Steven Spielberg justifies the violence in ‘Saving Private Ryan’: “It’s what really happened”
If there is one thing that most audiences will never associate Steven Spielberg with, it’s graphic violence. After all, he is the director who created the modern blockbuster and has spent five decades delivering some of the most beloved action-adventure and family movies cinema audiences have ever seen. Spielberg is so ubiquitous in people’s minds that a term is even used for films that evoke the sense of warm nostalgia mixed with pathos that he became so famous for: “Spielbergian.” Therefore, it may come as a surprise to hear he was criticised in some quarters for the brutal violence in Saving Private Ryan – even though he was adamant there was a reason behind it.
When Spielberg’s World War II epic was released in 1998, it received rapturous reviews and raked in nearly $500 million at the worldwide box office. It later became an Oscar darling, with Spielberg winning ‘Best Director,’ although it controversially lost out on ‘Best Picture’ to Shakespeare in Love. Interestingly, though, the movie blindsided many people when they first saw it because it was so un-Spielbergian in its approach to depicting war – and that was precisely what Spielberg intended.
With Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg wanted to escape the common Hollywood depictions of war as a glamourised call to adventure. He wanted to depict war as the chaotic, gruesome, terrifying experience it would have been for the real soldiers called into battle, and that involved showing the violence in starker, bloodier detail than ever before. “I had never done a serious war film,” Spielberg told Total Film in 2004. “I mean, they’re fighting Nazis in the Indiana Jones films, but it’s for our amusement, a springboard to false adventure.” Saving Private Ryan, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish altogether.
This is why Spielberg set his stall out with the opening Omaha Beach landing, which instantly went down in history as the most visceral battle Hollywood had ever staged. Indeed, it was so realistic and horrifying that some veterans of the war admitted they had to stop watching because it triggered traumatic memories of their experiences. Critics and audiences had never seen anything like it, either, with film historian Steven Jay Rubin noting, “It was a game-changer. It was devastatingly dramatic, visceral, immersive. I didn’t touch my popcorn because it felt sacrilegious to eat while I’m watching it.”
Some audiences went into the movie expecting a typical Spielbergian version of war, though, and were shocked by the level of violence they were met with. From his perspective, though, Spielberg argued he had to make the movie so extreme because he needed to confront viewers with the knowledge that the depictions of war they’d seen previously were phoney. In essence, he had to remind them what real violence is actually like.
“It’s graphic because it’s what really happened,” Spielberg explained. “It’s a very, very honest recreation of the landing on 6 June 1944. I could have made Saving Private Ryan a very safe picture; I could have done all the violence off-camera, and I could have had people dying in slo-mo, like in the movies we go and see every summer. But my intention was to re-sensitise the audience.”
Indeed, Spielberg felt encouraged to make the movie in such a realistic fashion for personal reasons. He revealed that his father, Arnold – a veteran of WWII who fought in Burma – would often tell him, “Nobody ever makes a movie about my war except as an excuse to do action and adventure.” So, his son set out to change that – and it forever altered how filmmakers approach war movies.
