(Credits: Far Out / DreamWorks Pictures/ Paramount Pictures)
Film » Cutting Room Floor
Scott Campbell
The film industry has been making World War II movies since almost the day the conflict began, whether they be narrative features, documentaries, or propaganda pieces. The conflict remains a fertile source of creativity 80 years after it ended, although it’s safe to say not many pictures will ever come close to matching Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
Robbed of the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ in one of the most egregious upsets in Oscars history, Spielberg’s riveting, nerve-shredding, and emotionally gut-punching epic deservedly took the box office by storm to become the highest-grossing WWII flick in history, a record it held for almost two decades until it was surpassed by Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
The story of an American unit mounting a dangerous mission deep behind enemy lines to rescue the last surviving son of the titular family may have come from the imagination of screenwriter Robert Rodat, but it wasn’t entirely fictional. Saving Private Ryan isn’t a true story in the sense that it was ripped directly from real-life events and brought to the screen, but it did take its inspirations from fact as well as fiction.
In the film, Tom Hanks and his soldiers set out to locate Matt Damon’s James Ryan and send him home after his three siblings were killed in action. While it was based on several factual accounts, the primary source of inspiration was Edward, Preston, Robert, and Frederick Niland, a quartet of brothers from New York.
Edward was shot down over Burma on May 16th, 1944, and listed as missing in action, which during the war typically meant presumed dead. Robert was killed at Normandy on June 6th, 1944, and Preston was killed the following day. Nine days after the D-day landings, Frederick went to visit Robert, only to be informed that he’d been killed in the line of duty. Assumed to be the last of the Niland brothers alive, he was shipped back to the United Kingdom and then on to the United States, where he served as a military policeman for the rest of the war.
Their parents had received notifications from the military that Edward, Preston, and Robert had been killed, and echoing what was to come in Saving Private Ryan, Frederick was removed from active combat to spare the Nilands the tragedy of losing all of their children on the battlefield.
However, Edward was discovered alive when Allied forces liberated a Burmese prisoner-of-war camp in May 1945, and he ended up outliving his only surviving brother. Frederick passed away in December 1983, and Edward died less than three months later.
Where was the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan filmed?
The opening scene of Saving Private Ryan is one of the most engrossing, immersive, and ear-shattering depictions of warfare ever committed to celluloid, with Spielberg and his crew pulling out all of the stops to plunge the audience into the thick of the action.
A staggering cinematic achievement that hasn’t lost any of its immediacy and urgency almost 30 years later, the Omaha Beach introduction was an understandably complicated sequence to shoot. Almost 20% of the film’s entire budget was spent on it, with hundreds of crew members and thousands of extras required.
It took almost a month to shoot, with Ballinesker Beach in Ireland’s County Wexford transformed into the setting for one of the pivotal moments in World War II and modern history in general.
And who survives Saving Private Ryan?
Tom Hanks’ John Miller, Ed Burns’ Richard Reiben, Tom Sizemore’s Mike Horvath, Jeremy Davies’ Timothy Upham, Vin Diesel’s Adrian Caparzo, Adam Goldberg’s Stanley Mellish, and Barry Pepper’s Daniel Jackson are the main characters dispatched to rescue Damon’s title character and spare his family more grief, and the majority of them don’t make it out of the final battle alive.
Mellish, in particular, suffers one of the most haunting death scenes in cinema, with Upham too shaken to save him from a gruesome fate. Cruelly, the latter is one of just three principal cast members who survive until the end credits, with Reiben and Ryan the only others to escape relatively unscathed, at least compared to their fallen compatriots.
Related Topics
Saving Private RyanSteven Spielberg