“The Worst Experience of My Life”: The Day the Cast of This Masterpiece Almost Gave Up

“The Worst Experience of My Life”: The Day the Cast of This Masterpiece Almost Gave Up



Very hard preparation for the casting

26 years later, none of the actors featured in the main cast ofWe Must Save Private Ryan does not regret his participation in this great war film. Whether it is Tom Hanks, Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper or even Jeremy Davies, to name a few, all are eternally associated with Steven Spielberg’s work, an immense critical and commercial success as well as a historical film of great cultural impact. . And no one would remove this important trait from his filmography.

We Must Save Private Ryan
Saving Private Ryan ©Paramount Pictures

However, not everything was easy for these actors who make up the team led by Captain John H. Miller and responsible for bringing back alive the young soldier James Francis Ryan. In fact, each on their own over the years, has shown that they are prepared for the film extremely difficult and intensespending several days in conditions as close as possible to the life of a soldier of the Second World War. Forced and equipped marches every day, physical exercises and simulations of aggression, sleep deprivation during the short nights spent in tents and in the cold after crawling through the mud…

Edward Burns, who plays Private Reiben, summed up the preparation during the shooting of the film like this: “It was the worst experience of my life.”

“We’ve had enough”

The technical consultant, as well as actor, responsible for preparing these actors for their roles is none other than the famous Dale Dye, a veteran of the American army who has become the technical reference in Hollywood when it comes to directing a war film with maximum authenticity. In 2016, he said Yahoo News! that the casting of Saving Private Ryan, exhausted by the intensity of the preparation, had decided on the third day of training camp just give up…

There were groans and the thought: “maybe we have to give up, we’ve had enough”.

So, as Dye tells it, the actors organized themselves a vote after three days, to decide whether to let him go or not. And they voted to stop him.

I think Tom Hanks personally called Steven Spielberg and said, “We have a little problem here, what do you want to do?”

According to the technical consultant, who did not spare the casting during this preparation, Steven Spielberg replied that it was up to him to make this decision, so Tom Hanks went back to his colleagues and convinced them to continue, explaining “that they only had this one opportunity, that it had to be done and that they had to stay and get your guts outsupported by Dale Dye.

I stood in the rain and told them the same thing Tom did, that they had to do things right by the people they were playing in the film. And to do things right you had to experience what you had experienced.

In the end, the actors stayed and finished the film. training camp. For the masterly result we know. We Must Save Private Ryan can be seen (again) on Netflix.

Source: Cine Serie

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