Dye bristles only once during our time
together. “Back the fuck away from that,” he
barks at a question about the Saving Private
Ryan boot camp — specifically, the rumour that
Tom Sizemore had fomented a revolt among its
eight cast members that Tom Hanks had been
forced to quell. Out in the rain-soaked woods
of Hertfordshire, Dye had dubbed Hanks and
Sizemore — the film’s captain and sergeant,
respectively — ‘Turd Number One’ and ‘Turd
Number Two’. Sizemore didn’t take to Dye’s
methods. “At one point I said, ‘Don’t call me
a turd anymore, I don’t like it,’” the actor recalls
in his autobiography. The upshot? Two hundred
press-ups for Turd Number Two. Ed Burns called
the camp “the worst experience of my life”.
Ask the film’s director, though, and you’ll
get a very different perspective. “Dale put all
my actors through their paces,” Spielberg tells
Empirevia email, “and all of them came out the
other end humbled and ready to honour the
men they were portraying.” Up on the screen,
those cold, gruelling, malnourished six days
translated into a squad dynamic that’s by turns
fractious, explosive and fiercely tight-knit. Just as
Dye had intended.been in
Dye’s blood from the moment his dad took him
to see Run Silent, Run Deep in St Louis as a boy.
Enlisting in the Marines, Dye’s critical facultieswere sharpened by experience of combat.
“Pictorial recognition of the service and sacrifice
of the men and women who wear the uniform is
what’s important to me. Who hired that guy [in
Hacksaw Ridge]?” he asks, tearing a strip off
Vince Vaughn’s performance. “He’s nice — I’ve
met him — but he is not your grizzled, combat-
hardened [sergeant major], so it takes me right
out of the movie.” Brad Pitt’s hipster-haired
tanker in Fury also gets short shrift. “I was fine
until he took his fucking helmet off, then that
haircut? Just no.” Needless to say, Dye worked
on neither project. “I wouldn’t have allowed it,”
he says of the Pitt crop.
The directors he’s worked most closely with
lean heavily on his exhaustive knowledge and