Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is a critically acclaimed masterpiece. It has been collectively agreed that the film is one of the best works of his career, being excellent in every way, shape, or form. The cast of the film was spectacular, giving the performances of their lives. On top of this, the direction, storytelling, and cinematography of the movie helped it gain the many Oscars that it did.
However, the curse of the film industry makes it so that even the flawless are labeled as having something missing. The same was the case for the 1998 film, which was being accused of being ‘too Hollywood’. Thankfully for Spielberg, he has been around the block a couple of times and knows how to handle criticism.
World War II was Too Hollywood?
Hollywood has a reputation for adding drama to things that didn’t originally have it as a way to peak audience interest. Real-life experiences that lasted a few moments turned into hours, and situations that held no significance became life-changing. This has happened time and time again with serious subjects, and most famously, it is seen in war films.
During an interview with DGA, Steven Spielberg was asked about his thoughts on the criticism his film Saving Private Ryan got for being too dramatic and made for Hollywood rather than telling a true story. The filmmaker has some very interesting things to say about this specific issue that many had.
It would seem that long before he came up with the script for the Tom Hanks film, he was very interested in making a war movie. However, there was one very specific mistake he did not want to make. Spielberg did not want to turn his movie into a Hollywood epic. He wanted to showcase real war; make the audiences feel what the characters were feeling, and not try to shape something for the sake of dramatics.
I’ve always wanted to make a war movie, and I had a chance to make a realistic war movie, as opposed to an apocryphal Hollywood war movie. Actually, I was beating away the impulses to go Hollywood.
He was so dedicated to this one limitation he set for himself that Spielberg had to stop his own hand when he realized that he was going in such a direction.
Steven Spielberg Paid No Mind to the Critics
Despite his dedication to making a film free of Hollywood’s constraints, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was accused of this very thing. They found the intentional diversity in the film to be an attempt at showcasing American culture, and they found that to be evidence of Hollywood’s clutches.
People who found fault with Private Ryan always picked on it because I had a guy from Brooklyn, I had a Jewish guy, and they said, ‘Oh, you’re using the same mix that Lewis Milestone used in A Walk in the Sun. You’re mixing ethnicities and cultures and showing that Americans are from all over the world.’
They compared it to similar characters in Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun, which was somewhat similar in this aspect. Addressing these criticisms, the filmmaker revealed that he does not pay much heed to these comments, and there is a very specific reason for this.
That doesn’t bother me at all because you can’t have seen as many World War II movies as I’ve seen, and not have some of that rub off on Saving Private Ryan.
In his research and anticipation of making the film, Spielberg watched many war films from all corners of the film industry. In this, he could not help but be influenced a little. Having so much of the past work from the genre in his mind, it was impossible for some of it to not rub off on the Tom Hanks film.
Saving Private Ryan is available on Prime Video.
