Last Updated on January 30, 2025

INTRO: Steven Spielberg is the son of a World War II veteran, and as a child he developed a fascination with the war his father fought in. This is evident all through his career; many of his movies are set in and around the World War II era. Even some of the 8mm shorts he made as a teenager were set during the war, with shots of his friends wearing his dad’s uniform being spliced together with footage from war documentaries. In this episode of Revisited, we’re taking a look back at Spielberg’s 1998 World War II movie Saving Private Ryan, one of the most realistically brutal films to ever be made about that conflict.

SET-UP: Screenwriter Robert Rodat was drawing inspiration from two sources when he came up with the story for Saving Private Ryan in 1994. He was reading a book on the D-Day invasion, and had also seen a war monument that listed the names of several brothers who had been killed in action. The idea was to tell an old school, World War II “men on a mission” story, but in this one the mission would be to save one man. The last remaining brother from a family that had lost several sons in the war.

Throughout the war, there were several instances of families’ surviving sons being sent home after their brothers were killed in action. This was following the tragic loss of all five sons from the Sullivan family, who were killed together in 1942 when the ship they were serving on was torpedoed. After the Borgstrom family lost four sons in 1944, the fifth son who was serving in the war was released from service. When Charles and Joseph Butehorn were killed in 1944 and 1945, their brother Henry was sent home. And when it appeared that only one of the four Niland brothers was still alive, the remaining brother was sent back to the states. Thankfully, it was later discovered that one of the brothers who was believed to have been killed had been taken prisoner instead. He was released after spending nearly a year in a prison camp.

Rodat’s story begins on D-Day, the day of the largest seaborne invasion in history. When more than a hundred and sixty thousand American, Canadian, and British troops stormed a fifty mile stretch of German-occupied beaches in Normandy, France. Thousands of men lost their lives that day, but the invasion of those beaches began the liberation of France and eventually led to the Allied forces winning the war. Rodat introduces his lead characters during the invasion, most notably Captain John H. Miller. After the invasion, it’s discovered that brothers Sean and Peter Ryan were among the soldiers killed on the beaches. They lost another brother, Daniel, earlier in the year when he was killed in New Guinea. Their youngest brother James Francis Ryan is also serving in the war – but when the War Department realizes that he’s the last Ryan brother alive, his exact location is unknown. He was one of the twenty-four thousand paratroopers who dropped into the Normandy area before D-Day, but he didn’t land where he was meant to. Miller is tasked with assembling a team and searching the French countryside for him so he can be sent home.

Rodat pitched his idea to producer Mark Gordon, who attached himself to the project and took it to Paramount Pictures. Rodat then went to work writing and rewriting the script – and sometime during the early stages, Michael Bay was offered the chance to direct Saving Private Ryan. He turned it down because he didn’t know how to approach the material, but a few years later he would make a different World War II movie. Pearl Harbor. The script for Saving Private Ryan soon made its way into the hands of Steven Spielberg, who signed on to direct the film – and as part of his deal, his new company DreamWorks would also handle some of the financing and distribution. But first, Spielberg had to face the same issue that had troubled Bay: he had to figure out how to approach the story.

Spielberg’s first thought was to make Saving Private Ryan an adventure movie, which may have been fitting for the early drafts of the script, where Captain Miller was written as a stereotypical, tough action hero. But Spielberg started interviewing World War II veterans in preparation, and while talking to them he realized this should be about something more than action and adventure. He needed to bring this closer to reality. Rodat wrote eleven drafts of the script, reworking characters, adding some, changing their fates. Then Scott Frank and Frank Darabont were brought in to do revisions. The script was never in perfect condition, so the cast Spielberg put together was also given the chance to bring their own ideas to their characters and do some improvising on set.

Finding the right actors to play the characters presented another challenge for Spielberg, who felt that people looked different in the 1940s than they did in the 1990s. He needed to find actors who looked like the people he saw in the World War II newsreels. Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and Pete Postlethwaite were among the options he had in mind for Captain Miller, but he ended up going with Tom Hanks – who was definitely not the obvious choice for a movie like this. But he’s Tom Hanks, he can do anything. He turned out to be the perfect Captain Miller, and he and Spielberg have gone on to work on several more projects together. For Miller’s team, Spielberg cast filmmaker Edward Burns as Private First Class Richard Reiben, who most strongly disagrees with the idea of Miller and his men being ordered to put their lives on the line to find one guy. Vin Diesel as Private First Class Adrian Caparzo, a short-lived character who was written specifically with Diesel in mind after Spielberg saw his movie Strays. Adam Goldberg as Private Stanley Mellish, who will take opportunities to show Nazi soldiers that he’s Jewish, a character who didn’t exist until Goldberg was cast. Barry Pepper as Private Daniel Jackson, a sniper, a deeply religious man, and a role that was apparently offered to musician Garth Brooks at one point. Giovanni Ribisi as T4 Medic Irwin Wade, perhaps the most compassionate of the bunch. And Jeremy Davies as T5 Corporal Timothy Upham, an interpreter with no combat experience, who meets Miller and his men for the first time when they set out on this mission. Technical Sergeant Mike Horvath is second-in-command, and after Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Madsen declined the role it went to Tom Sizemore. Who had to drop out of another World War II movie, The Thin Red Line, to do this one. Sizemore’s struggle with drug addiction has been quite public, and Spielberg hired him on this film under the condition that he take a drug test every day of production. If he ever failed the drug test, he would be fired from the film, the role of Horvath would be recast, and every bit of footage with him in it would be reshot. Sizemore stayed clean for the entirety of the shoot.

To make sure his cast would respect what it means to be a soldier, Spielberg had them undergo an intense week of training under technical advisor Dale Dye, a Vietnam veteran who had previously helped Hanks get ready for the Vietnam sequence in Forrest Gump. This training course was so tiring, most of the cast voted to drop out of it. They thought they should rest up a bit before filming started. The only one who thought they should see it through was Hanks – and since he was going to stick with it, everyone else decided to as well.

Matt Damon was cast as the Private James Ryan that everyone is searching for, and Spielberg didn’t have him participate in the training course. Most of Miller’s men resent being sent on the mission to find Ryan, so Spielberg didn’t want to give the actors the chance to bond with him during training. He wanted them to resent the fact that Damon didn’t have to endure the same thing they were put through. Neil Patrick Harris and Edward Norton had been considered for the role before Damon was hired, and Norton ended up receiving a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in the movie he did instead: American History X. Hanks, nominated for playing Captain Miller, was one of Norton’s competitors in the Best Actor category. Neither of them walked away with the gold… but we’ll get to the Saving Private Ryan Oscars controversy later.

REVIEW: Nearly half of the film’s sixty-one day shooting schedule and around eleven million of its seventy million dollar budget went into the recreation of the Omaha Beach landing in Normandy, which Spielberg uses to drop the viewer into his vision of World War II. It’s a harrowing, gory sequence that really drives home that this film is endeavoring to show us the true horror of war. It’s also our introduction to the visual style Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński went with for this film, a style that was – like the casting choices – inspired by World War II newsreels. The idea was for the movie to have a desaturated look, which was achieved by running the film through bleach bypass, which reduces the brightness and color. Kamiński also removed the protective coating from the camera lenses, allowing more light in. And for certain moments he changed the shutter timing, achieving what he described as a staccato in the movements and a crispness in the explosions.

Shot in sequence with up to one thousand extras moving their way up the beach location, bullet squibs and explosions going off all around them, the D-Day battle is the most famous part of Saving Private Ryan because of how shocking and intense it is. It lasts for more than twenty minutes and effectively makes the point that this is not your average war movie. This is a visceral experience. Spielberg wants you to keep in mind that the soldiers fighting in World War II really had to face these awful, terrifying situations. He wants you to think about the sacrifices that were made. The loss of human lives. When he decided to take this approach to the material, he didn’t think it was the commercial choice. He just knew it was the right choice. He didn’t expect to make a hit. In fact, since his company was co-funding and distributing, he was even willing to put the movie out with an NC-17 rating if that’s what the ratings board decided to give it. He wasn’t going to cut back on the depiction of violence for financial reasons. In the end, that wasn’t an issue. There are certainly sights that would have pushed the limits of the R rating at the time, but the ratings board let them pass.

Beneath the exhausting action and appalling visuals that serve as an endurance challenge for some viewers, the opening battle is also an impressive technical achievement, especially when you consider that none of it was storyboarded. Spielberg and his camera operators followed the action instinctively, catching shots on the fly because the director wanted them to feel unpredictable.

The D-Day invasion is the biggest sequence of the film, but slow, quiet moments are few and far between in the rest of the one hundred and sixty-nine minute running time. Miller and his team are sent out on their mission to find Private Ryan soon after the sequence ends, and this isn’t an easy stroll across France for them. There are enemy soldiers scattered throughout the countryside – leading to a sequence where they find themselves in a rainy, German-occupied village with a sniper set up in a tower. And another where they try to take out a machine gun nest set up at a defunct radar station. Every time gunfire breaks out in this movie, it’s jarring and usually ends in tragedy. Miller loses men along the way, which makes the survivors question their mission even more.

As the film goes on, we get a good idea of who Miller and his men are as people. Some of them are given strong emotional moments to play; Wade tells a heartbreaking story about his mother when the men spend the night in a church. Others share humorous stories. But even though we aren’t given back story information on most of them, we see who they are. We come to like them, we root for them, and feel the loss when any of them falls along the way. Spielberg chose the perfect actors for these roles, with each one bringing palpable depth and humanity to their character.

The decision to change Captain Miller from the stereotype he was in the first draft of the script to the man he is in the film was a very smart one. We see the toll the war is taking on him. His hands shake. He breaks down in tears. Although he’s a mystery to his men and they talk him up like he’s a mythical figure, he’s actually a regular guy. He has been traumatized. But he keeps following his orders and doing what needs to be done.

At times, it feels like Jeremy Davies’ character Upham is the audience surrogate. He’s the one who has no combat experience, so the frightening situations he finds himself in, the death and destruction he sees, this is all new to him. He’s ordered to stay back during most confrontations, and one sequence – the assault on the machine gun nest – is even shot through his monocular as he watches from a distance. Hanks has said Spielberg shot the sequence this way due to weather and lighting conditions at the location, but it’s a major example of Upham standing in for the audience. Viewers are likely to side with Upham when he shows empathy and convinces Miller and his men not to execute an enemy soldier they’ve captured. But there also comes a point when viewers start hating Upham. When he is finally forced to participate in battle, he does not step up. He is not a hero. From a real world psychological perspective, it makes sense that he shuts down when put in a life or death situation. But it’s really painful to see it happen in the movie, especially given the cost of Upham’s inability to put himself at risk to help others.

We don’t get to spend a lot of time with Private Ryan once he’s located, but he’s another character we learn plenty about. We see that he’s affected not only by the loss of his brothers, but also by hearing that two of Miller’s men were killed while they were searching for him. We get to hear him tell a story about him and his brothers, something that happened before they went off to war. Damon ad-libbed this story and Spielberg liked it enough to keep it in the film despite the fact that it presents a continuity error. Ryan says that he and his brothers haven’t been together since eldest brother Dan left for basic training. Yet dialogue earlier in the film tells us that the Ryan brothers served together for a while, they weren’t split up until the deaths of the Sullivan brothers. There’s also a picture in the Ryan home that shows all four brothers together in their uniforms. The story Private Ryan tells doesn’t fit what we’ve heard and seen before this scene, but it’s a nice character moment nonetheless.

During our time with Ryan, we also see that he’s a dedicated soldier, as he refuses to leave the men he has joined up with in the field. He won’t allow Miller to take him out of the fight until he has done what he said he would, which is help defend a bridge from approaching German forces. Since Ryan won’t leave the bridge, Miller and his remaining men have to help defend it as well. And try to keep Ryan safe during the ensuing battle.

Some have questioned Spielberg’s decision to put the most intense battle sequence right at the start of the film. The climactic battle to protect the bridge in the village of Ramelle – a location that doesn’t actually exist, but a scenario that was inspired by a real World War II battle – may not be as massive as the D-Day sequence, but it’s still quite impactful in its own way. It’s also roughly the same length as the D-Day sequence. The deaths we witness during this battle hurt even more than the ones on the beaches of Normandy did, because now we know the people who are dying. We’ve spent over two hours with them. We want to see them make it out of this. But not all of them do.

Even with all the loss, the mission is successful. The title is right, the movie is all about Saving Private Ryan. And when the fighting is over, we catch up with Ryan, decades later, and see how the knowledge that so many men died so he could live has affected him. For the scenes set in the 1990s, Ryan is played by Harrison Young, who turns in a heart-wrenching performance during his few minutes on screen.

Saving Private Ryan is a really violent movie, but its violence has a purpose. It never feels gratuitous or disrespectful to those who served in the war. The battles aren’t meant to be fun, and Spielberg wasn’t taking any of this lightly. He brought a rather melancholy tone to the film – but at the same time, he made sure that the overall viewing experience isn’t too grim or oppressive. There are some terrific moments of levity placed throughout that are right for the situations and characters. Moments that allow the viewer to laugh or smile before Spielberg cranks up the intensity again; whether that be through acts of violence or emotional character scenes.

Spielberg is one of the best directors in cinema history and has made several films that rank highly among the greatest movies ever made. That includes Saving Private Ryan.

LEGACY/NOW: The director didn’t expect this film to be a blockbuster, but it was. It earned just under five hundred million at the global box office and was the second highest grossing film of 1998, only coming in behind Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Its success wasn’t just financial; it also racked up eleven Academy Award nominations. Saving Private Ryan won Oscars in the Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, and Best Sound Effects Editing categories. Spielberg also won Best Director for the second time in his career, his first win being for Schindler’s List five years earlier. In the Best Actor category, Hanks lost to Roberto Benigni for his performance in another movie set during World War II, Life Is Beautiful. That film’s composer Nicola Piovani also beat Saving Private Ryan’s composer John Williams for the Best Original Dramatic Score award. The Saving Private Ryan makeup team lost to the Elizabeth crew. And the film lost to Shakespeare in Love in three categories. Here’s where things gets controversial. After beating Saving Private Ryan in the Best Art Direction and Best Screenplay categories, Shakespeare in Love also took home the biggest award of the night. Best Picture.

To this day many viewers, including Academy members who voted against it at the time, feel that Saving Private Ryan should have won Best Picture. But the head of Miramax, the company that made Shakespeare in Love – we won’t say his name here, but you probably know who he is – ran an awards season campaign that was effective at getting enough Academy members to vote for his movie that it took the win. There were a lot of upset movie fans that night. In a poll conducted in 2015, Academy members confirmed that they would have voted for Saving Private Ryan if they were given a second chance.

But Saving Private Ryan is enduring just fine without being listed among the winners of Best Picture. The American Film Institute regularly includes the film on their lists of great films, and many publications have honored it over the decades. In 2014, the Library of Congress selected it as one of the “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films worthy of being preserved in the National Film Registry. For three years, the television network ABC aired Saving Private Ryan uncut, with limited commercial interruptions, on Veterans Day. And it has always sold well on home video, most recently getting a 4K UHD release in 2018.

After making the film, Spielberg paid further tribute to those who served in World War II by donating an undisclosed amount of money to help fund the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. Part of the memorial is the Arnold M. Spielberg Theater, named after Spielberg’s father. The veteran who told his son stories of what it was like serving in the war, which would eventually inspire him to direct Saving Private Ryan. A film he made in honor of his dad.