(Credits: Far Out / DreamWorks Pictures)
Sun 22 February 2026 17:27, UK
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan isn’t an easy movie to watch, with the filmmaker’s insistence on depicting wartime combat as authentically and immersively dropping audiences right into the thick of the action from the very start, thanks to one of the greatest opening scenes in cinema history.
With that in mind, it goes without saying that it wasn’t an easy movie to make, either. Matt Damon had it much easier than the rest of the ensemble, which was entirely by design after Spielberg insisted that the actor playing the title character miss the boot camp the rest of the cast attended to whip them into screen-ready shape to ensure the animosity they harboured for James Ryan was as real as possible.
Spielberg was determined that the strain visible on screen would not be manufactured through camera trickery alone. He wanted exhaustion to sit behind the actors’ eyes and tension to inform the smallest exchanges. That pursuit of authenticity would come to define the production as much as the now-legendary Omaha Beach sequence itself.
The atmosphere was surprisingly collaborative for a film with so many moving parts, though. Several actors auditioned without even having a script to read from, and the filmmaker encouraged his performers to put their own stamp on the roles. Even when cameras were rolling, the Academy Award-winning icon had no issues making things up as he went along, whether it was shooting complicated sequences or developing character arcs.
As an ironclad classic and one of the finest war stories ever told on celluloid, Saving Private Ryan was impeccably cast across the board. Tom Hanks was in Oscar-nominated form as John Miller, the moral compass and father figure to the rest of the group, while Damon, Tom Sizemore, Ed Burns, Jeremy Davies, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi, and Barry Pepper all pulled their weight.
(Credits: Far Out / DreamWorks Pictures / Paramount Pictures)
However, had the cast followed through on their decision to quit before a single frame had even been shot, then Spielberg would have been left up shit creek without a paddle. Proving that art imitates life, it was Hanks who talked his castmates down from a ledge when the arduous conditions used to put them through their paces during the aforementioned boot camp saw them reach breaking point.
Three days into their ordeal, military advisor Dale Dye – who insisted on referring to them not as by name but as ‘Turd’ with Hanks being ‘Turd Number One’ – revealed that everyone other than the leading man had taken a vote and the majority decided they were going to quit.
“There was some grumbling and, ‘Maybe we ought to walk away, we’ve had enough,’” Dale explained to Yahoo. “I think there was a phone call that Tom made to Steven Spielberg where he said, ‘We’ve got a little situation here: what do you want to do?’ He said, ‘Look, we’re only going to get one shot at this, and we want to get it right, and I think we ought to stay and we ought to gut it out.’”
Seeking to diffuse the tension, Hanks organised a make-or-break meeting between the Saving Private Ryan cast and Dye, who stood in the pouring rain to state his case, telling the actors that they “owe it to these people you’re representing on film to get this right, and in order to get this right, you’ve got to experience some of what they’ve experienced.”
It had the desired effect, even if Dye admitted “there were some who were slower to get back up to speed than others,” sparing Saving Private Ryan from having to recruit an entirely new roster of actors when the first day on set was looming large.
In retrospect, that crucible became integral to the film’s enduring power. The camaraderie forged through shared discomfort bleeds into every frame, lending the ensemble a cohesion that cannot be faked. For all its technical mastery, Saving Private Ryan resonates most because the bonds between its characters feel earned rather than written.