The ‘Saving Private Ryan’ scene Tom Hanks cut from the script: “It would just cheapen the character”
Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have become a pair of Hollywood’s most prolific collaborators, and that friendship allowed the actor to do something that not a lot of people would have the stones to do when working with one of Hollywood’s most successful directors: refuse to shoot a scene.
It helped that they’d already been friendly for years when they first partnered up in a meaningful capacity for Saving Private Ryan, with their association dating back over a decade when Spielberg served as an executive producer on Hanks’ vehicles The Money Pit and Joe Versus the Volcano.
It also helped that the Academy Award-winning filmmaker was at his most improvisational. The classic World War II film was an expensive production that required thousands of moving parts, but Spielberg wasn’t beholden to such trivialities as a shot list, a nailed-down screenplay, and actors who were unwilling to speak up about their characters.
It wasn’t their only disagreement, either. Spielberg was wary of how audiences would react to seeing the wholesome and beloved Hanks gunning down enemy soldiers with an assault rifle and tried to convince him not to pull the trigger onscreen, only for the two-time Oscar winner to shut him down.
Hanks continued standing his ground when he was preparing to deliver the one thing that every prestige picture feels obligated to have: a grandstanding monologue. The closest John Miller gets is when he finally reveals information about his personal life to his squad, but the script contained another, lengthier exchange that sounds like it had ‘Oscar bait’ written all over it.
With the crew assembled and the cameras ready to roll, Hanks had it removed. “It was a monologue any actor would kill to have, because my character finally got to drop this whole mantle,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “But I didn’t want to drop the mantle.”
“If you have that moment where, OK, now we’re going to let our hair down, it would just cheapen the character and compromise the integrity of who he is throughout the entire movie,” Hanks explained. Miller was a man of principle, and as it turns out, so was the guy who played him, although everybody knew that already based on his reputation as Hollywood’s nicest fella.
Hanks was wary of sacrificing his character’s guardedness, virtue, and morality if he suddenly did a complete 180, dropped the persona he’d been building for the entire movie, and then launched into a freewheeling monologue that, from his perspective, added absolutely nothing to Saving Private Ryan.
It takes a bold actor to decide on the spot that they’re not only going to refuse to shoot a scene in a Spielberg flick but have it completely excised from the shooting script, but Hanks was fortunate enough to be in the position where his director was ready, willing, and able to take suggestions.
