During the events of World War II, three brothers are killed in less than a week. A squad is given a mission to find the fourth brother and get him out of the battle safely so he can go home to his mother.
Blaine: Steven Spielberg was always obsessed with World War II because of the fact that his father was a veteran. Steven watched several documentaries on World War II and respected the veterans who fought for the U.S. He even made a 25 minute student film at the age of thirteen called “Escape to Nowhere”, which was a World War II action adventure. Steven spent so much time studying World War II and one day he found a story about a young private, who’s siblings were in the same unit and were killed in just one week. A squad was sent to find this private so he could go home. Steven shared it with screenwriter Robert Rodat and it made Robert curious to know how it happened and that was how “Saving Private Ryan” got started. Steven Spielberg is a workaholic. He was working on two different movies, “The Lost World of Jurassic Park” and “Amistad" at once during 1996. Steven had a four week break after shooting “Lost World” before principal photography began on “Amistad”. And then six weeks later, after “Amistad”, Steven began shooting one of his most passionate projects, “Saving Private Ryan”. Of course Steven wasn’t around while his team was scouting locations to shoot and the art department had started building the sets without discussing them with Steven. So Steven didn’t know how these locations and sets were going to look until they started shooting. Steven felt like the soldiers experiencing new places they have never seen before. Steven loves to draw storyboards to show people what he wants to see and sometimes the things on set won’t be exactly what Steven had imagined or live up to his drawings, but he will work it out.
“Saving Private Ryan” starts off with an elder Ryan walking to the memorial of the soldiers who died during World War II and his family is with him. My dad says his emotion is very strong walking up to it and then there’s the shot where they are all down on the ground kneeling. Some light is bouncing onto the eyes of the man playing Private Ryan as an elder. You can see the difference between him and the family around him. So it’s just about him. The opening shot of the beach, the horizon isn’t straight, which is on purpose because kind of adds the intention to the shot. The shots bellow the water that you just see the movement and it’s quiet. Then when the camera hits above you hear all the explosions and noise. Steven wanted the audience to feel like they were the soldiers in the film. There’s a lot of jerkiness in the camera movements just to mimic the panic and how people would really be moving around. It’s not all smooth. You are introduced to Tom Hanks as a central character in the middle of a battle on the beach at Normandy where the American troops are immediately pinned down after getting out of the water. He is shown with a shaky hand and then goes to a tight shot of his face. My dad says the first time he and my mom saw “Saving Private Ryan” in the theater the opening sequence of the soldiers landing on the beach was so intense and loud. By then they’ve really drawn you into the film in a way you couldn’t be paying attention. The beginning and end of “Saving Private Ryan” are the most intense. The middle, the action is more level. It’s not as intense. It’s about finding Private Ryan and waiting for the Germans to show up. Another great shot is of Ryan’s mother when she sees a car coming down the road from her kitchen window. My dad also says the emotion in that scene is incredible and the reflection of the car coming down the road on the window is cool.
Steven couldn’t wait to shoot the machine gun nest at the radar installation, but when they got to the location there was one problem and that was the sun wasn’t in the right place. The sun needed to give the right light that Steven needed for the shot and the set was built in the wrong position. Steven was very disappointed because he had been thinking about shooting that scene for weeks and everything was in the wrong place. What Steven did was he took a walk to help him take away the stress he was feeling and it helped him think of a way how they were going to make the shot work.
They needed a space that was large enough, without any people living around the area for the village scene because they were going to be making a lot of noise that would be disturbing. The location supervisor found Hatfield Aerodrome, North of London. It was a private airfield and aircraft factory. They had the whole property to themselves. They started designing the village through models and it looked like a neat village, but they had to break it, using carving knives, to make it look like a bomb had hit it because this was going to be a damaged village. It took four months to build that set and it was a lot of work, but also fun for the production designers.
Steven Spielberg has worked with different cinematographers who have or had a unique style in shooting a movie, but he had never worked with the same cinematographer on a film he directed until Janusz Kaminsky. Janusz was Steven's cinematographer for “Schindler’s List” and he is very quick at deciding how a scene should be shot, just like Steven is fast with deciding how he’s going to direct a scene. Both Steven and Janusz knew they wanted the color for “Saving Private Ryan” to be something like newsreel footage from the 1940s, which is highly de-saturated, very grainy and extremely low tech. Like “Schindler’s List”, Steven wanted “Saving Private Ryan” to be shot like a documentary being a fan of a lot of those war documentaries. The camera is handheld and the images are unsteady, filthy and full of texture. And the color is being taken out in a shot. Only 40% of the color is left. The sky is not blue, it’s more burned out, de-saturated and blurry. Janusz would experiment with a lot of lenses. He took off a protective coating that prevents light from bouncing around. The images become slightly more diffused and prone to flares and the skies become burned out. Also the image becomes shorter. “Saving Private Ryan” was not only a film Steven Spielberg made to dedicate all the veterans who fought in World War II, but he also made it for his father.
My rating on “Saving Private Ryan” is five out of five stars.
