Steven Spielberg has crafted many a spectacular story throughout his mighty Hollywood tenure, but it’s films like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan that put him on the map as a man reborn. After an exultant run at the box office and a gala time at the ’99 Oscars, the Tom Hanks-led war/action film continues to be one of Spielberg’s greatest accomplishments.
Perhaps it is because people are often their own harshest critics that the director identified with the scrawny and cowardly character of Corporal Upham. But Hanks thought otherwise.
Who Tom Hanks Thinks Steven Spielberg’s Alter-ego Is
Saving Private Ryan was initially meant to be just another action-packed World War II movie that ended up doing a quick tailspin into a grim and pathos-filled depiction of war and humanity. Unsurprisingly, the film earned worldwide acclaim coupled with five Academy Awards, including one in the Best Director category.
In a conversation with The Guardian a year after the WWII movie spectacle, Steven Spielberg remarked how Corporal Upham represented his alter-ego. Played by Jeremy Davies, Upham’s character, at the end of the day, is reduced to a cowardly soldier when he’s really just someone irrevocably disturbed by the violence engulfing the world around him.
Even so, Tom Hanks – who led Saving Private Ryan as Captain Miller – disagreed with Spielberg, claiming that if the latter did have a counterpart, it would be Private Stanley Mellish (Adam Goldberg), the proud American-Jewish soldier hardened by life and combat. And it’s quite fitting since it also resonates with Spielberg’s Jewish identity.
I think who Steven fantasizes himself being is Mellish who pulls out his Star of David and says, ‘Juden, Juden’, as the German POWs are going by. I think Steven, for his Jewishness, wants to be that guy who, when the time comes, can pop a guy in the mouth with the butt of his M1.
The brutal death of Private Mellish was blood-curdling for even Hanks who was rendered speechless owing to the sheer horror of the scene that Spielberg “made up on the spot.”
Saving Private Ryan Held Personal Meaning For Steven Spielberg
Many of Spielberg’s films hold a certain sentimental value stemming from the personal meaning attached to the project, and the 1998 war drama was one of them.
The Indiana Jones director dedicated Saving Private Ryan to his father, Arnold Spielberg. As the oldest and only son in the house who was still navigating his identity, the three-time Oscar winner didn’t have the smoothest relationship with his father.
Although the two did make amends and grew close over time, it was astonishingly enough Arnold that pushed Spielberg into filmmaking. And when he read the script for Saving Private Ryan, the E.T. creator knew it would be for his dad.
That movie was for my dad. When I first read the script, I said, ‘My dad is going to love this movie.’
After all, it was also thanks to his father – who’d served as a radio operator on a B-25 at the time of World War II – that Spielberg caught his well-known obsession with the War and ended up spawning some of the most spell-binding war films ever known.
Saving Private Ryan can be streamed on Paramount+ or rented on Apple TV+.
