Trevor Hogg profiles the career of legendary Hollywood filmmaker Steven Spielberg in the fourth of a five part feature… read parts one, two and three.
Collaborating with co-director Douglas Day Stewart (Listen to Me), filmmaker Steven Spielberg produced a ninety-minute video release called The Visionary (1990). The Western centres around a psychiatrist who skeptically recruits the services of an Indian medicine man to heal the troubled relationship between an American Native Indian and his wife.
A modern-day retelling of a classic children’s tale by British playwright J.M. Barrie was the next theatrical release for Spielberg. Hook (1991) stars Robin Williams (One Hour Photo) as the middle-aged Peter Pan who must return to Neverland in order to rescue his kidnapped son and daughter from the clutches of his pirating archenemy Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman). “When I was eleven years old, I, along with other kids, directed a shorten version of Peter Pan in my elementary school, with all the parents watching in the audience,” stated Steven Spielberg. “I actually staged it and did it as a kid, just like in the opening scene of Hook. I put in that scene almost only for that reason.”
Hook had been put on hiatus for six years. “I had been pursuing the rights and in 1985 I finally acquired them from the London Children’s Hospital. Originally, I was going to make a Peter Pan movie based on the novel, a live-action version like the 1924 Peter Pan silent movie. But something happened, my son Max was born and I lost my appetite for the project.” Clarifying his comment, Spielberg remarked, “I couldn’t be Peter Pan any more. I had to be his father. The story of the boy who never grew-up carries with it a lasting legacy. “Anytime anything flies, whether it’s Superman, Batman, or E.T., it’s got to be a tip of the hat to Peter Pan.” The director added, “To me, flying is synonymous with freedom and unlimited imagination but, interestingly enough, I’m afraid to fly.”
“I related to the main character, Peter Banning [Peter Pan’s adult alter ego], the way Jim [Hart] wrote him – a ‘type A’ personality,” revealed Steven Spielberg. “I think a lot of people today are losing their imagination because they are work-driven. They are so self-involved with work and success and arriving at the next plateau that children and family almost become incidental.” Once production commences on a picture Spielberg implements a creative tunnel vision so to shield himself from the financial concerns. “When the movie is done the studio reminds me how much I’ve spent making the movie. Then, of course, I start to worry.” The production budget of $70 million was not seen to be out of the unordinary by the Ohio native. “Creating a world is always expensive…We all have expectations for Neverland so we needed to put our heads together to create a Neverland that you would believe in.” Populating the fantasy land are cast members Julia Roberts (Something to Talk About), Bob Hoskins (Last Orders), Maggie Smith (Gosford Park), Phil Collins (Buster), Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love), Maxwell Hoffman (Greenberg), Tony Burton (Rocky IV), Kelly Rowan (Assassins), David Crosby (Thunderheart), Nick Tate (The Public Eye) and Glen Close (The Big Chill).
Earning $301 million in worldwide box office receipts, the picture had been received differently during the test screenings. “I think tests are deceiving,” stated Spielberg. “Even though the critical community vilified me and trounced the film, the test scores were some of the highest that had ever been received by a movie.” At the Academy Awards, the movie was up for Best Art and Set Decoration, Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup and Best Original Song; while the Golden Globes nominated it for Best Actor – Comedy/Musical (Dustin Hoffman). The Young Artist Awards honoured Hook with Best Family Motion Picture and Outstanding Young Ensemble Cast as well as nominations for Best Young Actor Under Ten in a Motion Picture (Raushan Hammond), Best Young Actress Under Ten in a Motion Picture (Amber Scott), and Best Young Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture (Dante Basco and Charlie Korsmo).
Cinematically adapting a book by novelist Michael Crichton (The Great Train Robbery) about genetically-recreated dinosaurs running amok on a commercial animal reserve resulted in a movie that pushed the boundaries of computer technology and practical effects. “Our job was to create the most realistic dinosaurs that anyone has ever seen,” said makeup effects wizard Stan Winston of his work on Jurassic Park (1993). “We did an enormous amount of research. We maintained a legitimacy to all of the available knowledge when it came to what dinosaurs looked like and how they lived. We had to take that reality and make it as interesting, as dramatic, as beautiful, and as spectacular as you have ever seen.” Depicting a sense of realism was no easy task for Winston and his team. “We attacked our sculptures in a much more technically engineered way. Instead of just sculpting free-hand, we took our fifth-scale sculptures and sliced them into pies, so to speak, so we had a sculpture put together like the hull of an airplane; then we blew those slices up five times, recreated those hull pieces, and put the armature back together so that we had an armature that was very close to the finished structure of the character. Then it was a matter of detailing: putting on the skin and doing the final sculpting on an armature that gave us the shape.”
“We had four or five months of tests to see if we could make a computer create an image that looked like lizard skin and not like plastic,” stated Dennis Muren, the effects supervisor for Industrial Light & Magic. “Then we had to get the motions right.” The work was not entirely seamless. “In some cases you could see when we cut from a walking CG [computer graphic] element to someone in a suit, to a hydraulic puppet,” admitted special effects supervisor Michael Lantieri. Part of the problem with the believability factor was the setting of the story. “Although terrible things were happening in Jurassic,” explained production designer Rick Carter, “I don’t think you ever felt the terror very deeply, because everything had this Hollywood veneer which is how the theme park presented itself.”
Michael Crichton maintained a pragmatic view about what got translated from the printed page to big screen. “You never get to have things exactly as you want them,” reflected the best-selling author, “and you are always struggling with other people — which is easier than struggling with yourself, but not necessarily more fun. The finished project is never entirely yours, even if you are the director and writer. After so many years doing collaborative work, I’ve gotten used to the way it goes. And sometimes it is incredible fun. So you take the good with the bad.” Explaining the world of Jurassic Park in a way that moviegoers could comprehend without being bored was a major priority for Steven Spielberg. “People don’t know a lot about paleontology,” remarked the director. “They know next to nothing about genetic engineering, so all of the exposition was enthralling. You learned something. I even did some of it in animation, like one of those Frank Baxter films – Our Mr. Sun [1956] or Gateways to the Mind [1958] – that I saw as a kid.” David Koepp (Stir of Echoes), who co-wrote the screenplay with Crichton, was under no disillusions as to what theatre audiences would be expecting. “In writing Jurassic Park, I threw out a lot of detail about the characters because whenever they started talking about their personal lives, you couldn’t care less. You wanted them to shut up and go stand on a hill where you could go see the dinosaurs.” Even with the dinosaurs garnering the cinematic spotlight in the $63 million science fiction-adventure, the performances of actors Sam Neill (Little Fish), Laura Dern (Rambling Rose), Richard Attenborough (The Great Escape), Samuel L. Jackson (The Negotiator), Joseph Mazzello (The Social Network), Ariana Richards (Angus), and Jeff Goldblum did not go by entirely unnoticed. “No one recognized me after I made The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai [1984] and The Fly [1986],” recalled Goldblum. “But after Jurassic Park they would stop me and talk about those films. It’s like Jurassic Park jogged their memories.”
Jurassic Park tallied $915 million in worldwide box office receipts and won Oscars for Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects and Best Sound. At the BAFTAs the picture was presented with the award for Best Visual Effects and received a nomination for Best Sound; in Japan, the Mainichi Film Concours lauded it with the Reader’s Choice Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The MTV Awards nominated Jurassic Park for Best Action Sequence, Best Movie and Best Villain; while the Young Artists Awards handed out trophies for Best Young Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture (Joseph Mazzello), Best Young Actress in a Motion Picture (Ariana Richards), and Outstanding Family Motion Picture – Action/Adventure.
Moving on, Steven Spielberg produced another cinematic adaptation based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Australian writer Thomas Kenneally. Schindler’s List (1993), which shares the same name as the source material, saw the director shift from an imaginary genetic playground to a horrific historic tale. “It’s a drama about the Holocaust, about the real life story of Oskar Schindler, who was a German Catholic profiteer who saved twelve hundred Jews in Poland,” stated Spielberg who bought the film rights to the novel in 1984. “The authenticity of the story was too important to fall back on the commercial techniques that had gotten me a certain reputation in the area of craft and polish…I threw a whole bunch of tools out of the toolbox…I just limited the utensils, so the story would be the strength of the piece.” To better respect the subject matter, the filmmaker decided the picture would be shot in black and white. “I don’t see the Holocaust in colour. I’ve been indoctrinated with documentaries and they’re all in black and white. Every time I see anything in colour about World War II, it looks too glamourized, too antiseptic.” One idea which Spielberg compromised on was the initial plan to have the actors speak only German and Polish in the picture. “I had Germans speaking German, and Poles speaking Polish only on certain occasions when I wanted to pretty much show what it was like and what it sounded like, and then only let those moments come across in English where I had to make a point.”
Filming in Poland, the massive production involved 126 speaking parts, 30,000 extras, 148 sets on 35 locations, and 210 crew members with an additional 30 involved with construction. “Most every place was authentic,” stated Steven Spielberg. “We only had to reconstruct the camp, Plaszow, because Plaszow was a huge 50-foot monument in one direction and a modern skyline in the other direction, so we couldn’t shoot there at all.” Before the principal photography commenced on the $22 million project, a memorial service was held at Auschwtiz, the site of one the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. “Many of the barracks have been torn down, but the chimneys are still there,” remarked the moviemaker. “It’s a forest of chimneys. It was a city. It was an industry, an industry of death. It is a haunted killing field, and you feel it. Everybody was extremely edgy the couple of days we shot there.” The movie caused the Cincinnati born director to deal with his troubled childhood memories. “I kept wanting to have Christmas lights on the front of our house so it didn’t look like the Black Hole of Calcutta in an all-Gentile neighbourhood.” Spielberg confessed, “I was so ashamed of being a Jew, and now I’m filled with pride. I don’t even know when that transition happened.”
“The novel was suggestive, but it wasn’t essentially a point-to-point map of how to tell the Oskar Schindler story,” stated the director. “I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war, and talked about why they had come back. I spent more research time on this project than I had on any previous film.” The trip took on a life beyond the scripted page. “I went there the first time to research a movie and wound up researching my own Judaism.” Actress Kate Capshaw visited her husband during the principal photography for the picture. “Each day was really hard,” remembered Capshaw. “So many shots are violent, emotionally violent. There were a couple of days where I think he really struggled to stay the director – in particular the shower scene, all the women being marched in for disinfection in what was, as we all know, a gas chamber.”
Rumoured leading men for the part of Oskar Schindler were Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon), Harrison Ford (Working Girl), and Kevin Costner (Field of Dreams); however, Spielberg selected an Irish actor for the role. “I tested him on film, and his test was wonderful,” recollected the director about Liam Neeson (Taken), who at the time was performing in the Broadway play Anna Christie. “All the actors I’d been talking to for a year and a half to three years, he was the one that I wanted the most. I also didn’t want to put a movie star in the part because I didn’t want the distraction of a whole bunch of other movies to cloud this one.” To help Neeson with his on-screen persona, Steven Spielberg had him reference a former Time-Warner chairman who served as a father figure to the director before his death in 1992. “Steve Ross gave more insights into Schindler than anybody I have ever known…Before I shot the movie, I sent Liam all my home movies of Steve, I said, ‘Study his walk, study his manner, get to know him real well, because that’s who the guy is.’” The World War II capitalist oozed with charisma. “Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler is the most romantic character I’ve ever worked with. He romances the entire city of Kraków, he romances the Nazis, he romances the politicians, the police chiefs, [and] the women. He was a grand seducer.”
Featured in the three-hour plus historical drama are Ben Kingsley (Sexy Beast), Ralph Fiennes (The Constant Gardener), Caroline Goodall (White Squall), Jonathan Sagalle (Urban Feel), and Embeth Davidtz (Fracture). “I made a rule for myself that any scene that didn’t involve Schindler wasn’t in there,” stated screenwriter Steve Zaillian (Searching for Bobby Fischer). “Schindler didn’t have to be in the scene, the scene just had to have an effect on him.” Zaillian had to modify his storytelling approach when Steven Spielberg became attached to the project. “The biggest change when Spielberg got involved was the liquidation-of-the-ghetto sequence, which in my original script was about two or three pages and which finally ended up being about thirty pages. Spielberg said, ‘I want to follow everybody we’ve met up to this point through this sequence.’” The screenplay continued to evolve. “As we got closer to filming, one of the survivors might talk to Spielberg about something or there might be something in the book that he particularly responded to, and that would go in. I think his changes were good…His great strength is really being able to visually interpret a script.”
The Holocaust film grossed $321 million worldwide and became an international award circuit darling. The Oscars lauded Schindler’s List with Best Art Direction and Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Original Score, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay while nominating it for Best Actor (Liam Neeson), Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Fiennes), Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, and Best Sound. At the BAFTAs, the World War II picture won Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Fiennes), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, and the David Lean Award for Direction; it also contended for Best Actor (Liam Neeson), Best Supporting Actor (Ben Kingsley), Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, Best Production Design, and Best Sound. The Golden Globes handed it trophies for Best Director, Best Picture – Drama, and Best Screeplay as well as nominations for Best Original Score, Best Actor – Drama (Liam Neeson), and Best Supporting Actor – Drama (Ralph Fiennes). Other awards for Schindler’s List came from the Directors Guild of America, the American Cinema Editors, and the Writers Guild of America.
Utilizing his profits from the movie, Steven Spielberg established the Righteous Persons Foundation which for six years after the picture’s release dispersed $37 million to Holocaust and Jewish continuity projects. The director also established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation which has recorded and archived over 50,000 videotape testimonies of Holocaust survivors so to educate future generations about the ethnic genocide.
In 1994, Steven Spielberg made major movie industry news when along with former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen, he established a major studio called DreamWorks SKG. “I’d actual been in conversation with Mike Ovitz, my agent at CAA, on privatizing Amblin [Entertainment, Spielberg’s production company] and turning it into an independent entity,” explained the director. “It’s because I woke up one day and I realized that I really didn’t work for myself. I had achieved success beyond my wildest dreams, but I achieved that working for everybody in Hollywood.” DreamWorks SKG was not the only new venture involving the moviemaker. A video game titled Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair (1996) was released; the player has to negotiate four levels to go from being a novice to an A-list director.
“When Michael [Crichton] told me the basis for his new book was going to be a complete lost world, a perfect dinosaur ecological system, and then about the human incursion into a real prehistoric land, I got very excited,” said Steven Spielberg who returned to the imaginary scientific realm created by the American novelist with The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). “As a popcorn muncher when I was a kid, I always loved those kinds of movies – King Kong [1933], even some of the B’s, like Dinosaurs! and the Jock Mahoney film called The Land Unknown [1957].” Spielberg was very much aware of the dangers of producing a follow-up to a box office sensation. “One of the toughest things about a sequel is the expectation that goes along with it, that you’re going to top the first one. And therein lies all of my anxiety. We worried about that every time we made another Indiana Jones picture. But we wound up realizing you can’t really top yourself. You just tell a different story and hope that the new MacGuffin [the plot device that drives the tale] is as compelling as the last MacGuffin.” David Koepp, who co-wrote the script with Crichton, was not immune to the expectations of audience members. “When we announced the sequel, I got this packet of letters from an elementary school class somewhere outside of San Francisco. One of the kids wrote that we should add a stegosaurus and this and that, but ‘whatever you do, please don’t have a long, boring part at the beginning that has nothing to do with the island.’ In other words, the premise of these movies is so exciting the usual cat-and-mouse just game doesn’t work. The kid was only eight, but he was right. I kept his letter on my desk.”
“Now that we’ve been educated in Hollywood’s version of how dinosaurs are created by man, it’s a tougher challenge to justify why these characters, who wouldn’t ever imagine returning to that nightmare alley, decide to go back,” remarked Steven Spielberg. “It’s not unlike William Holden being asked by Jack Hawkins, in The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957] after that horrendous ordeal of escaping from the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, to lead an elite commando group back in.” Jeff Goldblum reprises his role of Dr. Ian Malcolm, who upon learning that capitalist John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has persuaded the mathematician’s paleontologist sweetheart Dr. Sara Harding (Julianne Moore) to observe dinosaurs on a second island location, angrily responds, “You sent my girlfriend to the island alone? It’s not a research expedition, it’s a rescue mission!” With that remark, the story is immediately set in motion. Devising the various action sequences in the picture was complicated by the cinematic history of Spielberg. “One of the problems writing for Steven is that he’s done so many big, memorable films,” said David Koepp. “You’re always saying, ‘That’s just too Indiana Jones.’” Nevertheless Koepp soldiered on with his assignment. “The first thing you do is say, ‘Okay, if I was going to see a movie like this, what scenes would I really demand be in it? What would be really cool?’ Steven operates from images…I really like working with directors like that because they tend to leave a lot of stuff, dialogue and so on, to you.”
“The first movie was really about the failure of technology and the success of nature,” reflected Steven Spielberg. “This movie is much more about the failure of people to find restraints within themselves, and the failure of morality to protect these animals.” Production designer Rick Carter observed, “I think it’s Jurassic Park post-Schindler’s List…This world is lost and the people in this movie are trying very hard to protect that which they believe in. But the forces they’re up against are too big and powerful and convoluted. Luckily they succeed, but the only way they succeed is by pulling out the smallest of victories.” As for portraying the prehistoric animals returned from extinction, special effects supervisor Michael Lantieri said, “Lots of people suggested that The Lost World should be all CG, because now they’ve done all-CG movies like Dragonheart [1996] and Toy Story [1995]. But we realized that the mix brings something to the life of the creatures that we don’t think can be gotten just mechanically or just digitally.” Lantieri added, “We’ve made a lot of progress in terms of making the robots behave and interact and touch human beings that we couldn’t have done in the first movie….In the first movie we built an Explorer that rolls over and crushes itself with the children in it, but there’s no dinosaur in the shot. In The Lost World, we did a shot in which the rex bites through the real windshield, almost picking the car off the ground, and tears its to pieces.” Visual effects producer Ned Gorman was also up for the challenge of meeting the creative needs of Spielberg. “Steven asked for a higher level of integration of the dinosaurs into the environment,” remarked Gorman. “So when you see dinosaurs running across a meadow, ours are going to be kicking up dust and dirt.”
Produced on a budget of $73 million, The Lost World: Jurassic Park earned $619 million worldwide. The action-adventure received an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, while contending at the Razzie Awards for Worst Reckless Disregard for Human Life or Public Property, Worst Remake or Sequel, and Worst Screenplay.
With The Lost World: Jurassic Park in post-production, Steven Spielberg commenced preparations to film a movie set in the 1830s about a slave rebellion aboard a ship. “I promised myself after I made Schindler’s List that I wasn’t going to make a film just like it next, because Schindler’s List can be as limiting as Jurassic Park can be. So I went to a historical drama, because it’s very compelling for me.” Amistad (1997) starred two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou (In America) as the chief mutineer after Cuba Gooding, Jr. passed on the idea of portraying a slave. “It is obviously difficult to play a slave,” admitted Hounsou. “Now that we have Amistad, if something else comes along in that spirit, I think I would have to leave it to someone else to tackle that. How many slave characters can you play?” Asked whether the tale would be better told by an African-American filmmaker, the actor responded, “I don’t think there was a lack of creativity having a white man telling a historical story about black people. Sometimes it’s better to take a step back with somebody who is not too involved or consumed by the nature of the story to tell that story.” Djimon Hounsou was quick to point out that Steven Spielberg brought something else to the project. “[He] fronted his own money to tell this story. We would never have gotten that much money. It took anywhere from forty to fifty million dollars to make that story. Nobody spends that kind of money on our stories.”
“You’re talking about a story that defines what the make up of this country is all about,” remarked Hounsou. “It’s just a very powerful story and directed by one of the greatest directors of our time.” Steven Spielberg could empathize with the tale of ethnic intolerance because of his Jewish heritage. “We [Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw] were already talking to Theo about slavery and where he came from and who his great-great-grandparents might have been. So when I heard the story, I immediately thought that this was something that I would be pretty proud to make, simply to say to my son, ‘Look, this is about you.’” Recalling his childhood of growing up in a gentile community, Spielberg remarked, “It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be popular or wanted to meet girls. I just didn’t want to get hit in the mouth.” Amistad features the acting talents of Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs), Morgan Freeman (Million Dollar Baby), Nigel Hawthorne (The Madness of King George), Matthew McConaughey (A Time to Kill), Pete Postlethwaite (The Shipping News), Stellan Skarsgård (Dogville), Anna Paquin (The Piano), Chjwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things), Jeremy Northam (Enigma), Arliss Howard (Birth), and Razaaq Adoti (Black Hawk Down). Upon the released of the picture, Variety stated in its film review, “Thematically, the new film is a logical endeavor following Schindler’s List, though stylistically the two films are very different – Amistad lacks the subtleness of tone and simplicity of form that made the 1993 Oscar-winning film so special in Spielberg’s oeuvre.” The director was in agreement with the movie industry publication as he confided, “It became too much of a history lesson.”
Amistad was featured in plagiarism lawsuit by author Barbara Chase-Riboud who claimed that there were forty points of overwhelming similarities between her book Echo of Lions and the film. Only one literary source was referenced in the screen credits, Black Mutiny: The Revolt of the Schooner Amistad by William A. Owens. The request for a court injunction to prevent the release of the picture was denied (the case has since been settled). Upon opening, the $36 million Hollywood production grossed $44 million domestically and received Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score. The Golden Globes nominated the historical drama for Best Director, Best Picture – Drama, Best Actor – Drama (Djimou Hounsou), and Best Supporting Actor – Drama (Anthony Hopkins). Anthony Hopkins contended for Outstanding Performance of a Male Actor in a Supporting Role at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and Steven Spielberg was lauded with a nomination from the Directors Guild of America.
Revisiting World War II in 1998, Steven Spielberg produced a story about a group of American soldiers sent to rescue a comrade left behind enemy lines. “In truth, on [Saving] Private Ryan I tried to take the opposite approach of nearly every one of my favourite World War II movies,” said the director who admires William Wellman’s Battleground [1949], Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet [1951] and Don Siegel’s Hell is for Heroes [1962]. “Films that were made during the actual war years never really concerned themselves with realism, but more with extolling the virtues of winning and sacrificing ourselves upon the altar of freedom.” The tone of the war picture was affected by historical footage. “From a visual perspective, I was more influenced by various World War II documentaries – Memphis Belle [1944], Why We Fight [1943], John Ford’s Midway movie and John Huston’s film on the liberation of the Nazi death camps… I was also very inspired by [photographer] Robert Capa’s documentary work, and the eight surviving stills he took during the assault on Omaha Beach.”
“Had I attempted Saving Private Ryan at an earlier stage in my career, it probably would have been a little closer to The Dirty Dozen [1967] or Where Eagles Dare [1968] because I don’t think I understood the gravity of that war when I first started,” confessed Steven Spielberg whose debate on how to film the movie was settled when he was faced with a parental question from his father about Schindler’s List. “He asked me why I shot it in black and white, and I said because my only experience with the Holocaust has been through black-arid-white archival footage. And my dad said, ‘Well, I was alive during that time and I fought in WWII, and my experiences were in full, living, bleeding colour.’ I remember him telling me that, and that really helped me make a decision on Saving Private Ryan.” Along with desaturating the colour footage, the moviemaker decided to imitate the equipment used by Second World War photographers. “I discovered that a lot of those old cameras that were being used by the Signal Corps had 43-degree shutters, A 45- or 90-degree shutter eradicates blurring, and it made the image look so neurotic and chaotic and panic-stricken, that I thought this was the way I need to shoot every combat scene in Saving Private Ryan.”
Serving as the dramatic piece of the picture is the opening D-Day landing scene. “I shot the entire Omaha Beach sequence in continuity, starting in the landing craft and ending at the top of the bluff at the Vierville exit,” revealed Steven Spielberg. “Figuring that most of the members of our audience had never seen combat, I thought it was a good way to put the audience in the shoes of every member of that squad, because that sequence would inform [them of] every square inch of terrain that they had to navigate to somehow get to Private Ryan.” Spielberg continued, “When I did have a high shot, it was usually justified by either being through the gunsight of a German sniper, or showing the point of view of one the squad members who at the time was on high ground.” The American helmer wanted to make sure he was cinematically authentic. “I had a very good advisor for the battle scenes [retired Marine Corps Captain] Dale Dye,” explained the director. “He served three tours of duty under fire in Vietnam, and he was wounded several times. In order to capture the realism of combat, I relied on Dale, as well as several World War II combat veterans who served as consultants.” Ireland took the place of Normandy for the principal photography. “During the four weeks that we were shooting the Omaha Beach sequence, which comprises the first twenty-five minutes of the film, we had very rough seas and bad weather – it was overcast for ninety percent of the time. That was a miracle, because we were shooting at a time of year when there’s normally bright weather and tourists.”
“In order to keep the actors involved in the story, I had to keep them on the set, which meant shooting the film even faster than I normally do,” remarked Steven Spielberg. “War doesn’t give you a break, and I didn’t want the production of Private Ryan to give them one either.” As much as he was personally connected to the story because of his father’s wartime tales, Spielberg had doubts about the picture’s box office appeal. “I’d said to my whole cast midway through the shooting, ‘Don’t think of this as something we’re going to go out and make a killing on, but just as a memorial. We’re thanking all of those guys, your grandparents and my Dad, who fought in World War II.’” Among the cast of Matt Damon (Green Zone), Jeremy Davis (Rescue Dawn), Vin Diesel (Pitch Black), Tom Sizemore (Heat), Giovanni Ribisi (Heaven), Paul Giamatti (Sideways), Dennis Farina (Get Shorty), Barry Pepper (True Grit), Adam Goldberg (The Salton Sea) are performers such as Tom Hanks (That Thing You Do!) and Edward J. Burns (She’s the One) who have spent some time behind the camera. “I think all the actors who once directed were so overwhelmed by what we were trying to put on film that they got quiet awfully fast. They didn’t even want to make a suggestion for fear that I would say ‘What a good idea, why don’t you do the next four shots?’” Helping Spielberg assemble the war epic in post-production was a veteran collaborator. “The editing was pretty amazing. Mike Kahn [Raiders of the Lost Ark] has been my editor for ninety percent of every movie I’ve ever made. He cut the film right behind my directing it, meaning that I was spending mornings and lunch hours, and sometimes evenings with him in the editing trailer or in the editing room in London.”
“I’m very satisfied with it,” reflected Steven Spielberg on the picture which had a production budget of $70 million. “There’s nothing I would have changed even though the bookends, the beginning and ending in the cemetery, have gotten some criticism. I really did that for the veterans, and those two scenes actually affected the veterans more than the Omaha Beach landings.” Grossing $482 million worldwide, Saving Private Ryan won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Editing and Best Sound; it also received Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Art Direction and Set Decoration, Best Makeup, Best Original Score, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay. The BAFTAs presented the movie with the trophies for Best Sound and Best Special Visual Effects; it also contended for the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Makeup, Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Production Design, and the David Lean Award for Direction. At the Golden Globes, Saving Private Ryan won Best Director and Best Picture – Drama and was lauded with nominations for Best Original Score, Best Actor – Drama (Tom Hanks), and Best Screenplay. The American Cinema Editors presented the WWII movie with the Eddie for Best Edited Feature Film, Spielberg won a Directors Guild of America Award, and the Writers Guild of America nominated the script for Best Original Screenplay. The Screen Actors Guild Awards handed out nominations for Outstanding Performance by a Cast and Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role (Tom Hanks).
As part of the millennium New Year’s Eve celebrations, Steven Spielberg produced a twenty-minute documentary about American life and history. The Unfinished Journey (1999) stars Maya Angelou as well as the narrative vocal talents of former U.S. president Bill Clinton, Ossie Davies (Do the Right Thing), Rudy Dee (American Gangster), Edward James Olmos (Blade Runner) and Sam Waterson (The Killing Fields).
For his first twenty-first century picture, Spielberg completed a project started by one of his cinematic idols.
Continue to part five.
Visit the official Dreamworks website here.
Related:
Five Essential Films of Steven Spielberg
Short Film Showcase – Amblin’ (1968)
Short Film Showcase – Duel (1971)
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
