Saving Private Ryan not only earned director Steven Spielberg the DGA and Academy Awards as Best Director of a Feature film in 1999, but Andrew Levy's January 1999 DGA Magazine article about the making of Saving Private Ryan recently won the award as Best Interview/Profile at the Western Publishers Association's 49th Annual Maggie Awards.  The award makes the third for DGA Magazine, which won Maggies for Most Improved Trade Publication and Best Color Layout for the February 1998 article The Directing Team: Titanic by DGA Magazine Editor, Ted Elrick.

Steven Spielberg on the set of Saving Private Ryan

By Andrew Levy
Photos by David James/courtesy of Dreamworks

DGA Magazine recently spoke with director Steven Spielberg and his directing team for a behind-the-scenes look at the recreation of the invasion of Europe and its impact on a small band of soldiers.

You've made several films that take place during World War II, but Saving Private Ryan is really your first film about World War II.   Do you feel as though in some way you've been building up to this film?

I think I've been building up to this film ever since I strapped on a camera, because two of the films I made as a child literally, as a youngster, one when I was I think about 14 years old were WWII films. So I've had a fascination with the war and with the war propaganda pictures that used to be made back in the 1940s. Had I attempted a Saving Private Ryan at an earlier stage in my career, it probably would have been a little closer to The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare because I don't think I understood the gravity of that war when I first started.

In the last decade or so, it seems as though most filmmakers who have made war films have made their films about Vietnam.   You chose to do yours about WWII.   Is this because of your childhood or because you were inspired by all these WWII films?

Well, I was certainly inspired by my father, who fought in that war, and was the closest thing between me and the actual war itself. My dad did not see a lot of combat action- he primarily was the radio operator aboard a B-25 during the Burma campaign and having not seen combat allowed him to he more freely associative in speaking about the war than other veterans I met who were right in the thick of it, who because of the nightmares they endured, were not able to freely speak to me about it. It took my dad, who was on the edge of combat, to be able to fascinate me as a child growing up with his war stories.

In many ways Ryan kind of follows the conventions of the standard WWII film. You have the ethnically diverse group of soldiers the Jew, the Italian, the Southern Christian, the wiseass from Brooklyn. Did you make a conscious decision to use this form so that filmgoers would be comfortable with it, before you took them further?

I wasn't thinking about the filmgoers being comfortable with it. That was inherent in Robert Rodat's screenplay and after doing some research I accepted the diversity of American representatives inside that squad. For instance, it's a little-known fact that Brooklyn served up more fighting men during WWII than any other city or suburb in the country. Which is why Hollywood often had a Brooklyn representative when they told their war stories in the 1940s. It was just something you couldn't get away from.

The opening scenes of the Normandy landing, when the ramps on the Higgins boats go down and the soldiers just immediately start dying, are some of most jolting scenes audiences have ever seen. Was it your intent to show the audience right away that this was going to be like nothing else they had ever seen?

Well, I wasn't trying to create a prime for that kind of violent honesty. I was simply trying to show the audience a little bit of what those actual young kids experienced when they hit those beaches 54 years ago, and at the same rime, those kids, aside from basic training, had never before seen combat. Figuring that most of the members of our audience had never seen combat, I thought it was a good way to put the audience in the shoes of every member of that squad, because that sequence would inform every square inch of terrain that they had to navigate to somehow get to Private Ryan.

Was shooting the D-Day scenes unlike anything else you'd ever had to film?

Yeah. Both the D-Day scenes and the last battle in the town of Ramelle were unlike anything I've ever attempted, and therefore there was no instruction manual, no handbook that would show me a precedent for how to do sequences like that. I simply relied on all the combat documentary footage I had looked at in preparation for making the picture. Probably the things that informed me more than anything else were those surviving snapshots of Omaha Beach taken by the famous war photojournalist Robert Capa. I had all eight of those pictures hung up on my bulletin board in my office, and also at home, and I stared at them relentlessly and told my group that I wanted to re-create the feel in every single one of those photographs.

How do you choreograph the movements of 750 people on this beach?

It wasn't the logistics of so many people, it was how do I put the audience at eye level with actual battlefield experiences, so the audience can become as combat fatigued as I was assuming those soldiers were after they went through such an ordeal. So it wasn't so much of a logistical problem, it was simply doing something that I hadn't done since 1981, when I made ET, which was to shoot Saving Private Ryan in absolute continuity. I shot the entire movie in continuity, but more importantly I shot the entire Omaha Beach sequence in continuity, starting in the landing craft and ending at the top of the bluff at the Vierville exit.

How did you rehearse these scenes?

You don't rehearse those scenes. You don't rehearse combat. What you do is rehearse for reasons of safety, for the actors, the crew, the stunt people and the extras. All of our rehearsals had to do with safety meetings and rigorously showing everybody where all the danger zones were, so when the shot began and the chaos started, no one would haphazardly wander into what I would call an "X zone."

Did you shoot most of those scenes in one take?

Not really. I think at Omaha Beach I probably averaged three takes.

So you had to just go back, reset the explosives...

Yeah, you bet [laughs]. But every time I knew I would have to do it again, I would change angles with one of the cameras. I would go over the video replay from those cameras and if I didn't have it on the A and B camera but the C camera was good, I would then move the C camera to a brand-new position and pick up a bonus shot. So every time I had to do a sequence more than once, I would pick up one or two bonus shots.

The most I used at one time was probably five, but on most of Omaha Beach, I was averaging two.

Is it true that you yourself shot some of the hand-held stuff?

Yeah.

What made you decide to shoot these scenes with that bleached-out, desaturated look?

That was something I had decided, because it was a thought when I made Schindler's List. When I was debating black and white versus color on Schindler's List, one of my thoughts was to desaturate the color 60 percent or 70 percent, so it had that old, time-worn look. Then I decided to bite the bullet and commit to full black-and-white negatives for Schindler's List, and when I started to do Ryan, I remembered those doubts I had and thought in this case maybe I could use the time-worn, desaturated look that I had debated using for Schindler's List.

Did you ever consider shooting Ryan in black and white?

Never. I'll tell you why: when my dad saw Schindler's List, he said something that really informed me. He asked me why I shot it in black and white, and I said because my only experience with the Holocaust has been through black-arid-white archival footage. And my dad said, "Well, I was alive during that time and I fought in WWII, and my experiences were in full, living, bleeding color." I remember him telling me that, and that really helped me make a decision on Ryan.

What about the staccato, almost strobelike effect that you used on a lot of the beach scenes?

I remember watching combat footage and wondering how come when you see an explosion going off, you can count either the grains of sand or the clogs of concrete and dirt flying into the air, and nothing is blurring. And when I analyzed this footage, I discovered that a lot of those old cameras that were being used by the Signal Corps had 43-degree shutters, A 45- or 90-degree shutter eradicates blurring, and it made the image look so neurotic and chaotic and panic-stricken, that I thought this is the way I needed to shoot every combat scene in Saving Private Ryan.

It's almost hyper-real.

It's hyper-real, exactly

One of the things that almost gets overlooked in this onslaught of graphic images on the beach and throughout the film is the incredible use of sound that just adds to the realism. How did you achieve this?

I think I hired well, in that case. I hired Gary Rydstrom and Gary Summers up there at Skywalker [Sound] in Northern California, and I only gave them one direction. I said where possible, please record real bullets and real explosions and real ricochets. I didn't want any stock Hollywood library sounds anywhere in this picture. And they went out, along with Ron Judkins, the production mixer, and recorded the real thing. They actually at times fired bullets right past microphones on a safe firing range. They did just an amazing job on the sound.

There really aren't a lot of panoramic shots, a lot of vistas, in the film. Did you do this purposely, to keep the story more personal?

I tried to keep the story more personal, I tried to keep the story from the point of view of the individual members of the squad. When I did have a high shot, it was usually justified by either being through the gunsight of a German sniper, or showing the point of view of one the squad members who at the time was on high ground. I violated that rule-there's a shot after Wade, the medic, has been killed, as Reiben is beating up the German prisoner. There's an unmotivated high shot that shows the rest of the squad running to the Germans. But I tried to not break that rule as often as possible.

How closely did you work with Robert Rodat?

I worked very closely with him on the drafts, and then after Robert, several other writers came in to put in their two cents worth. As I usually do on most of the movies I direct, I get under the covers with all of the writers until we've got something we're proud to shoot.

How closely did you stick to the written script?

Storywise, I stuck to written script very closely, but I had a very good written script. In the combat scenes I did a lot of improvising, both on Omaha Beach and the battle for Ramelle, Also the scenes in the first town in the rain, I did a lot of improvising and kind of got off the page during those sequences.

When most people talk about this film, they talk about the Omaha Beach landing. But the battle to save the bridge at Ramelle seemed almost equally tough, logistically, to shoot in such a way that the audience never loses track of where anybody is at any given time.

I had two people that really helped me. I had our technical consultant, [retired Marine] Captain Dale Dye, and I had my 1st Assistant Director, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan. Dale Dye was very careful to say, "Let's do this the way it really would've happened, not the way writers, including yourself, Steven, might imagine it in the safety of your offices in Los Angeles in 1997." He vas pretty hard on me, but I kind of needed it, and I thanked him for it later He made me realize that war is spontaneous, and I certainly had realized that based on what I had already shot on Omaha Beach, but he said also at Ramelle, don't let the movie slip back into a Hollywood cliché. Make sure that Rarnelle is as spontaneous and yet as graphically clear as you can possibly make it.

Spielberg directs Tom Hanks

When you're shooting, do you know in advance what everything is going to took like? Do you sometimes improvise, do you storyboard?

I used to storyboard, and I will again, especially if I do a movie that has huge physical effects, such as dinosaurs and spaceships. But in the case with Saving Private Ryan, as was the case with Schindler's List, I did no storyboards at all. I philosophically kept thinking that those Rangers didn't have a storyboard in their minds when they got off those Higgins boats. All of their training was shot to hell once they realized that they didn't know where they were and chaos ruled. I just thought it would be not very spontaneous of me to be so methodical in shooting that sequence as opposed to intuitively trying to figure out where I would be if I were a combat cameraman lying next to these guys who were trying to get to safety on that beach.

Going back to the chaotic nature of war, did this lead to improvisation, or was it tough to improvise because of the safety factor?

Well, no, because I improvised the way you improvise when you're actually fighting a war. I tried as hard as possible to keep alive the surprise of combat, where even I didn't know what I was going to do from day to day. I knew I had to get off the beaches and get to the Belgian gates for defilade from all the firepower coming from the cliffs. I knew that's what happened in history and I was always informed by the veterans that that's how it should be. Then I knew I had to get to the seawall, because in history the soldiers then had to make a rush to the seawall where there was also some defilade afforded. Beyond that they had to get to the marshland to get up these very difficult passes that were mined and zeroed in. So the larger picture had already been directed by history, and then I was able to improvise inside what history would allow me to do.

How much CGI did you use?

Only about 38 shots in the whole movie, which is my lowest shot count since I began using effects in my pictures.

How do you decide when you're going to use them?

I knew I had to use them to turn the English Channel into a parking lot, or that shot would have probably equaled the budget of the entire film. I knew I was going to have to use effects for the tracers. It was too dangerous to fire tracers because they won't be on straight trajectories, they'll he affected by whatever onshore wind is blowing. And then there were some sweetened bullet hit effects that I did with CGI, not a lot, but a few.

Tell me about the editing process.

The editing was pretty amazing. Mike Kahn has been my editor for 90 percent of every movie I've ever made. He cut the film right behind my directing it, meaning that I was spending mornings and lunch hours, and sometimes evenings with him in the editing trailer or in the editing room in London. I needed to see how it was all going together so I could add to it or be more economical later on. It was great to have him cutting that close behind me. He's a master, he has the greatest rhythm of any editor I've ever worked with, and he just has a way of taking two pieces of film and putting them together in such a particular way. It's kind of indefinable why it works so well, but it just does. It's very hard to analyze what makes this cut work over another cut that someone else might make on the same picture with the same two scenes, what frame to cut on, do you let the actor expel the breath before you make the cut.

Several of the actors in Ryan are themselves directors. Did this help or hinder you in any way?

No, I think all the actors who once directed were so overwhelmed by what we were trying to put on film that they got quiet awfully fast. They didn't even want to make a suggestion for fear that I would say "What a good idea, why don't you do the next four shots." That would've terrified them more than a German grenade hitting them on the head. So they all acted as actors.

How important was Dale Dye to what we see on the screen?

Dale Dye was important to the extent that what you see on the screen is accurate in terms of the size of grenade explosions, the size of German 88s, what a bullet will do to a person compared to what a bullet will do when it hits sand or concrete. Dale was in Vietnam on three tours of duty. He was shot several times, he lost his best friends. He knows what combat is like, and so when he made a suggestion that perhaps that explosion, that mortar round that hit the beach was a Hollywood mortar round and we should take the size down 50 percent, I respected that. Because usually what you hear is, "That explosion is not big enough, make it bigger, we want to get more people into the theatre, we want to dazzle them," What Dale Dye was saying after we saw the first tests of the first couple of explosions was, "OK, those were Hollywood explosions. Now, if you go half that intensity, that is an American 60mm mortar round."

In addition to Dye and historian Stephen Ambrose, who was brought in later? What other sources did you turn to to help insure the accuracy of the film?

Before I made the movie I talked to a lot of veterans who were actually there at Dog Green and other places on Omaha and Utah Beach, and they just filled my head with the truth. One veteran turned to me and he said, "I know you want to talk to me about Omaha Beach, and it's very difficult for me to talk about it. If you're going to listen to everything I tell you and then turn around and just make another glory-mongering war film, then I'm wasting your time." I'll never forget those words to me, and when I assured him that I was going to try to acquit his experience the best I possibly could, he and others trusted me and sat down with a lot of us and began to talk.

Was it your intention for the character of Corporal Upham to be an audience surrogate?

He was more me than an audience surrogate. I kind of put myself in tile movie through his eyes, because I'm only presuming that in combat I wouldn't be Captain Miller, I would he more like Corporal Upham. I know I'm denigrating myself somewhat, but I'm not sure I would ever be able to withstand what a lot of those guys did for us 54 years ago. I'm not sure I would've been able to take it. So I needed an outlet and I needed a voice, and I used Upham to kind of voice how I would have reacted in similar situations.

There seems to be a point of confusion concerning the identity of a German soldier. Many people think that the soldier who kilts Mellish is the same one Captain Miller sets free earlier in the film, and that it's this same soldier who is then one of the ones who kills Miller. But as far as I can tell, the German who is set free - Steamboat Willie I believe he's called in the credits - while he is the one involved In Miller's death, is not the one who kills Mellish. Can you set the record straight?

The soldier who kills Mellish is a different German soldier who you've never seen before. The soldier who kills Miller, and the soldier who Upham kills, is the soldier that Miller lets go. That was not intentional, and yet it was also not a mistake. ‘When I cast the German who kills Mellish, I was commenting to some of the actors that it would be really interesting if the audience thinks that that is also the character who Captain Miller lets go. They didn't bear a striking resemblance, but they had short hair, and they were basically the same height. I thought that there could be some confusion, but I didn't think that confusion would necessarily be bad. I kind of went along with it knowing that there might be some confusion, although I didn't expect this much confusion.

I've read some criticism of the modern-day framing sequences you utilized, that they didn't work, that they were overly sentimental. As an Army veteran, I thought they were incredibly moving. Is this a split that you've noticed or that you anticipated?

I did that for the veterans, because I actually witnessed the first scene in Saving Private Ryan when I first went to Omaha Beach in ‘71 or ‘72. I was a new director and I came to France for the first time, and I went to Omaha Beach, and I actually witnessed that moment, where an older man - certainly older than me, he was probably my age now, 51, - had his family with him, and he went to the Normandy cemetery over Omaha Beach, and he went around a corner and saw something that I had not seen yet, and I stopped because he had stopped and fallen to his knees sobbing. His entire family surrounded him, in exactly the same way it that occurs in Saving Private Ryan. I finally walked around to see what he had seen, and it was a vista of all 9,000 Stars of David and crosses. I never forgot that, and when I had the opportunity to tell this story, I created these bookends, because I thought that, more than anything else, was my tribute to the veterans who survived that experience, and who have been reticent to talk about it.

And who really had to live with the fact that in many of their cases, someone else died so that they could live.

I've had hundreds and hundreds of letters from veterans since the movie came out, probably thousands of letters. I've read hundreds of them, and 80 percent of the letters talk about the bookends and they're so happy that those bookends exist in the film, so looking back on it, I wouldn't do it any other way.

When I talked to your directing team, every single one of them said that they felt that you always knew exactly what you wanted in a shot. Is this from extensive preparation, or is it just something innate in you, that you can look at scene and say, "This Is what I'm shooting?"

I think I project on the outside a great deal of security in what I'm doing, But on the inside, especially on this movie, much of the time I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I was trying to re-create something that I wasn't ever there for in real life, and I was always confused as to where I needed to put the camera. I think I probably underwent more struggle on this picture than any film I've ever directed, having to do with where the camera should go. Nobody could help me. Nobody could really suggest where the camera went because once you're the director it's very hard for anyone else to make those kinds of suggestions. I would struggle, but I would make very quick decisions, so people would look at me and they'd say, "Well, he knows where to put the camera," but in fact, the five or six minutes I walked around just trying to figure it out were excruciatingly painful. I'm much more used to coming onto a movie and knowing exactly where the camera should go at each and every turn. On this film, that didn't quite happen.

You've been a DGA member for almost 30 years now. How has the Guild changed in that time?

I love the amount of women in our Guild. I just love the evolution of women in film anyway. I love the amount of attention and respect gained for UPMs and ADs. I think the Guild has put the assistant director on the map, in my 30 years of experience. There's been a tremendous celebration of what the Firsts and the Seconds do to make a movie.

What do you think are the big issues facing the Guild and directors in general?

The Guild has been addressing artists' rights for many years, and we've been struggling for the last decade to have our government put protection clauses in writing, to protect filmmakers from copyright holders. That's been the fight over the past 10 years, to give directors, and writers, some kind of legal redress for crassly commercial manipulation of the finished film, We've been saying for a long time that once the film is finished, whether it's a good film or not, it's still someone's vision. It's the writer's vision and the director's vision, and in many cases the actors have a piece of that vision. That vision should be respected by the people who own the copyrights, and can through digital futuristic techniques take that film totally out of context and break it up and make 60 or 70 little movies out of it that defile the original author's intentions. It's called moral rights, and it's enjoyed in every country except Russia, China and the United States.

What advice do you have for young directors just starting out?

I think directors first starting out should never give up on themselves. This business challenges your tenacity, and I think those who survive are those who have an abiding, even somewhat of a haughty, belief in themselves, and I think that's extraordinarily healthy. That's a real good value. You just have to keep slugging away. It does help if the director writes, because often a director who writes first can get the directorship, the stewardship of a film, after he sells one script. He can hold out to direct the second one. I've always found that to be an easier way to break into the business as a director. But it's also just as important to work in every medium you possibly can, from television to commercials to music videos to documentaries to low-budget indie productions. As long as somebody will give you a camera, even if they don't pay any money, and say, "Hey, I'm giving you a chance to tell me something about the way you see the world, and hopefully make me a few bucks while you're doing it," that's an opportunity that must never be bypassed.

With Saving Private Ryan, have you now said all you want to say about the 1940s, the WWII era? Do you think it's behind you now?

I never think of things as ever being behind me. When I was finished with Schindler's List, for a couple of weeks I thought the Holocaust was something I would never revisit because it was just too painful. Now four years later, I'm still up to my eyeballs in collecting Holocaust survivor testimony through our Shoah Foundation. So I can never say that about anything I do, because who knows what is going to happen next week.