Three telegrams. That's what Tonawanda's Michael and Augusta Niland received in the month after D-Day in 1944.
The first reported their son Edward shot down over Burma and missing in action. The second reported the death of their son Preston the day after D-Day. The third reported the D-Day death of their son Edward. Not since the five Sullivan brothers went down aboard the USS Juneau during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942 had one American family suffered such wartime devastation.
A fourth Niland son, Fritz, was immediately taken from the battlefield and flown back to Buffalo. There is only so much that one family can be asked to sacrifice.
By JEFF SIMON News Critic
PASADENA, Calif. -- Steven Spielberg, by far the most important living American filmmaker, is sitting at a table discussing his ambitious new movie, "Saving Private Ryan," with a handful of journalists. The film, which opens Friday, attempts nothing less in its extraordinary opening minutes than a complete reinvention of the American war movie. On a typically paradisaical early morning in California, Spielberg is wearing a leather bomber jacket and awaiting an herbal tea.
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His movie is about a grizzled Marine squadron sent to retrieve the last surviving brother from behind enemy lines in occupied France after his three brothers became part of the horrific carnage of D-Day.
Spielberg's presence at the table is a rarity. Though he has always made himself selectively available to a few members of the press with every new film, he has been abstemious with himself over the years. Not even "Schindler's List" brought Spielberg out for wholesale interviews.
But then, he doesn't really have to meet the press. He is the most easily identifiable American filmmaker since Hitchcock.
When he talks, he tends to talk in movies. Emotions and images pour forth.
About the Nilands, Spielberg admitted: "The (surviving) Nilands were interviewed for our film. The film is really based on the whole concept of siblings shot during combat experience during World War II. The Sullivan brothers on the Juneau. We have another story about the five Bixby brothers during the Civil War that caused the actual letter that we found that Lincoln wrote and that we quote in the film.
There were many, many stories of all those stars in windows, and mailmen that came to the same house two or three times to tell parents that their sons had been lost in combat, both in the Pacific Theater and overseas in Europe. It's inspired by a lot of different sibling losses. The Nilands are a very interesting story because there were, in fact, four brothers. Two of them were killed. And two of them survived."
He drinks his herbal tea. He likes to wake up slowly, he says (and, in fact, napped in the car on the way over). But consider closely that leather bomber jacket -- the same one you find omnipresent in one of Spielberg's rare catastrophes, "1941," in his epochally successful Indiana Jones films, on young Christian Bale in his largely hidden masterpiece "Empire of the Sun," in "Always."
That jacket in a Southern California hotel ballroom is a kind of key to the defining filmmaker of our era; it reveals as much as anything he says. It's not a fashion statement as much as a life statement. It's what his father might have worn as an aircraft radio man and turret gunner in World War II. It's the symbol of a remarkable American artist who has come to define his cinematic era not by traveling far and wide but by mining his own life so deeply.
That such a creative force should have sprung from so banal a life is part of what America, and Hollywood especially, has sometimes found so unforgivable. (Much of the rest of Spielberg resentment is explained by his astounding, virtually unprecedented financial success and the frugality, to put it mildly, of some business practices.)
The bare facts in Spielberg's dossier are almost vengefully nondescript: On the surface, he seems a paradigmatic "nice Jewish boy" from suburban Phoenix, albeit one with a mildly sadistic sense of humor. His parents' unhappy marriage and divorce and a mild discomfort as a Jew in WASP suburbia are virtually all that distinguish Spielberg's middle-class childhood. In America, they, too, are nothing but banal.
And yet with parental connivance, encouragement and even tutelage (from his father),
he has been making films since he was literally a child. He is his parents' prodigy. He has admitted that "Schindler's List" -- arguably the greatest fictional film about the Holocaust -- was made in part because, according to his childhood Hebrew teacher, it was "Steven's gift to his mother, to his people." And now comes "Saving Private Ryan," a film clearly made to move and please his father.
Who else but Spielberg -- who, as a seventh-grader, wanted to make a World War II film called "Fighter Squadron" -- would try, before the century's end, to redefine World War II movies? The movie in which he does it opens with 25 minutes of unremitting wartime horror at D-Day's Omaha Beach. It is one of the most grueling and remarkable sequences in American movies.
The man who sits talking to us wears a bomber jacket that's a relative of what his father might have worn in World War II. Though a grown man born in the mid-'40s, he was artistically arrested in boyhood and has explored as a magnificently gifted (and well-supported) adult, both the imaginative awe of childhood and an awe-filled world of childhood stories interpolated from his parents.
It's a theory of novelist Thomas Pynchon that narrative artists are irresistibly drawn to the decade of their birth. Spielberg fits the theory perfectly. It just so happens that his parents' interpolated stories of the '40s were about the cardinal events of the 20th century -- the "last great war" and the Holocaust in which Western civilization came face to face with the barbarism in its heart.
It isn't that his imagination is so vast or that his life has ranged at all widely. It's that, in his coddled, severely circumscribed life, he became one, as Henry James might have said, "on whom nothing was lost." Ever since his massive successes, all of his films have been related intimately to his life -- "Amistad" and even "The Lost World" (with its wonderfully gratuitous young black heroine), for instance, to the simple fact that he has adopted children of African-American descent and wanted to make films for them.
And now he has made a film in which he reassesses all World War II films in a year when another American film giant -- Terence Malick -- will do the same in his version of "The Thin Red Line" to come in December. It's Malick's first film since the marvelous, magical "Days of Heaven" in 1978. Spielberg even stole -- literally -- one of the actors set to do Malick's film, Tom Sizemore. It is no accident that these great film artists born in the '40s (Malick is 54, Spielberg 51) are affixing the century's pivotal decade and "last great war" to film before the century ends.
The herbal tea kicks in. Spielberg talks about the horrific and unprecedented opening Omaha Beach sequence of "Saving Private Ryan."
"For 50 years," he says, "most of the World War II films have been sanitized. During World War II, World War II movies were almost a recruitment tool to show the honor and the glory of serving your country and to get a lot of young men to enlist. After World War II, films continued to glorify our victory and to make audiences understand our sacrifices, but in a way that was always very sanitized and very safe and wholly untrue. I've always wanted to do a story on World War II.
"My dad's 81 years old. He's a veteran of World War II. I grew up with all the veterans. And they used to laugh at the Hollywood movies. They used to always say, 'That's the way it is in California, but it sure wasn't that way at Omaha Beach.' Or, 'It sure wasn't that way in Guam.' Or, 'It sure wasn't that way in Sicily.' Or on Iwo. They would tell stories that were absolutely hair-raising. But it's what they experienced. So I kind of knew a long time ago that if I had the opportunity to tell a story of World War II, it's going to be holding a mirror up to what really happened -- to acquit the veterans as opposed to using World War II as just another springboard for an action-adventure movie.
"I made this movie for everybody who would like to experience what it was like for these kids to lay down the kind of sacrifice so that we could be sitting here talking today. What my father told me when we were growing up is that 'World War II was the only crossroads of the 20th century,' where there really were no gray zones. You either won or you died. Meaning that we either freed the world or we lost the world. It was just the only time in the last 100 years that this world has reached that crossroads. So I think World War II is the most significant event of the entire last 100 years. I just wanted to make a movie that kind of reflected that."
In that opening sequence, "I'm trying to get the audience to have, not just a voyeur's experience but a physical experience watching the film, so they can somehow relate a little better to what it was like to be in combat and what it was like to lose your best friends and what it was like to survive something like that. War is chaos. It isn't 'gung-ho over the hill.' It's very chaotic. Often you don't know who to listen to. You lose your commanding officer during the first wave. You don't know who's giving the orders. Privates lead sergeants often. Lieutenants lead captains sometimes. Omaha Beach was really the best example of a strategist's debacle.
"My dad flew B-25s in India and Burma against the Japanese. He was a radio man aboard a B-25 and the top turret gunner. So he didn't have any ground action at all. But a lot of his friends who were on the ground told many stories about combat. . . . When we were making the movie we interviewed a lot of veterans of Omaha Beach.
"I cannot tell you how many veterans came up to me while we were researching this film and said: 'Please be honest about it. Please don't make another Hollywood movie about World War II. Please tell our stories.' To a person, they said: 'We'll support you if you support us and at least show people -- if you've got the guts to do it -- how it actually happened. And if you're not going to, if you're just going to make another World War II movie, we don't want any part of it."
The film's opening and closing with an Omaha Beach veteran also came from life.
"I think I hit Europe for the first time in 1972, when I went to Europe for my (TV movie) 'Duel.' It was June. They were releasing 'Duel' overseas. The first place they sent me was France. I had one day off. I went right to Omaha Beach (at Normandy). I stood there on the beach. It was blustery. It was windy. There were big waves.
"The opening of the movie was exactly what I observed. When I first went to Omaha Beach, I saw a man -- he was probably about 50, probably my age right now -- and he had a family around him. He was walking ahead of me. As he turned right -- there were a bunch of hedgerows blocking my view of what he was responding to -- he stopped in his tracks and then fell to his knees and began to sob, literally with his face in his hands. His family went up to him, they embraced him. He was sobbing.
"I caught up to him. I got to see the reveal (the revealing shot) that brought him to his knees, and it was that one reveal of all the Stars of David and crosses in the Normandy cemetery. I opened the picture with what I actually experienced watching that man go down to his knees."
In World War II, there was no such thing as "post-stress trauma. . . . There was no psychologist treating the wartime stress that my father's generation experienced. Most of them dealt with it the same way, I discovered, that the Holocaust survivors dealt with it -- by shutting up about it, by not telling their children about it, by not telling their grandchildren about it, seeing it hidden, even from themselves. That's how half of the Holocaust survivors have survived the post-Holocaust years. Many more American GIs still won't talk about combat and what they saw and who they lost."
As much as coddled, big-budget moviemaking can be, shooting the film was an emotional ordeal for Spielberg and the actors. He made the actors -- including Tom Hanks, Ed Burns and Tom Sizemore -- go for a week to a boot camp. Why? "Because they're actors. I didn't want them coming to the set complaining that they didn't have any carpeting in their motor homes. I wanted them to understand that it was going to be a taxing physical ordeal making 'Saving Private Ryan.' That I was going to shoot very quickly. That there was going to be no time to rest. That there was going to be no time to go back, read three chapters from a novel while the cameraman is finishing lighting the set.
"We were getting 40, 50 shots a day on this movie. The actors never had a chance to rest except when they went to lunch. So for the most part I felt that they needed to learn how to, if not be soldiers, gain some respect in five or seven days for what it's like to be an American GI. So boot camp was my idea. I hired Dale Dye, who's an amazing veteran of Vietnam, four tours of duty. He put these kids through the wringer.
"The difficult things about shooting this story were the scenes where we were losing men from our squad, when we actually had to stage the death of one of our squad members. And then had to say goodbye to him. I shot most of the film in continuity. So when someone died in the film, they were out of the movie. The hardest thing was the re-creation of some of the deaths. We weren't standing by the monitors after some takes shouting 'Cool' and 'Sweet.' There was silence. We'd finish a take. We'd watch the playback on the monitor and nobody would speak. They'd just watch it. Nobody had anything to say. We were trying to get as close to the way it was as we could.
"I knew I was going to assume the role of combat cameraman, that I was going to stay as close to the ground as I could so that I, as a combat cameraman, wouldn't get my head shot off. That was the approach I took to try to create a virtual reality of what it was like to be under fire. What it's like to be under fire is not to be in a helicopter shot. Or being on a camera crane. It's being in the sand with the soldiers. I shot all of the Omaha Beach (sequence) in continuity, from the Higgins boats to the offloading to shoreline up to the Shingle and up to the foothills. Every instance of that is pretty much what happened to the survivors of Omaha Beach.
"At the same time, we as a film company felt like we were taking the beach as well -- certainly with no losses, but re-creating ones. We still felt like we were taking the beach one inch at a time. It took four weeks of filming just to shoot the Omaha Beach landing. By the end of that, even with the seven days of training in boot camp, I think my actors -- with the help of the Irish army (also used in the scenes) -- they were able to do the rest of the picture as GIs."
