How Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan changed the war movie

When Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan first screened 25 years ago, crit­ics and war vet­er­ans alike cit­ed it as the most real­is­tic por­tray­al of war ever seen on film. This was not the World War II of The Guns of Navarone or The Great Escape; Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan – par­tic­u­lar­ly its D‑Day land­ing sequence – aimed to emu­late the ter­ror, fear and unimag­in­able vio­lence of war through a real­ism-led approach to its cinematography.

Despite the com­plex­i­ty of Steven Spielberg’s approach to the war scenes, pre-pro­duc­tion on Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan was sig­nif­i­cant­ly trun­cat­ed by the direc­tor expe­ri­enc­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­lif­ic streak, shoot­ing Juras­sic Park sequel The Lost World and his­tor­i­cal dra­ma Amis­tad back to back. Spiel­berg and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Janusz Kamin­s­ki (who he had just worked with on Schindler’s List) were heav­i­ly influ­enced by the con­tem­po­rary war pho­tog­ra­phy of George Stevens and Robert Capa, as well as the pro­pa­gan­da films of Leni Riefen­stahl, and the accounts giv­en by actu­al vet­er­ans, includ­ing Spielberg’s own father Arnold who was draft­ed into the mil­i­tary in 1942.

In the past, Spiel­berg – who was born the year after his father returned from the war – has been open about how the Sec­ond World War loomed large in his con­scious­ness. His father would tell war sto­ries and vet­er­ans would fre­quent his house as a child, while the fam­i­ly had an awful rela­tion­ship with the Holo­caust, hav­ing lost an esti­mat­ed 20 rel­a­tives in the genocide.

Because of Spielberg’s close con­nec­tion to the war, he knew the ways in which he didn’t want to make a war movie. The Sec­ond World War was more than a shad­ow on Spielberg’s career. He’d already made five films set in the peri­od – albeit rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent ones that ranged from adven­ture epics to Holo­caust biopics – but Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan felt like the director’s defin­i­tive state­ment on the sub­ject as he sought to get as close to recre­at­ing war as possible.

There was a prece­dent of sorts for Spielberg’s boots on the ground, ​‘Let’s do war as close as we can to the real thing’ approach. 1962’s The Longest Day was famous­ly filmed on actu­al WW2 bat­tle­fields and Leslie Norman’s 1958 Dunkirk deployed some 2000 extras, but Spiel­berg yearned to take the audi­ence inside war like nev­er before. There were small details he learned from vet­er­ans – GI’s vom­it­ing as they approached the beach from sea­sick­ness and fear; dead fish float­ing on top of the water; the blue ocean stained red with blood – that would com­plete­ly immerse view­ers and set the stan­dard going for­ward for war films.

France’s Oma­ha Beach was recre­at­ed in Ire­land over about four weeks to the cost of $12 mil­lion, with a cast and crew of around 1500 peo­ple, to cre­ate the D‑Day Land­ing sequence. Spiel­berg and his vast team had rough­ly a kilo­me­tre of the shore to them­selves and essen­tial­ly rebuilt wartime Nor­mandy com­plete with bat­tle­ments, con­crete bunkers and defence nests.

Spiel­berg shows much of the land­ing from a soldier’s point of view (a tech­nique that would lat­er heav­i­ly influ­ence video games includ­ing Spielberg’s own brain­child the Medal of Hon­or series as well as the huge­ly suc­cess­ful Call of Duty fran­chise). For the first time, we see war through the ter­ri­fied eyes of the men who were there. The sub­jec­tive tech­nique sees the cam­era fre­quent­ly dis­ap­pear under­wa­ter as the march to the beach is made. The cam­era lit­er­al­ly goes up and down beneath the ocean, a tech­nique achieved by mount­ing a cam­era on a crane on the back of a flatbed truck which was then dri­ven into the sea. Spiel­berg also makes use of sev­er­al hand­held cam­eras in this sequence, all of them manoeu­vring in a coor­di­nat­ed fash­ion around the life­like set, immers­ing the view­er in the fog of war.

Spielberg’s recre­ation of the assault made use of actu­al Hig­gins boats used in the land­ings and to achieve the all-con­sum­ing effect of war, they rigged a sec­tion of the beach the size of a large field with blood squibs and mor­tar explo­sives, shoot­ing usu­al­ly just one or two long takes. Fake blood would often unin­ten­tion­al­ly splat­ter against the cam­era but they kept on shoot­ing, believ­ing it enhanced the real­ism, espe­cial­ly with the effects crew burn­ing bar­rels of diesel to cre­ate flumes of black smoke in the air. The move­ments of the many hun­dreds of actors had to be chore­o­graphed to the most minute detail because of the mor­tars placed across the beach (amaz­ing­ly the only on-set injury was an extra whose foot was run over). 

The shot where Tom Han­ks makes the dash to the cliff edge was filmed in exact­ly that man­ner. Spiel­berg called action and hun­dreds of extras sprung to life, explo­sives were det­o­nat­ed, and the most famous actor in the world sprint­ed across a beach fol­lowed by a cam­era­man car­ry­ing a 34-pound cam­era on his shoul­der. It was one of the first scenes shot and was com­plet­ed in one take, set­ting the tone for the rest of the shoot.

This proved to be pret­ty gru­elling if you hap­pened to be a cam­era oper­a­tor. Most of the film, espe­cial­ly the action sequences, was filmed using hand­held cam­eras and these cam­eras were not light. Spiel­berg also want­ed the cam­era at awk­ward heights such as near the ground, which meant the oper­a­tors were often run­ning around a beach, drag­ging a cam­era close to the floor while try­ing to avoid actu­al explo­sions, and also pro­tect­ing the equip­ment from the sand. It was a her­culean chal­lenge of filmmaking.

On a pure­ly tech­ni­cal lev­el, Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan upend­ed the war movie. It became a bench­mark for depic­tions of war in the same way Juras­sic Park was for spe­cial effects or Rag­ing Bull was for box­ing. Com­bined with wide praise from vet­er­ans for the film’s accu­ra­cy, you had a pic­ture that would loom large over the next 25 years of war movies.

Rid­ley Scott embraced Spielberg’s immer­sive tech­niques with Black Hawk Down, implant­i­ng Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan’s vis­cer­al open­ing 20 min­utes across two and a half hours in Soma­lia. Christo­pher Nolan has also been vocal about the debt his own WWII epic Dunkirk owes the film, ask­ing Spiel­berg for advice on how to approach shoot­ing, espe­cial­ly with regards to hav­ing an unseen ene­my (both movies fea­ture very few Nazis). 

Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan’s influ­ence can also be seen in Sam Mendes’ Oscar-win­ning 1917. As the now viral behind-the-scenes footage of film­ing shows, Mendes embraced Spielberg’s prac­ti­cal approach to film­mak­ing with the final sequence requir­ing actor George Mack­ay to run 300 metres with 500 extras in the back­ground and explo­sions being set off everywhere. 

Cin­e­mat­ic tech­nol­o­gy has evolved and heavy CGI usage has become the stan­dard for large-scale war films, but to this day noth­ing beats a man and a movie cam­era run­ning around on an Irish beach.