A lot goes into making a movie and for Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a movie that is heralded as one of the best war movies ever made, the opening scene is often considered to be a masterpiece of cinematography and story that captures the horrors of war in the most visceral way. Indeed, audiences are drawn into the D-Day Landings in a 25-minute sequence that is riveting and sets the stage for a film that engenders the immersion of its audience to a time period and historic moment that could never fully be understood in words alone.

The recreation of the D-Day Landings in the film is memorable, not just because of the length of the scene as an opening, but because of the breadth by which it plays out and visually explores that specific moment in time. Saving Private Ryan is an intimate movie in that the story is told through the eyes of one man, Tom Hank’s character, Captain John H. Miller, and attempts to shrink the grand scale of World War II by focusing on a specific point of interest: the search for a paratrooper who is the last surving brother of a family that is already grieving.

The intimacy of the movie is a macrocosm of the opening scene, where Spielberg draws the audience into a very specific moment to capture the atmosphere and mood of the entire movie in one moment. Needless to say, it is astounding cinematic work and deserves both recogntion and comprehension of just how it was done.

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Steven Spielberg’s goal to draw in the audience with the D-Day sequence was an extraordinary task that required more than 12 millions dollars of the film’s budge to secure. His idea was to gather several hundred extras on the coast of Ireland to film. This was without any storyboarding, which is accustomed for most movies, especiallly those of this magnitude.

Spielberg’s inclination was to improv most of the sequence, to allow for the organic and natural flow of creation to take hold with only the few pages of script written delineating the sequnce as the blueprint and foundation. This was risky and out of the ordinary, and also went against the general rule of a minute-to-a-minute-a-half rule from page to film that would have equated to the sequence having been scripted between 16-25 pages instead of around only seven.

When it came to the actual footage, the shooting of the scene, instead of relaying it all in one motion, capturing all the characters at once and in a variety of angles to later edit and splice together on the cutting room floor, Spielberg took it frame by frame, capturing each step of the Rangers to mirror what was done in real life on that fateful day on the beach. The cinemaphotagraphers even used hand-held cameras to simulate the shakiness and human-errored movement found in a documentary.

The result of all of this risky business allowed for some upredictability, which made the sequence feel geniune and provided an authentic visual, along with mood, that stepped out of the box by which so many other war movies found themselves in as it pertains to the feeling of orchestration and being too staged or planned.

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Overall, the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan is one of the most important scenes in the entire movie. Steven Spielberg understood the power that this scene could levy as he crafted his war epic. There was a monumental task and undertaking to make a movie about war that was unlike others, and in order to do that not only did the story have to diverge from the grandiose and all encompassing, but different focal points of the story and war itself had to be mesmerizing enough to get the appropriate buy-in from the audience. It is truly a case of author’s purpose, the conveying of the message of the story, that Spielberg is after in this particular scene. If done correctly, he would get the right atmosphere and mood, which would tell the story itself and pull the audience along for the ride, in that moment and throughout the rest of the film.

     DreamWorks Pictures

Steven Spielberg’s elaborate opening scene, as remembered by viewers and movie-goers, is a culmination of creativity and the process by which it is brought to life. Escaping the mundane staged battles of other war movies for the spontaneous, garnered the grime and grittiness of the reality of war, punching a card toward the suspension-of-disbelief that allows for audiences to feel as if they are actually present and in-person, a witness to the action taking place on the screen. Saving Private Ryan as a war epic does this very well and it is epitomized in how the D-Day sequence was filmed, and ultimately, how it came to exist as an indistinguishable body of cinematic work.