The movie Steven Spielberg called demoralising: “I didn’t realise how devastating that was going to be”
Having always projected an air of nothing but kind-heartedness, very rarely has any Steven Spielberg production been plagued by tales of behind-the-scenes woe. At least since Jaws, anyway.
The filmmaker’s breakthrough feature was nothing short of a nightmare from start to finish, but it emerged on the other side as an instant classic, the highest-grossing release in cinema history, and a trailblazer that helped usher in an industry-wide shift into the blockbuster era.
He might be one of the best to ever do it – and the single most successful in terms of career-long earnings – but Spielberg has never been the type of director to fly off the handle, berate his cast and crew, or create an atmosphere on set that’s anywhere close to being uncomfortable.
However, when he’s also responsible for the harrowing Schindler’s List, the intimately powerful Munich, and the nerve-shredding Saving Private Ryan, to name but three, it’s not as if Spielberg has gone out of his way to ensure that every single one of his post-Jaws productions has been a light and frothy barrel of laughs.
In order to ensure the cast of the latter grew into their characters over the course of the movie, Spielberg opted to shoot Saving Private Ryan chronologically, the first time he’d done so on a film for almost two decades. As he explained to Roger Ebert, though, parachuting his team into the heat of battle from day one had a psychological effect that he couldn’t have prepared for.
“It was a mentally demoralizing experience for us, because we shot in continuity, from beginning to end. We were all reliving the story together. The last film I shot in continuity was E.T,” he said, which was obviously for entirely different reasons. “I did that to help the kids understand where they were coming from and where they were going in the story. So literally yesterday was a page ago and tomorrow would be a page later.”
It goes without saying that there’s a stark difference between an all-ages, family-friendly fantasy and an ear-shatteringly authentic depiction of World War II, which led Spielberg to admit that “I didn’t realise how devastating that was going to be for the whole cast to actually start off with Omaha Beach and survive that as a film team, and then move into the hedgerows, move into the next town, as we all began to get whittled down by the storytelling.”
As one of the greatest war stories ever committed to celluloid that won five Academy Awards, including ‘Best Director’ – not to mention being the subject of one of the ceremony’s most egregious snubs when Shakespeare in Love took home ‘Best Picture’ – Spielberg’s sequential approach to Saving Private Ryan paid huge dividends, even if it had the adverse effect of causing widespread demoralisation.
