BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Steven Spielberg, center, gives direction to Tom Hanks, left.
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CHICAGO -- In his newest movie, Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg confronts what he calls "the defining event of the 20th century" -- World War II.
The movie follows one company of Army Rangers who survive the carnage of Normandy's Omaha Beach on D-Day, then are sent into enemy territory to find a paratrooper whose three brothers have been killed in combat.
It re-creates battle scenes in excruciating, realistic detail. No war film has depicted combat violence as graphically or has been as faithful in recounting of the experience of men on the ground.
"I always think it's easier to honor something in its total truth decades later," Mr. Spielberg said, during a stop on a nationwide tour to promote the film, which opens Friday. "It's too hard, closer to the event, to gain any perspective."
Like most of his generation, Mr. Spielberg, 50, grew up playing soldier. One of the homemade stories he filmed as a teen-ager with his father's 8mm camera was a war movie he called Battle Squad.
"I thought war was something that was romantic, that was attractive, that created heroes . . . or cast people that were already heroes and extended their virtues."
He had watched war movies of the 1940s, designed to shore up morale at home and reassure the nation that its sacrifices were justified. He also absorbed later films that turned World War II into "a colorful backdrop for adventure," he said, as in The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare and Von Ryan's Express.
It was during the Vietnam war when he, like his contemporaries, suddenly found reason to consider the facts of war. He lost his student deferment and was classified 1A. He took his pre-induction physical in Oakland, Calif., though he was never drafted.
"That's when I began to watch the news," he said. "I was just terrified I was going to have to go. . . . That's when Vietnam became a reality for me. I also buried a friend of mine who came back from Vietnam in a casket."
Films about the conflict are dominated by the bitter cynicism the war itself engendered.
Tom Hanks, center, in a scene from Saving Private Ryan
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For Saving Private Ryan, the director was determined to shed both the flag-waving and the bitter cynicism of earlier war stories. He turned to combat veterans -- and combat documentaries -- for his cues.
"We've been conditioned to watch war movies from a storyteller's point of view, or from an adventurer or explorer's point of view. But . . . all the movies have kind of fudged the truth about combat battlefield conditions," he said.
"I wasn't interested in taking Private Ryan and joining a long list of movies that have already been made that put WWII on a pedestal and which said that Vietnam was the real cruel war . . . War is war is war is war.
"I thought it was important for at least people of my dad's generation to be able to see a war picture that was more like what we believed the truth of Vietnam to be -- which was the truth of all wars."
GI viewpoint
Inspiration came from the books of historian Stephen E. Ambrose (Citizen Soldiers) for GI testimony that "painted a picture of chaos," as well as wartime documentaries, some by distinguished directors such as John Huston, George Stevens and John Ford.
Steve Spielberg on the set
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The film boasts a visual style unlike any previous Spielberg film. The director and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who also won an Oscar for Schindler's List) used hand-held cameras, muted color, grainy textures and sharp detail to achieve a look that evokes footage shot by the U.S. Army Signal Corps and other combat photographers.
"I looked at not hours' but days' worth of documentary footage from WWII," Mr. Spielberg said. "I went into the archives to look at outtakes . . . and discovered something really interesting -- that combat camera people really want to live.
"So the cameras are in places that would afford the camera person cover, or defilade, from all the firepower coming at everyone, and still get the footage. I found so often that the camera was just down so low to the ground, where my camera is almost all the time."
So absorbed did he become in the GI viewpoint that when an assistant director one day said, "Your camera hasn't left the ground," the director responded, "Of course not, I don't want to get my head blown off!"
In addition, he said, "Janusz stripped all of the coating off the lenses. Coating is put on the lenses to make everybody look pretty good. It makes men, makes women look good. It's the stuff that movie stars are made of. We stripped the coating off the lens because the combat cameramen didn't have any coating."
Mr. Spielberg noted that in most films, effects such as the impact of a bullet are shown "only where the camera can see them, in relative close-up."
SPIELBERG'S FILMS
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Films directed by Steven Spielberg:
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Amistad (1997)
Schindler's List (1993)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Hook (1991)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Always (1989)
Empire of the Sun (1987)
The Color Purple (1985)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Twilight Zone: The Movie (one segment) (1983)
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
1941 (1979)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Jaws (1975)
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In shooting Private Ryan, he said, "I pulled my camera way back, and did the same kind of bullet hits on the sand and on people where you would only subliminally see it.
"I was more concerned with the details of the fighting, but wasn't concerned about exploiting those details, which in my opinion would have been the gratuitous thing to do."
Though his crews spent long hours rigging hundreds of extras with squibs set to explode like bloody wounds during the battle scenes, Mr. Spielberg said, "I didn't do anything for shock value." In fact, he said, "I tried very hard to avoid shock value by letting the different incidents of tragedy be over quickly and not glorify it by doing it in slow motion like (director) Sam Peckinpah, but letting it be over fast and getting on with getting off the beach to the next obstacle.
"I felt in my heart I was not being a gratuitously violent re-creator of that war, but I was just trying to create the facts, as ugly as they are, but not dwell on them," he said.
He accepts that the realism of the violence will keep some viewers away from the film, including some WWII veterans.
He likened their reaction to Holocaust survivors who stayed away from Schindler's List because they did not want to relive the worst moments of their lives.
"I expect a lot of veterans who were in extreme combat situations will respect what we've done, but won't (see) the film," he said.
"The level of violence, by the way, for moviegoers is extreme but for combat veterans is probably below average," he said "I wanted to lean more toward the combat veteran's experience than what the audience is used to seeing in the movies.
"But had I wanted to make a fortune with this film, I certainly would have made more of an average war movie."
"Boot camp' for cast
For realism's sake, the director insisted that his principal cast members, including Tom Hanks, Edward Burns and Matt Damon, attend a six-day "boot camp" designed by military consultant Dale Dye to introduce the actors to life in the foxholes.
"In six days you can't learn very much about being a soldier," Mr. Spielberg said. "But in six days you can learn how to respect a soldier."
Once shooting began, the pace was intense, he said.
"We were so organized that, while riggers were putting in effects on one end of the beach, I was shooting on the other. I literally never stopped shooting. One of the reasons I shot so quickly was to give all the actors the feeling we really were accomplishing something.
"You know, often in a movie you don't feel like you're accomplishing anything, because you spend all your time reading novels in trailers. . . . These actors never went back to their trailers except for lunch. During the whole four months of shooting this picture, they were on the set all the time. We shot and shot and shot. We shot a lot of film."
The pace and the subject matter left emotions rubbed raw.
"There was a lot of crying on the set," Mr. Spielberg said.
One reason: "We shot the film in continuity. . . . I wanted everybody to learn about what this experience was like from the beginning to the end, and often from the beginning to the end of their lives." When the actors saw the finished film, he said, "They told me "This is the first time we ever saw a movie where we had no memory of making it and we don't even recognize ourselves in it.' So they kind of had an out of body experience watching the picture."
Inspired by his father
Mr. Spielberg said Saving Private Ryan owes much to his father, now 80, who served in World War II as a pilot flying supply planes in Burma.
"He really inspired me to make this movie. He told me war stories all his life. He had reunions with some of the guys from his group. I met a few of them when I was very young, and they would tell war stories. My dad made contributions to this movie. He told me about "fubar,' which I never heard about before." The term was GI shorthand for "fouled up beyond all recognition."
NO FILM FOR CINCINNATI
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Steven Spielberg is the most honored, imitated and successful director in the United States. He counts among his films some of the biggest money-makers of all times, as well as some of the best-loved modern movies. He directed five of the 100 titles voted onto the American Film Institute list of great films.
Although he spent most of his childhood in Arizona, he was born in Cincinnati. They left when he was 2.
Presumably that connection is the source of persistent rumors that Mr. Spielberg is planning to make a movie here.
Not so, he said last week. Nothing on his far-ranging work schedule calls for him to be in or near Cincinnati "for the foreseeable future," he said.
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Mr. Spielberg admitted he feels a special affinity for the World War II era, which he has visited before in his films 1941, The Empire of the Sun and Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as his masterwork, Schindler's List.
"I think World War II, and the '40s in general, is one of the few periods of time in our nation's history where we really were a united country and we weren't living in pods, as we are today," he said.
"Back then there were communities, and the communities were kind of closely knit. Family values meant more; children actually listened to their parents, believe it or not, 50 years ago.
"I've sort of always had 1940s envy. The only thing I decry about the 1930s and '40s was the absolute and ultimate racism that this country swept under the table.
"So there were good things and bad things. I just have never found -- unless it's science fiction -- good contemporary subjects that I'm interested in spending time directing. My kids call me retro-dad."
He credits a new resurgence of interest in WWII -- the subject of several other upcoming films -- in part to 50th anniversary commemorations, such as those marking the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, when thousands died in the beginning of the final drive to recapture Europe from Nazi Germany.
"Saving Private Ryan is a very specific story, but the larger context is World War II, and that attracted me very, very much," Mr. Spielberg said.
"What got me to want to tell this story was the heartfelt interest, which was the moral question: Do you send eight to save one because someone in Washington, D.C., thinks it would be an important gesture, to show Americans the government is compassionate, to send one boy out of millions of boys home to his mom because of what happened to his brothers? That's what attracted me."
While the story is told from the point of view of GIs in battle, the larger significance of the war informs the grueling action.
"Had we lost that war," Mr. Spielberg said, "there would not have been a baby boom to create a Generation X. . . . My dad used to tell me stories. He'd say, "You wouldn't be here today (if the Allies had lost the war).' I didn't believe him. I thought it was his job to tell me that."
In the end, he said, the movie pays tribute to the people who fought and won World War II, not to the necessity that sent them into battle.
"Every movie that doesn't trade on the war for entertainment reasons is an anti-war movie," he said. "Certainly Saving Private Ryan is not a pro-war film."
