After showing the horrors of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg later returned to World War II to deliver one of the most harrowing and technically groundbreaking war scenes ever committed to film in Saving Private Ryan. The 1998 film pitched Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller and a band of soldiers on a near-impossible mission — but before that, they had to survive D-Day.
The Spielberg Takeover issue of Empire features an oral history of the jaw-dropping, disorientating opening 24 minutes of Ryan — a sequence which innovated new filmmaking techniques, changing how gritty and visceral a war film could look, and more importantly, feel. Chris Hewitt spoke to the actors, the extras, the producers, the crew, the stunt team, and — of course — Hanks himself.
“You don’t have a choice of what to be horrified by,” he recalls of the sequence. “It’s this gestalt wave of horrible, horrible human experience riding over you and by the time it’s over you have a degree of numbness that is, I think, the point of the movie. The overall effect of the movie as a whole is getting over this life-altering 24 minutes that nobody should be able to get over.”
The entire Omaha Beach segment was shot chronologically over the course of 19 days, and the bloodshed begins from the moment the landing boats first approach the beach. “The ramp went down and all the stunt guys had been set up with prosthetics at the front, and they just exploded in a line,” Hanks remembers. “I’d never been in anything like that before. It was crazy loud. Crazy loud.”
To read more about the filming of the D-Day sequence, as well as a world exclusive interview with Spielberg, an access-all-areas piece on Ready Player One, and much, much more, pick up the new issue of Empire, on shelves now.
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