(Credits: Far Out / DreamWorks Pictures / Paramount Pictures)
Mon 27 April 2026 17:45, UK
An actor’s job is to do what their director tells them, meaning Tom Hanks went along with Steven Spielberg’s wishes, despite having his reservations.
Saving Private Ryan was the pair’s first feature together, and they pulled out the stops to make sure it landed with maximum impact. The D-Day sequence alone is proof enough, but the smaller, quieter, more character-driven moments were equally as effective.
Whether it was Matt Damon’s completely improvised monologue, Hanks’ John Miller ending his squad’s betting pool by revealing he was a teacher before World War II broke out, or Vin Diesel’s desperate cries for help as Caparzo bled out in the rain, it wasn’t all about the visceral, jaw-dropping combat scenes.
However, one of those introspective exchanges didn’t sit too well with the two-time Academy Award winner, at least, not at first. When Miller and his soldiers are holed up in a church, it leads to him opening up about how many men he’s lost during the war, and questioning why Ryan is such an important goal.
“The Ryan better be worth it,” the character says. “He’d better go home and cure some disease, or invent a longer-lasting lightbulb or something, because the truth is, I wouldn’t trade ten Ryans or one Vecchio for one Caparzo.” It offers insight into his mindset, and also finds Miller revealing his tremor to Tom Sizemore’s Horvath, but Hanks nonetheless questioned his director’s intentions.
“That ended up being the scene that we talked incessantly about,” he explained. “Because we shot that almost at the end of the film, because it was one of the rare times when we were shooting on a set. That scene had to carry a certain amount of weight.” It did, but the star wasn’t entirely convinced.
“First of all, I told Steven, ‘I hate this scene.’” Hanks revealed. Naturally, the director asked him why, and he had a valid reason, which was all about authenticity. “Because we’d all be asleep! We wouldn’t be sitting around talking; we’d be dead on our feet, we’d be asleep. This is a fake scene!”
That’s where Vecchio came in. After much deliberation, it was suggested that Miller and Horvath end up “talking about an unseen character,” Vecchio, which convinced the leading man that “verbalising the theme and the superstructure of the character” wasn’t such a fake scene after all, but an integral part of his onscreen evolution.
Within the context of Saving Private Ryan, and what it tells the audience about Miller, there’s nothing fake about it, but Hanks was nonetheless concerned that stopping the story to fill in those gaps could come across as inauthentic. Obviously, it didn’t, and the movie is all the better for it.
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