SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 273
grainy and extremely low tech” (www. tcm. com / tcmdb / title / 335178 / Saving - Private
- Ryan / articles. html). To further suggest the shaky quality of newsreel footage, com-
bat scenes were filmed with handheld cameras and, as was done for Mel Gibson’s
Braveheart, some frames were deleted in the editing pro cess to underscore a sense
of the jarring immediacy of combat.
Production
The two- month shoot on Saving Private Ryan began on 27 June 1997 with the film-
ing of the 23 minute D- Day landing sequence, which was shot over a three- week
period (27 June–17 July) on Curracloe Strand in Ballinesker, Ireland, about 70 miles
south of Dublin: a beach not as broad as the real Omaha Beach in France so wide-
angle lenses were used to visually extend the length of the flats on the sandy beach
before the soldiers reach the shingle. Beforehand, hundreds of workers spent two
months building facsimile German coastal fortifications, trenches, and beach obsta-
cles (e.g., steel anti- tank “Czech hedgehogs,” wooden ramps, posts with mines,
etc.). The shoot then moved to the grounds of a former British Aerospace factory
in Hertfordshire, about 20 miles north of London, where the fictive, ruined French
village of Ramelle was built (a set later reused for Spielberg’s 2001 TV miniseries
Band of Brothers) and the final battle was filmed, described by Spielberg as a “very
complicated sequence which took weeks and weeks to plan out on paper” (Piz-
zello and Spielberg, 1996, p. 4). The Ryan farmstead where Mrs. Ryan receives news
of three of her sons’ deaths was allegedly in Iowa but was actually built near West
Kennet, Wiltshire, 85 miles west of London. Two scenes— the costly skirmish with
the German machine- gun nest near a ruined radar installation, and the ambush of
the German half- track— were filmed on the grounds of Thame Park, about 15 miles
east of Oxford. The chapel on the grounds of Thame Park was used for the French
church where Miller’s squad rests overnight. The only shooting actually done in
Normandy was for the present- day scenes bookending the film that take place at
the American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville- sur- Mer.
Plot Summary
On the morning of 6 June 1944, American soldiers land on Omaha Beach as part
of the D- Day Normandy invasion. Exposed to withering artillery and machine-
gun fire from German coastal positions, they suffer extremely heavy losses. Capt.
John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) of the 2nd Ranger Battalion puts together a unit to
break through the German defenses. Meanwhile, on the beach, a deceased soldier
lies face down in the sand, with “Ryan, S.” printed on his belongings. Back at the
U.S. War Department in Washington, D.C., General George Marshall (Harve
Presnell) hears that three out of four brothers serving in the war have perished in
battle, while the fourth brother, James Ryan, has gone missing in Normandy, France.
Taking inspiration from Abraham Lincoln’s Bixby letter, Marshall demands that
the remaining Ryan be located and returned to his family. Capt. Miller is tasked
with bringing Ryan home, and so forms a unit of six troops from his platoon:
T/Sgt. Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore), Pfcs. Richard Reiben (Edward Burns) and
Adrian Caparzo (Vin Diesel), Pvts. Stanley Mellish (Adam Goldberg) and Danny