The ‘Saving Private Ryan’ scene nobody was ready for: “You are not prepared”
Even though the cast had been put through their paces to convincingly play soldiers in Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic Saving Private Ryan, none of them were prepared for what was to come when cameras started rolling on the nerve-shredding masterpiece.
It didn’t help that several members of the ensemble hated their military training so much that they were ready to walk away from the movie completely, with Tom Hanks justifying his casting as the leader of the central squad by smoothing over the tensions between the drill instructor and the stars to ensure everybody emerged unscathed on the other side.
In the name of realism, Matt Damon was the only principal member of the ensemble who didn’t partake in the training after Spielberg decided it would do a wonderful job of fostering authentic animosity between the title character and the characters who dropped everything to traipse across France trying to find him, which it did.
Even though they’d all read the script and were fully aware that Saving Private Ryan would open with an eardrum-shattering recreation of the D-Day landings, it didn’t mean any of them – from the key players to the extras – were prepared for what was to come. Spielberg wanted to craft the most immersive and realistic portrayal of wartime combat ever depicted onscreen, and he came closer than just about anyone.
The Omaha Beach sequence occupied almost a month of the shooting schedule, drafting in over a thousand extras and hundreds of crew members. It was an incredible achievement from a purely technical perspective, but for the actors, nothing could have readied them for just how much dirt, dust, blood, bullets, and body parts were waiting for them on set.
“We were on that beach for, I’m gonna say, on the beach itself, for I’m going to say, three weeks,” Hanks told the Reel Blend podcast. “And the other guys, Vin [Diesel] and Eddie [Burns] and Adam [Goldberg], they weren’t shooting yet until we were at the shale. And halfway through the first day, the shot was an amputee actor, in the distance and in slow motion, looking around, picking up his arm, and looking forward.”
Having shocked an experienced actor like Hanks right down to his core, he knew that the D-Day scene would be even harder to handle for his younger and more untested co-stars. “So, I went upstairs. I went up to where we were having lunch,” he continued. “I said, ‘Guys, guys. Hold onto your hats, man. You are not prepared for what’s going on down there on the beach’. It’s insane.”
It was a hell of a way to open the movie, with audiences completely unprepared for the assault on the senses Spielberg unleashed from the opening frame. As it turned out, the actors were in the exact same boat, and their very real distress massively enhanced the action.
