywood would be keen to hop on the bandwagon.
After all, when something works once, every studio assumes that it’ll work in perpetuity. That’s why the 1970s were bombarded by star-studded disaster flicks, the early 2000s were overflowing with big-budget historical epics, and why the 21st-century superhero boom still shows no signs of slowing down.
That’s without including video game adaptations, found footage horror movies, the post-Halloween slasher craze, 3D post-conversions, and any of the other trends, fads, or crazes that can all be traced back to a single picture. And yet, Saving Private Ryan was such a monolithic work of cinema that it had the opposite effect, and killed a pair of World War II stories set to star the biggest stars in the business.
In early 1997, it was revealed that Arnold Schwarzenegger was set to partner with Academy Award-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest director Miloš Forman and Oscar-nominated Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace to make With Wings as Eagles, which would have been a drastic departure for the ‘Austrian Oak’.
For one thing, it sounded more like a prestige picture than the sort of gun-toting actioners that made him a superstar, and he’d also be playing a German for the first time. Not just any German, though, but the head of a prisoner of war camp who defies orders to execute the thousands of people in captivity and aids them in an escape mission instead.
At the same time, Robert Rodat had pitched Paramount the basic outline for what would become Saving Private Ryan. They commissioned a full-length script, and shortly after he’d started working on it, the studio acquired not only Schwarzenegger’s With Wings as Eagles, but another World War II adventure titled Combat, which had Bruce Willis attached to the lead role.
Naturally, Rodat thought that of the three, his was the least likely to be made, since he couldn’t compete with those A-listers on any front. “I began panicking,” he admitted, until Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks entered the fray, brought Tom Hanks on board to play the lead role, and ultimately crafted a five-time Oscar-winning masterpiece, all while the other two films never happened.
Schwarzenegger remained determined, though, and in 2011, he was still talking up the potential of his abandoned wartime epic. “One script, which I considered a long time ago before governor, is delighting me particularly,” he hinted. That script saw him “play an older soldier who gets the order at the beginning of the war to kill a bunch of kids,” so there are no prizes for guessing what it was.
It didn’t happen that time, either, and it’s all thanks to Saving Private Ryan, since Paramount was so blown away by the script/Spielberg/Hanks combination that it shelved all other projects set in and around the same time period, consigning With Wings as Eagles to the history books for good.
