In the Footsteps of G.I. Joe

It has been a long while since an actor wearing a U.S. infantryman’s helmet qualified as an undisputed American movie hero, but Tom Hanks and the seven men who play his Omaha Beach brothers in arms are poised to turn back the clock on that notion when “Saving Private Ryan” opens Friday. Their director, Steven Spielberg, has not exactly recast them in the mold of John Wayne in “The Sands of Iwo Jima” or “The Longest Day,” however.

Hanks, as Capt. John Miller, and his squad of young Rangers seem about to make their own kind of history this summer as they storm the beach at Normandy gripped in bloody terror, then brave the limb-splintering firepower of German tanks in occupied France, showing us World War II in unfamiliar close-ups that reveal the ravages of real heroism and the crippling humanity of cowardice.

“When I was a kid,” says Hanks, “and saw war movies like ‘The Dirty Dozen’ and ‘The Great Escape,’ we immediately went outside and played our version of the same movie. I don’t think many kids are going to go out and play ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ ”

Which says a lot about the kind of film Spielberg and company have made from Robert Rodat’s script. The experience itself was anything but ordinary, as Hanks and his fellow actors Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore and Matt Damon bear witness months later on a Sunday in July as they sit in a Pasadena hotel room sipping coffee, reflecting on working for the famous director who vowed he “would not exploit the glory of it all but try to discover what it’s really like to be in combat.”

Burns has already said he considers “Private Ryan” an antiwar film, even as it dramatizes the courage of young men giving their lives in the unimpeachable cause of reclaiming Europe from the Nazis.

“I think Steven wanted you to see that much as those sacrifices had to be made, they aren’t glamorous,” the 30-year-old Burns explains now. “It’s a horrific, horrific thing that kids 10 years younger than me had to go do 50-some-odd years ago.”

“It’s ambiguous whether it’s an antiwar movie or not,” says Sizemore, who has a voice like tires on wet gravel and plays the sturdy Sgt. Horvath, a role that 40 years ago might have gone to William Bendix or Aldo Ray. “I actually don’t think that it is. It asks a question: ‘At what cost do we fight and for what?’ ”

What sets “Private Ryan” apart from so many of the earlier films made about World War II are both the unflinching agonies of its battle scenes and the dilemma of its main story that finds Hanks’ squad members risking their lives not just to defeat Hitler but to rescue a lowly private (Damon) in what the soldiers see as a public relations mission for the Army. There are no easy answers to some of the questions that arise--for the squad and for the audience.

Informed by Steven Ambrose’s 1994 bestseller, “D-Day: The Climactic Battle of WWII,” which was itself based on first-person accounts of veterans, the movie’s first half-hour is a maelstrom of shell shock, death and fear as the Allies hit the beaches under horrendous fire.

“We’ve all seen amphibious landings in the movies before,” says Hanks, conjuring one up. “A young Richard Jaekel or Marty Milner standing on the boat. Maybe they’re nervous about [whether] they’re gonna get killed but none of them are seasick and none of them are throwing up.”

“And none of them were wet!” notes Sizemore.

In Ambrose’s book, veterans recount how the landing crafts lurched through rough seas in the Channel on June 6, 1944, with men getting drenched by waves while their stomachs turned. As they waited to face the German machine guns, they stood ankle-deep in seawater and vomit, bailing it with their helmets. It’s the sort of detail Spielberg didn’t miss.

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Has a war movie ever been louder? As part of its strategy to spare the audience as little as possible, the decibel level of the mortars, cannons and machine guns passes over the pain threshold. Was it just as loud for the actors filming those sequences?

“Though we did it in two- to three-minute bursts, it was so loud, the first time it happened it was horrifying,” says Hanks. “We ended up wearing ear protection because otherwise we’d all have severe damage to our ears. There are a lot of weapons going off, and while they’re blanks, they’re full loads, and you’ve got the mortars and the tanks. It was cacophony. Plus, there are moments when hot shells are landing on you, little bits and pieces of the pyrotechnics coming down.”

“If you were next to Eddie [Burns] when he fires his BAR [Browning automatic rifle], ‘Oh, God, BOOM!’ ” says Sizemore, wincing.

“I can’t imagine how frightening [the real invasion] was,” says Burns, the handsome Long Island wunderkind who plays the most reluctant of the warriors on this questionable mission. “Because it was scary doing some of the things in the movie. Bullets aren’t flying, but dirt and rocks and stuff are flying in your face. You never thought you were at war but you kind of forgot for a second you were on a movie set. Your blood gets pumpin’, you’re firin’ your gun and you just kind of get amped up.”

Like the actors in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War epic, “Platoon,” Burns, Hanks and the rest spent a miserable week of military orientation under the lash of retired Marine Corps Capt. Dale Dye, who provides a kind of rude finishing school for actors who want to be soldiers. (Dye has a part in the movie as well, playing an aide to Gen. George Marshall, portrayed by Harve Presnell, who orders the mission to save Ryan.)

“Everybody wanted to quit but me,” says Hanks, none of the others challenging his recollection.

“We took a vote to leave,” Burns says. “Everybody voted to go; Tom voted to stay. He said, ‘How would you guys feel about a re-vote?’ Everyone said, ‘I feel good about a re-vote,’ ” he says looking over at the star. “Then everybody voted to stay.”

There is laughter now, remembering this. But they say the training helped. They felt so assured in uniform by the time the cameras rolled, some of them fell asleep in the grass minutes before the first take, mimicking the infantryman’s impulse to get rest when he could. “On a big movie like this,” says Damon incredulously, “a Steven Spielberg movie no less, to have a group of actors who are literally asleep on the grass get woken up to go do the scene and then go back to sleep!”

Spielberg has said he took his main visual cue not from other combat films but from the eight surviving photographs taken on Omaha Beach by Robert Capa, who, on assignment for Life magazine, went ashore with the first wave of American troops. To get the same stark effect of the Capa photos, the director had cameraman Mitch Dubin carry a hand-held camera and run with the squad, producing a jittery, GI’s perspective for many of the action shots. “Mitch was one of us,” Hanks says.

The actors say Spielberg also relied heavily on improvisation to build scenes. “He’s very collaborative,” says Hanks, who, though a close friend of Spielberg’s, was working with him in front of a camera for the first time. “He’s cast you in this part for a particular reason, this quality that you’ve got, so he’s hiring you to do that thing you do--pardon my use of the term. He wants your chops.”

“The fact that he shot all hand-held exteriors [meant] we were never sitting around waiting for lighting,” recalls Burns. “There was a lot of room for us to experiment. We could kind of play a little bit.”

“He certainly was never constrained by the script in any way,” says Damon, who, with partner Ben Affleck, won a screenwriting Oscar in March for “Good Will Hunting.”

Speaking during an interview earlier in the day, screenwriter Rodat praised the director for “embracing the ambiguity of the film, not only in moral terms but in cinematic terms.” For a change, Spielberg did not “storyboard” the film, or sketch the scenes visually ahead of time, as is often done to control the look of a picture.

Rodat cited the example of a climactic scene in which Hanks must diffuse violent tension building between two members of the squad. “He’s not even in the foreground when he speaks up,” the writer said. “You don’t even hear him the first time he says it. He’s facing away from the camera. That’s a very anti-cinematic moment.”

Another unexpected scene depicts in awful detail the inability of a bright noncombatant corporal (Jeremy Davies) to act in defense of a fellow squad member who is being killed. “I see him,” Rodat said of the corporal, “as a stand-in for the audience.”

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For those who grew up on the World War II cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s, as did Spielberg and Rodat, the degree of atmospheric realism achieved in “Saving Private Ryan” would seem to call into question how anyone will ever be able to look at Daryl Zanuck’s “The Longest Day” (1962) again and see past its period kitsch and staginess.

“I respect that book, and the movie was a movie of its time,” Rodat said, “but it was trying to do more than you could ask of a film, frankly. It was trying to show all aspects of such a huge undertaking and show them with the extreme constraints of not being too realistic.”

While “The Longest Day” (which had three directors and was shot in black-and-white) attempted to lay out a complete logistical account of the Normandy invasion, Spielberg has pushed history into soft focus around the experience of one squad and its post-invasion mission to rescue the last surviving son of an Iowa farm family that has lost three other sons to the war in a single week.

“At the first meeting,” Rodat said, “both [Spielberg] and Tom Hanks said, ‘We don’t want to make a “movie-movie,” ’ “ a term for traditional Hollywood make-believe, at which Spielberg has excelled. “We wanted to get to an emotional realism, gathered from talking to veterans and reading first-person accounts.”

Rodat’s own father fought in Europe in the war and was badly wounded. “My father has never seen a war film he likes. He thinks they’re phony-baloney.”

Spielberg, whose father also served in the war, has said he admires certain World War II movies, particularly two from 1949: “Battleground,” about the Battle of the Bulge, directed by William Wellman, and “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” directed by Allan Dwan.

“They weren’t representative of what it was like to be in a war, but I enjoyed those films,” Spielberg said in April when he was finishing ‘Private Ryan.” “I think it took Vietnam to sober everybody up and certainly caused me to look at war not as someone trying to exploit the glory of it all but someone trying to discover what it’s really like to be in combat.”

Stone made “Platoon” from memory, having fought with the U.S. infantry in Vietnam. Spielberg had to draw on the memories of others. “I haven’t been in combat but I was surrounded by those who were, Rangers who were in the first, second and third waves at Omaha Beach, with the 29th Division as well as the 101st Airborne who parachuted into Normandy. We had some pretty good technical consultants.” Spielberg said the veterans implored him “to please be as honest as you can in showing what we saw.”

Which was not--and is not--pretty. And is not what people once went to the movies to see. Whether audiences in large numbers will want to see it now remains an open question--but ironically it is surely the gradual acceptance of a higher level of sensational violence in films that has made a film like this one, about the consequences of violence, possible.

“I just think it takes an awful lot of time and an awful lot of other movies to enter into the national consciousness before you can go and make a movie like Steven made this one,” Hanks says.

None of the actors seated here was even born during World War II, yet they say it might have been easier to leap that distance in time than to imagine playing soldiers in Vietnam, a war closer to their own time. “They were ordinary guys who just found themselves in this circumstance that they never could have imagined themselves to be in,” Hanks says. “So, yeah, I think all of us could project ourselves very easily back into that sort of mind-set, which is different, I think, than going off to play Vietnam-era veterans.”

The politics, in other words, are simpler. And if there is nothing comforting about the scenes of carnage and psychological mayhem in “Saving Private Ryan,” Hanks says, “There is something comforting and easy and secure about knowing who the bad guys are and who they aren’t. We simply don’t have this anymore. This is going to the movie theater to be transported to some other time and place.”

As were the actors themselves in some cases. The movie was shot in England and Ireland, but Hanks made two visits to Normandy and the cemeteries that hold the bodies of thousands of Americans and other Allied soldiers who died in the invasion. Burns also went.

“I had no idea what to expect,” Burns says. “I went down to the beach and through the bunkers and when I went up to the cemetery and saw all the graves, you know, it hit me, but I didn’t have a real emotional reaction. Then I went to the chapel, which is right there in the middle, this little tiny room, I went in to say a prayer and I got this sudden chill down the back of my neck and I started gushing. I don’t know why except making the film for four months, being there, seeing all those gravestones and saying, ‘Another time, another place, that’s me, that’s my friends.’ ”