“You know,” Steven Spielberg recalls, in his suite at Chicago’s Four Seasons, “My dad was a soldier in World War II. In the Army Air Corps. And for years, he’s been after me – for so many years – about what he used to call `his war.’ “
His war. Iwo Jima. Okinawa. Bastogne. Omaha Beach.
At 51, facing a marathon of interviews for his great, wrenching new war movie “Saving Private Ryan,” Spielberg’s eyes still burn with curiosity and energy: a glow that hearkens back to his days as a 21-year-old Hollywood wunderkind, or even earlier, as a teenage prodigy making amateur movies in his hometown near Phoenix.
But he’s different now somehow, and Omaha Beach is part of the reason.
Re-created with numbing violence and jolting realism as the first act of “Saving Private Ryan,” that legendary battle–the fiercest and deadliest of D-Day, June 6, 1944–was a rite of passage for the American soldiers who fought and died there. And, in art and memory, for Spielberg, too.
No longer simply the safe, audience-friendly director of “Jaws” and “E.T.,” Spielberg presented the war as a cauldron of bravery and savagery, iconoclasm and idealism. In “Saving Private Ryan,” he has made probably the first great cross-generational World War II movie.
The generation of Spielberg’s father. And his own.
“I talked with a lot of veterans before I made this picture,” he says. “And they all call it `their war.’ I was really interested in this possessory credit. . . . how they personalize it, how they take it upon themselves. They all say: `It was my war.’ I never quite understood that as I was growing up.”
Everyone changes. But the 1990s have seen a remarkable alteration in the “Dreamworks” mogul and 1993 Oscar-winner (for “Schindler’s list”). In the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, Spielberg caught the world’s fancy and broke all box-office records by awakening a worldwide sense of wonder. Mining his early memories and emotions, he drew the mass movie audience into a kind of spectacular second childhood: terror (“Jaws”), other worlds (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), adventure (The Indiana Jones Trilogy) and a high-tech realm of magic and myth (“Jurassic Park”).
But now, as he moves in a different direction, he wants to be seen in a different way. “I’m not in real life what I am in my movies,” he told me in 1993, before the opening of “Schindler’s List.” “Not until this time!”
The Spielberg of “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” (and, though in a different key, of “E.T”) is, he says, the real one. Yet, despite “Ryan’s” huge opening week grosses, he fears part of his devoted audience may not follow him.
“I can take the audience with me, if they’ll come,” Spielberg predicts. “But I tend to lose some . . . when I depart from what they expect from me. And I think I’ll lose more and more of them.
“But to me, it’s worth it, because I am able to explore stuff that I wasn’t able to allow myself 10 years ago.”
How does he see himself now? “What I would love to be, today, inside my own company (Dreamworks), or in any other studio . . .” Spielberg says, and pauses. “I love independent movies. Films that have independent attitudes. . . . Sometimes, in some of the stories I’ve told, I felt I was a bit attached by the umbilical cord to the audience. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really allowed myself to make my movies.”
But “Saving Private Ryan” is a more logical extension for Spielberg than his old fans might guess. It’s another quest movie, another picture about endangered children, going home and reuniting families.
Dad’s war stories
The son of WWII veteran and electrical engineer Arnold Spielberg, Steven Spielberg says he made “Ryan” largely because of his fascination with his dad’s war stories. And the movies they saw as well: “I grew up on the World War II `over the top’ pictures. I was raised in thinking that World War II was not only the only just war–and the only necessary war–but that it was a war that really inspired one to be part of it. And, if you weren’t part of it, you had missed out on something great.
“Look at how many WWII pictures that preceded (`Saving Private Ryan’) were mindlessly affirmative only because they had a job to do. (They) were propaganda pictures, effectively supporting the Second World War, and giving solace to the home front. That was an important thing to do. And the American flag meant something different in those days than it does today, anyway.”
Instead of his father’s war, with its stirring flag-raising on Iwo Jima, the cataclysm Spielberg grew up with was the morally equivocal, debated and hated Vietnam–shown on TV in horrific images that disillusioned much of America.
“I thought World War II was the clean war, where people were romantically wounded. And if they died horribly, it was just not as horribly as they were dying in Vietnam.” Classified as 1A at 18, Spielberg missed service only because he had a high draft lottery number. “Even then,” he says, “as an 18-year-old, I’m thinking, I don’t want to fight it. Not because I was political . . . but because the images I’m seeing on television are much more horrifying than the images . . . from Hollywood about the Second World War. A war I would have fought in.”
So, when it came time to actually film his father’s war, Spielberg already saw it in the harsher Vietnam era light. And by his own experiences dealing with a similarly painful WWII era history in “Schindler’s List.”
“You know, I couldn’t go backwards from `Schindler’s List.’ Suddenly go back and romanticize warfare. And make it commercial. . . . I have a whole other way I could have made this movie that would have made our investors much happier. A `Dirty Dozen.’ But I didn’t want to make that picture, because (it) had been made over and over again by Hollywood.”
Old war movies
Spielberg frowns when he’s reminded of some critics’ complaints of old war movie cliches in “Ryan.” “We weren’t trying to play on stereotypes. The reason I wanted Eddie Burns’ (wisecracking Pvt. Reiben) to be from Brooklyn is because I had read that Brooklyn sent 350,000 boys into World War II, the most of any community in the entire country. And the coward (Jeremy Davies’ gunshy interpreter, Corp. Upham): that’s me. My point of view of this movie was through his eyes. So I kept building up his character, (which) was very thinly sketched throughout (Robert Rodat’s) script.
“You know, I shot this film in continuity, which I hadn’t done since `E.T.’ It’s been 16 years since I shot anything in continuity. But I found that the wonderful thing is: You can start to lay pipe for things that are going to pay off later. Like Upham’s character.”
Nowhere did Speilberg fight cliches more than in his battle scenes: eruptions of chaos and horror that were meticulously planned, with bodies falling all around in an eerily realistic gray light.
But, real as they seem, they also were inspired by his longtime passion for film, especially the old Hollywood war movies he says he still loves: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Lewis Milestone’s classic 1930 anti-war tale from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel; the grittier and more realistic battle pictures like Milestone’s 1945 “A Walk in the Sun,” William Wellman’s “The Story of G.I. Joe” (1945) and “Battleground” (1949); John Huston’s 1945 documentary “The Battle of San Pietro”; and, from the Korean War, Sam Fuller’s 1951 “The Steel Helmet.
Other, more exotic influences are visible too. When I mention that “Saving Private Ryan” reminded me of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s period epic “Seven Samurai,” Spielberg smiles: “That’s one of my favorite pictures of all time! That’s a good call. I love `The Seven Samurai.’
“When I first met Kurosawa, and he took me to dinner in Tokyo, we talked until the sun rose about `The Seven Samurai.’ We were in the restaurant from 9 o’clock at night till about 5 o’clock in the morning. . . . That was amazing. I wish I’d had a tape recorder. I wish I had written a book.”
What would Spielberg like to do next? Something very unwarlike. “One thing I’m fiercely looking for is a love story. I’ve been looking for one for 20 years.
“I’d love to do a contemporary love story. I’m not talking about making it kitschy or entertaining like `My Best Friend’s Wedding.’ I’d like to do a realistic romance, but the way they were done in the 1930s. I love the screwball love stories. (I guess) I’ve got to get a writer who’s in love! And not with themselves.”
Never in his career has Spielberg made a genuinely mature love story. But, then, never in his career before “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” had he made a real-life historical drama or a realistic battle film. Both have been career watersheds for him and “Ryan” is, as well, a fitting tribute to his father’s generation. As he hoped it would be.
“Halfway through making this movie, Tom Hanks and I are sitting down talking about it,” he says, “and we caught each other referring to (WWII) as `my war.’ And it was the darndest thing. I called my dad up later, when I got back to Los Angeles, and I said: `I’ve been calling it my war, Dad. Just like you used to.’ “
PUTTING `CHAOS’ ON FILM
Even detractors of “Saving Private Ryan” agree that Steven Spielberg’s re-creation of the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach is a staggering achievement. Here’s how he shot it:
“I kept thinking . . . how do you fight in a war as a Signal Corps combat cameraman? That was my approach: Where do you put the camera? Do you put the camera where a Hollywood director puts it, where the composition is just perfect, and you get the guys lined up in the right way? Or do you just try to get the shot without getting your body blown up?
“I was much more of a mindset to figure out: How do you put chaos on film? And you put chaos on film by celebrating all the `mistakes.’
“It was elaborately planned. The rigging crew would rig the bullet hits for long shots (from 200 yards), not just for close-ups (from 5 feet). Also, Janusz Kaminski, (the cinematographer), took all the coating off the lenses (to approximate the condition of 1944 lenses, which let in more light and gave it more of a newsreel look).”
Spielberg and Kaminski then supervised the hellish action, either from the sandy beach command post, or while carrying handheld viewing monitors and moving behind the running camera operators. “Most of the time I used the single camera (instead of the multiple simultaneous cameras favored by action virtuosos like Sam Peckinpah and Akira Kurosawa), because I needed to be more in control of that shot.” He also used remote control “vibration lenses” to heighten the battle-like effect.
Rather than use today’s standard of 180-degree shutters, Spielberg shot the Omaha Beach sequence using mostly a 45-degree shutter “only because all the Bell & Howells in 1944 had 45-degree shutters. (The shutter controls light coming into the lens). When you take a shot of an explosion with a 180-degree shutter, it’s a beautiful explosion (like) you’ve seen in many, many movies. But when you do the same thing with a 45-degree shutter, it’s still at 24 frames a second, and you can count every piece of dirt that goes into the air.
“Have you ever seen `All Quiet on the Western Front?’ It was all shot with a 45-degree shutter. That’s all they had in those days.”
