The one thing Tom Hanks loved about ‘Saving Private Ryan’ that everyone else hated: “It was very humiliating”
It probably takes a lot to make Tom Hanks angry, an assessment that’s admittedly based almost entirely on his persona as modern cinema’s ultimate everyman.
The two-time Academy Award winner may have tried to suggest that he’s not always as affable as his reputation suggests, but there’s hardly a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Audiences love Hanks, and so do the people he’s worked with, and there’s barely anyone in the business who has anything less than the utmost praise for his professionalism, dedication, and commitment.
Obviously, it’s not an earth-shattering proclamation to say that Hanks is every bit as nice as everyone says he is, but it does have its downsides. Most notably, his relentless optimism and never-ending positivity didn’t make things any easier for his Saving Private Ryan co-stars when they were on the verge of mutiny.
Steven Spielberg wanted his ensemble to look, feel, act, and behave like genuine World War II-era soldiers, so he deployed them to boot camp ahead of the shoot. All of the major players were dispatched and put through their paces by military advisor Dale Dye, with the sole exception of Matt Damon, a deliberate move made by the director to foster real-life animosity.
However, he didn’t account for how much his stars would hate it. Being put through their paces pushed the cast to breaking point, so much so that they were ready to quit. Everyone except Hanks was fully prepared to walk away from the exhausting training, forcing him to get even deeper into character by talking everyone else down from a ledge and convincing them to carry on.
“I loved it,” he admitted to Empire. “They all wanted to quit, and I said, ‘No’. The actual boot camp was very cold, and it was very miserable, and it was very humiliating. It was exhausting; we didn’t get much sleep. We were worried sick, and we were worried about getting hurt, but we were never worried about those being the six most worthwhile days that we could have spent.”
Ed Burns would disagree with boot camp being a worthwhile way to prepare for Saving Private Ryan after the actor called it the worst experience of his career, but Hanks had a whale of a time. “It brought us together as a cast, which was reflected in every moment of the film,” he explained. That’s undeniably true, even if Burns, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi and the rest had to suffer for their art.
His colleagues couldn’t wait for their ordeal to be over after Hanks had managed to avoid a mass walkout, and his enthusiasm was at the opposite end of the scale. “I wish it had gone on a couple of weeks,” he suggested, and if it had, then he probably would have been the only one left on the final day.
