“I wept”: why Tom Hanks found one of his greatest moments “too horrible to watch”
Affable everyman Tom Hanks has been a beacon of positivity and wholesomeness throughout his entire career, with nobody in the industry having a bad word to say about an A-list superstar who doubles as one of the greatest talents of their generation.
Whether or not Hanks secretly harbours a dark side that he keeps hidden behind closed doors remains entirely up for debate, but he’s been in plenty of movies that don’t shy away from the uglier side of life. Many of them are classics, even if he’s been left horrified when the results are splashed up there on-screen.
The two-time Academy Award winner has delivered countless knockout performances, and like many thespians, he’s been critical of his work on occasion, but the scene that left him shaken to his very core didn’t focus on him at all. He was there in body and spirit, but he was merely a cog in an awe-inspiring machine that left jaws on the floor and hearts in mouths in cinemas all over the world.
There’s not a shred of hyperbole to be found in calling the D-Day landing sequence in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan one of the most engrossing, immersive, and gut-punching scenes in cinema history, with shrapnel and limbs splaying across the screen in harrowing fashion as the Allied forces mount their invasion of enemy territory.
Spielberg went all out to ensure as much authenticity and accuracy as possible, which could have backfired spectacularly when his cast threatened to mutiny during an intense boot camp designed to prepare them for the horrors of the entirely fictional conflict they were about to be a part of.
Beyond being a regular collaborator and close friend of Spielberg’s, Hanks is also a noted World War II buff, so there isn’t much about the six years that changed the course of history he wasn’t eminently familiar with. And yet, even though he was intensely knowledgeable about D-Day and he’d been right there on set when Saving Private Ryan shot it, he could hardly bear to watch.
“When I first saw the completed sequence, I wept,” he told Vanity Fair. “The landing, from the boats to the top of the bluff, it was just too horrible to watch without becoming undone.” It was an assessment widely shared by audiences, but it’s something else to hear the top-billed star of the movie say the exact same thing.
Beyond the emotional impact it had on Hanks, the Omaha Beach sequence was a mammoth undertaking for the production itself. Spielberg knew that the entirety of Saving Private Ryan would live or die on the strength of its introductory set piece, and the filmmaker pulled out all of the stops at great expense to create the most tactile and ear-shattering depiction of warfare ever committed to celluloid.
Almost 20% of the entire production budget was siphoned towards filming the scene, which unfolded over the course of nearly a month. There were 400 crew members, over a thousand volunteers and extras, thousands of mannequins, explosions, gunfire, prosthetics, and all the bells and whistles that come with plunging the viewer into the thick of the action, seizing them by the throat, and refusing to let go.
From the second the soldiers put their feet on land, all hell breaks loose. Hanks was far from the only person to come undone at what followed, with Saving Private Ryan beginning with one of the most mesmerizingly evocative opening salvos in cinema history. Cinema is supposed to entertain at the end of the day, but the overall reaction by the time the dust settled on Omaha Beach was that of relief because it was finally safe to exhale again.
Hanks was right there when it was filmed, but he was far from being the most important aspect of Saving Private Ryan‘s D-Day. If it had that kind of effect on him, then spare a thought for the poor patrons who had no idea what was coming, with the scene having been seared deep into the cinematic consciousness for three decades as an unforgettable introduction to the horrors of war.
