That was an afterthought. I never really had that in mind when I was shooting the picture. But while I was in the editing room with Mike Kahn, I thought about how interesting it would look if we actually had the bullets traveling through the water.
"In Jaws, when Roy Scheider was firing his carbine at the shark, we shot high-velocity 'fizzies' — little wax projectiles filled with Alka-Seltzer, which gave the effect of bubbles — at the mechanical shark [during several underwater shots]. There were no humans in the vicinity, so we could do the effect practically. But, of course, we didn't have digital effects in 1974."
The addition of these bullet trails add immeasurable impact to Ryan's D-Day sequence, especially when blended with Corbould's practical underwater squibs, which send blood billowing in ethereal scarlet plumes. "We actually used that bullet-under-the-water shot in Jaws as a reference," Guyett says. "Christa Starr did a fantastic job making the digital bullet models go through the water as realistically as possible and then slowly decelerate. Some of the bullets would then actually stop and just sink to the bottom. Gregor Lakner added the bubble trails using a particle system."
Lest we forget that visual effects can be used to save money, Spielberg offers this testimonial regarding a spectacular shot of hundreds of battleships in the English Channel: "My film cost $65 million. Had I really gotten that many ships to anchor off Omaha Beach, my film would've cost $85 million. With a few $100,000 digital effects, I was able to save millions."
Guyett adds, "That panorama, looking back across the cliffs at all of the ships in the water, with all of the troops and barrage balloons and barbed-wire barricades in the foreground, was our biggest shot in the movie. Stefen Fangmeier was the visual effects supervisor on that shot, and he filmed all of the plates using a motion-control system obtained from The Mill in London. Although the shot was planned out fairly well, just putting the motion-control plate together was quite complicated. Only the immediate foreground in the beginning of the shot was there in the plate. Since there were only a certain number of soldiers available, Stefen did four motion-control passes, and kept repositioning the same 400 soldiers all over the beach. Of course, with so many people involved, that can take time, and there was an obvious change in the weather on each pass, enough so we couldn't just marry the passes together. Also, there was enough camera motion to present some interesting compositing issues. Since we were going to be adding ships a mile off shore, the slightest bump created huge problems. If the camera moved one degree on the beach, all of a sudden a digital ship a mile away jumped a hundred yards in the air! We put a tremendous amount of effort into stabilizing the plate elements in Saber; then Pablo Helman and his compositing crew put that basic plate together for us, which was quite an undertaking."
Once the plate was in one piece, many different people and techniques contributed to the very complex panorama. "Jennifer McKnew added all of the CG landing craft and barrage balloons in the foreground, plus a couple of trucks," Guyett reports. "There were lots of little details: we put CG characters in the landing craft, and added a CG jeep moving along the beach. Our modeler, Paul Ferron, built the P-51 Mustang fighter flying overhead. Then, digital matte artist Matt Hendershott added all of the large ships in the water. The closer ships were more complicated, but the really distant ones were almost 2-D cutouts. Steven's got a tremendous eye for detail, so Matt also added the wakes of the ships out at sea. It was very elaborate."
ILM's Saber system, which was used to stabilize and assemble the original plate, came into play at the end as well. "That shot was composited in three different environments within ILM, but with over 200 ships on the water, there were so many levels of density that the final composite was done via Saber," says Pablo Helman, who headed Ryan's three-person Saber unit. "The Saber allows us to do very fast high-resolution compositing, so we're able to turn around more versions of shots. Saber was used in the last step before the shot went out, because we could color-correct individual elements in context and adjust for the ENR process."
It's important to note that Spielberg's uncharacteristic decision not to storyboard the film further complicated matters for Corbould's practical and ILM's digital effects teams, but deepened the filmmakers' emotional involvement. The director recalls, "I didn't do any storyboards, but I extensively researched the Dog Green section of Omaha Beach, by interviewing veterans and survivors and reading everything I could get my hands on. I knew how I was going to approach the assault. But like all of those heroes of Omaha Beach, I took it one step at a time. I shot in religious continuity, because otherwise I would have become hopelessly lost and I wouldn't have been as emotionally invested. It would've been much more of a technical feat and less of an emotional one, so I started in the Higgins boats and I took one day and one inch of that beach at a time with the whole cast and crew. At the end of the 3 1/2 weeks of principal photography for the Omaha Beach assault, we were ready to wrap the whole movie. We were exhausted, spent, and had nothing left to make the rest of the picture with. Luckily, we had a four-day weekend while we moved from Ireland to England, and I think those extra two days gave everybody a second wind. By the end of that scene, I said, 'This is my movie right here — I'm going home!' I was lucky I had a good story, and where I went from there was the telling of the tale of Saving Private Ryan."
En route to the film's climactic battle in the fictional war-torn village of Ramelle, Fangmeier began work on Small Soldiers, leaving Guyett to carry on with ILM's Ryan division, which contributed muzzle flashes, more ghastly digital wounds and the film's eerie "night barrage" sequence, inspired by a similar scene in the 1951 film The Desert Fox. As the G.I.s march along a ridge, they are silhouetted by a digital artillary battle beyond the horizon. ILM added the sky and the lightning-like explosions behind the actors, which was complicated by the shot's grueling 900-frame length.
As the Ryan production crew moved to the vacated British aerospace facility that served as the backlot for the rest of the film, Corbould's company never stopped working, with or without combat scenes. For example, they were constantly smoking the exterior sets to control the lighting. "And if we weren't smoking, it had to be raining," Corbould states. "Most of the rain sequences were done in one continuous take. We probably had five or six holes in the ground, measuring about 6' deep and 40' square, dug-in around the Neuville [town] set. We then put liners in there and had 10,000-gallon tankers going up and down the runway, just filling them up all day long. We had rain stands on the tops of the buildings and a couple of handheld units behind the cameras just to fill in any areas that looked a bit off."
One of Ryan's most remarkable practical effects is the least likely to be noticed. "Because he wanted a documentary feel, Steven wanted to be able to shoot over the shoulders of soldiers actually firing guns and see the bullet hits going off," Corbould relates. "They did some tests in America using an umbilical cord from the gun to the squib [to create simultaneous detonations], but I decided to take that idea one step further, because a lead running from the gun to the men is not practical. My brother Ian, who loves all of these little gags, worked out a radio-control system — as the trigger was pulled, a switch actually fired the blood squib at the same time. We eventually had radio-control boxes on three different men, each with a different frequency, so the same guy could shoot three different people."
Nevertheless, Spielberg nixed Corbould's plan to use radio-controlled squibs for the sequence in which sharpshooting Private Jackson (Barry Pepper) takes aim at a sniper in a belltower - who is simultaneously training his gun on the American — and shoots the German through his rifle scope. "Steven said, 'We'll do that with CG' because he wanted to do it in one shot, but this was one of those times a fool can't take no for an answer," Corbould remembers. "Steven wanted to see the German looking over the top of his scope and then bang! — a bullet hole in the sniper's eye and blood all over his face. I did a video test of the effect [with my radio-controlled system], which looked fantastic, and took it down to the set. Steven looked at it and looked at it again. And he actually said, 'How the hell did you that?' That was one of my proudest moments on the film."
So how the hell did Corbould do it? He explains, "We actually milled some holes inside the telescopic sight, which became small airjets. We then put some breakaway glass and glitter in the front. Finally, we actually stuck a prosthetic 'wounded eye area' appliance inside the eyepiece of the scope, so when the actor pressed his own eye against the scope, the pre-glued prosthetic stuck to his face. After the site exploded, the airjets shot fake blood onto the actor's face, which hid any bad joints. Then we had a little blood mortar strapped to his back, loaded with bits of foam. As it went off, we got this spray out the back of his head as well. That was done in one shot, and in one take."
Although ILM's wound and bullet-hit techniques were also used to enhance the film's climactic firefight in the fictional French village of Ramelle, Spielberg's decision to create much of the chaos in-camera infused the battle with immediacy. Unlike the D-Day sequence, where Corbould's company had to rig a real beachfront location, the entire decimated town was built from the ground up in the British town of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, at an abandoned aerospace facility which served as the production's backlot and English base camp. This gave the filmmakers much more control. "Steven basically took us around the town one day about two weeks before we started filming and said, 'I want bullets in that wall there, in that church, and I want the front of that building to collapse,'" Corbould remembers. "Fortunately, we could pre-rig the squibs and leave them there until needed. We didn't have to put it all away every night."
But not everything could be planned in advance, since Spielberg and his senior military advisor, retired USMC captain Dale Dye, were choreographing how the Germans would take over Ramelle as shooting progressed. "Certain stuff we had to leave till the day," Corbould admits, "but Steven was great, because he could see the problems that we were facing timewise. He would set us up in the morning, and say, 'Right. I want that, that, that,' and then go shoot something else while we rigged it."
The W.W.II-vintage German Tiger tanks used in the sequence were procured in Czechoslovakia, and it took time to re-dress them in authentic Nazi colors and insignia. One of Corbould's biggest challenges was to rig these real tanks to safely fire their lethal cannons. "We first sleeved the inside of the gun barrel with another steel barrel, and placed a small black-powder charge in there, which was set off from inside the tank," he reveals. "The resulting impact blasts were done manually, just by eye. One guy let the tank off, then let the impact off."
Corbould's team also had to blow up the tanks without actually harming the vehicles or the scene's participants, while keeping the effect authentic. "Steven originally wanted the turret to fly off [when a tank blew up], but Dale said, 'That wouldn't happen — those turrets weigh tens of tons,'" Corbould relates. "Instead, we dug a 6' hole behind the tank and balanced the rear treads on these solid, 6'-long wooden railway sleepers covering the hole. When we blew the planks away, the tank just dropped straight through, and then a large explosion underneath actually chucked the front of this 45-ton tank in the air and tossed a lot of dirt up."
What was it like doing real explosions with real tanks? "It was fun," Corbould admits with a grin.
One of the most shocking moments in Ryan is the shot in which a G.I. tries to disable a Tiger tank with a "sticky bomb," but ends up blowing himself to pieces. Amazingly, this was accomplished in-camera. "Steven wanted to see this guy disintegrate," Corbould recalls. "To do that, we made a dummy out of 1/32" thick fiberglass, filled it up with blood bags and some primer cord, and blew it up on-set next to the tank. Steven thought the dummy was too static, so we had to change it. We later formed a little splinter unit that went back and re-shot the effect. This time, we laid some track next to the tank and buried a pneumatic system in the ground, which was attached to the dummy's legs and shuffled it along just to give it enough movement [to facilitate a cut from a live actor]. That half-second of movement was crucial because without it, you'd see this dummy just standing there as the explosion happened. We also rigged some cables in the arm so that it appeared to toss the sticky bomb. At that moment, we just obliterated it while filming at 120 frames a second. When we saw the effect during the film's premiere, there was popcorn flying everywhere."
Although the principals can now discuss the making of Ryan with technical detachment, the experience profoundly affected everyone involved. "During production, we were all very traumatized by what we were putting on the screen and a bit repulsed by some of it," Spielberg acknowledges. "Luckily, I already had that experience of total verisimilitude while making Schindler's List. It took me three years to recover from that and direct my next picture. Because of Schindler's List, I steeled myself before I made Ryan, and I wasn't as vulnerable. I was back on my feet and living a normal life only a couple of weeks after I got back home."
Remarkably, Spielberg's uncompromisingly vivid war story, which he felt certain would not draw an audience due to its intensity, took the public by storm. "I never expected that," the director reveals. "I expected the word of mouth would have been 'It's too hard to watch.' The biggest surprise of the whole experience was that so many people went to see the picture. I wish I could give 'em all Purple Hearts and kiss 'em on both cheeks!"
