272 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
Background
The Niland brothers— Edward (“Eddie”), Preston, Robert (“Bob”), and Frederick
(“Fritz”)— were four brothers from Tonawanda, New York, who served in the U.S.
military during World War II. Of the four, two survived the war. For a time, though,
it was believed that only one brother, Sgt. Fritz Niland, 501st Parachute Infantry
Regiment (PIR), 101st Airborne, had survived. Eddie was shot down over Burma
and reported missing on 16 May 1944; Bob was killed on D- Day; Preston was killed
the day after. To spare his family further grief, Fritz Niland was pulled off the
frontline near Normandy and returned to the United States to complete his ser-
vice. Almost a year after D- Day, Fritz learned that Eddie, missing and presumed
dead, had actually survived and had been held captive in a Japa nese POW camp
in Burma. Fifty years later, screenwriter Robert Rodat (Fly Away Home) saw a
monument dedicated to the four sons of Agnes Allison of Port Carbon, Pennsyl-
vania, all killed in the Civil War. Struck by the tragedy of a single family’s huge
loss in war, Rodat began to research WWII instances and read a slightly incor-
rect account of the Niland saga in Stephen Ambrose’s D- Day June 6, 1944: The
Climactic Battle of World War II (1994) and deci ded to use the Niland story as the
rough basis for a film script. Rodat’s first draft included an opening Omaha Beach
sequence, altered the number of brothers killed from two to three, and added a
search and rescue mission. In the spring of 1995 Rodat successfully pitched his
script idea to producer Mark Gordon (a partner with Gary Levinsohn in Mutual
Film Co., a newly formed production firm). Over the next two years Rodat and
Gordon collaborated on 15 drafts of a script before shopping it around to the stu-
dios. Initially they met with rejection; the prevailing view was that WWII movies
were passé. Things changed in 1997, however, when Gordon sent the script to
Tom Hanks and got an enthusiastic reception. Gordon also sent the script to Cre-
ative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Karen Sage, who then pitched the concept to
Steven Spielberg, a close friend of Hanks. Having an abiding interest in the Sec-
ond World War, Spielberg embraced Rodat’s script. Spielberg’s studio (Dream-
Works SKG) subsequently signed a distribution deal with Paramount and hired its
own line producer, Ian Bryce, thus limiting the further involvement of Gordon
and Levinsohn (though relations between parties remained cordial). Spielberg
also followed suit with other directors making war films since 1984 and hired
former Marine Dale Dye’s Warriors, Inc., to put his principal actors through a
tough six- day boot camp to familiarize them with standard military operating
procedure, but also to have them gain re spect for the arduous life of a soldier. Matt
Damon was exempted to make the rest of the group feel resentment towards the
Pvt. Ryan character. Tom Sanders, Spielberg’s production designer, who was Mel
Gibson’s designer on Braveheart (1995), went to Ireland and once again struck a
deal to use 1,000 Irish Army reservists as extras. Ian Bryce located 10 WWII- era
landing craft in Palm Springs, California, and had the vessels transported to
St. Austell, Cornwall, England, where they were made seaworthy by Robin Davies’
Square Sail Ventures. As for the film’s visual style, Janusz Kamiński, Spielberg’s
regular director of photography since Schindler’s List, opted for a look “very much
like color newsreel footage from the 1940s, which is highly desaturated and very