“I have found my Normandy!”: the Wexford beach that defined ‘Saving Private Ryan’
Steven Spielberg’s original plan to maintain the realism he desired for Saving Private Ryan was to shoot the seminal D-Day sequence on location in Normandy, but the area had become too overdeveloped and modernised to do justice to its real-world history.
That led to a months-long search to find the perfect backdrop to a scene that would go down in history as not only one of the most visceral, deafening, jaw-dropping, and awe-inspiring depictions of warfare ever committed to the screen, but one of the greatest scenes of the director’s legendary career.
As chance would have it, Mel Gibson was instrumental in that regard. Having won two Academy Awards for Braveheart, which had been largely filmed in Ireland, the since-deposed A-lister told Spielberg that if he wanted to combine the ideal locations with authorities who were more than willing to lend an assist, he couldn’t do better than Ireland.
After checking it out for himself, the three-time Oscar winner concurred, and when he visited Wexford and laid eyes upon Curracloe beach at Ballinesker, he only had five words: “I have found my Normandy!” That was all well and good, but what came next was the tricky part: figuring out the logistics, with thousands of cast and crew members, extras, and more required to bring the scene to life.
“We had to build a lot of service roads from scratch just to take in the trucks with all the hardware, and we had to construct the battlements, bunkers, and attack vantage points. It was the biggest logistical plan of the entire movie,” associate producer Mark Huffam explained. “We wired off about a kilometre of beach in total for the scene. Steven just has a way of making these things work. He’ll always find a way.”
Finding a way included wrangling a 400-person team, not to mention “about 1,000 members of the FCA [An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil, Ireland’s volunteer reserve army] and dozens of extras, many of whom were amputees, so that we could make the war injuries look very realistic.” On that front, you’d have to say that Saving Private Ryan succeeded.
That’s without mentioning the military vehicles that had to be shipped in from Donegal, Southampton, and Palm Springs to ensure World War II-era accuracy, and the time it took to train people to use them. On top of all of that, Spielberg discarded any notions of using storyboards or planning his shots, adopting an improvisational approach that saw him devise many of the D-Day barrage’s most striking visuals moments before they were captured on camera.
“It blew me away,” Huffam said of watching the scene in its finished form. “And that’s what Spielberg wanted to achieve; not just for shock value, but to show what war was really like on those beaches.” Of course, when the mammoth four-week Wexford section of the shoot was over, everything had to be torn down, packed away, and the vista restored to its former glories.
Even that was no challenge for the Saving Private Ryan crew, though, with the producer revealing that when he returned to Curracloe a year later, once all the service roads had been scrapped, and the grass had been re-seeded, “You’d swear we were never there at all.”
