Spielberg and Kaminski initially considered rendering Private Ryan monochromatically, as they had previously done on Schindler’s List. "Black-and-white was the right choice for that film because of the subject matter and because most of the real footage of Nazi atrocities was photographed in black-and-white," relates Kaminski. "However, there is a tremendous amount of documentary footage from World War II that was photographed in color. In fact, [renowned director] George Stevens was a combat cameraman and shot a great deal of footage in color. Steven and I really didn’t want to shoot Private Ryan in black-and-white, and I think it would have been a little pretentious to do another World War II film that way.
"We also wanted to shoot this picture in color because there is some blood in the film and we wanted to play with the reds, even though we did desaturate the colors through the use of ENR," Kaminski expands, noting that the use of the special Technicolor process was a key reason to do extensive camera tests. "I knew the movie would have more of a bluish tone to it, and with 70 percent ENR, the color of the blood on the uniforms and the ground was a primary concern. For scenes in which the characters got wounded, we wanted to know how the blood would look on the uniforms and how it would look after they wore those uniforms for a couple of days. Because we were dealing with a World War II drama, the wardrobe was already muted, and since we were shooting in England and Ireland, we had day after day of foggy, rainy climate, which automatically made the light more diffused and the colors more pastel. We therefore compared various levels of ENR, and based on those tests, the special effects department mixed a certain amount of blue into the blood to make it a bit darker than they’d normally use.
"I think the biggest mis-conception about ENR that everyone talks about is what the process does to the shadows to make them deeper and richer," he adds. "Yes, that is one aspect of the process, but the biggest thing about ENR that no one seems to be talking about is what it does to the highlights and colors. If you shoot a test and compare a shot with ENR and without, the clothing will look much sharper and you will see the texture and pattern of the fabric in the ENR print. This was especially true on Amistad, on which we used about 40 to 50 percent ENR. As a result, all of the Africans’ clothing had much more texture. On Saving Private Ryan, the uniforms benefitted as well. The edges of the shirts and the helmets were sharper, and the process also worked magic on metallic surfaces and water reflections, which become like mercury. It’s so gorgeous."
After arriving in England, Kaminski conducted another week of tests to further pinpoint his visual approach. "[Famed Life magazine photographer] Robert Capa’s war photography was one of the guiding references for the film," he explains, "but Steven and I didn’t talk much about how we were going to do the movie during prep. I prefer to shoot tests that show him what I intend to do photographically. By that point, I’d already made certain selections and decisions about a possible visual style, so I wanted to give him a range of different ideas and techniques to get him excited and inspired. On Private Ryan I wanted to take a major Hollywood production and make it look like it was shot in 16mm by a bunch of combat cameramen. That was a conscious decision, but thankfully Steven is a very visually-oriented director and is willing to take certain chances. However, he also has a sense of what is too far!"
Battle plans
Saving Private Ryan begins with a truly harrowing 25-minute depiction of the carnage and chaos experienced by the soldiers storming Omaha Beach. Both Spielberg and Kaminski sought to infuse the sequence with a high degree of realism, and studied newsreels and documentaries shot by combat cameramen in order to capture a true sense of the insanity and frenetic panic of war. "We wanted to create the illusion that there were several combat cameramen landing with the troops at Normandy," the cinematographer submits. "I think we succeeded in emulating the look of that footage for the invasion scenes, which we achieved with both in-camera tricks and other technological means. First off, I thought about the lenses they had back in the 1940s. Obviously, those lenses were inferior compared to what we have today, so I had Panavision strip the protective coatings off a set of older Ultraspeeds. Interestingly, when we analyzed the lenses, the focus and sharpness didn’t change very much, though there was some deterioration; what really changed was the contrast and color rendering. The contrast became much flatter. Without the coatings, the light enters the lens and then bounces all around, so the image becomes kind of foggy but still sharp. Also, it’s much easier to get flares, which automatically diffuses the light and the colors to a degree and lands a little haze to the image.
"If I had two cameras running on a scene, I’d mismatch the lenses on purpose, using one with coated Ultraspeeds and one without coatings. That gave us a certain lack of continuity in picture quality, which suggested the feeling of things being disjointed.
"Next, we shot a lot of the film with the camera’s shutter set at 45 or 90 degrees. The 45-degree shutter was especially effective while filming explosions. When the sand is blasted into the air, you can see every particle, almost every grain, coming down. That idea was born out of our tests, and it created a definite sense of reality and urgency."
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