HATFIELD, NORTH OF LONDON, ENGLAND, 1997—THE RAIN MACHINES HAVE BEEN RUNNING FOR NEARLY TWO DAYS STRAIGHT.
Tom Hanks, already the winner of two Oscars at this point in his career, is soaked. This particular sequence includes one of the few times he’ll ever say fuck on film—fucking, to be precise. Steven Spielberg is directing the death scene of Private Caparzo, a brash soldier with a heart who just tried to save a little French girl whose house had been bombed to ruins. Spielberg has won one Oscar for directing. He’ll win his second for this film, Saving Private Ryan.
Caparzo is being played by a young actor, barely 30 years old, named Vin Diesel. He used to be Mark Sinclair, but a few years back he renamed himself Vin Diesel. For the movies. And right now Vin Diesel is lying on his back in a puddle of mud and fake blood. He’s cold. Someone has brought a few dry towels to cover him between takes, when the rain stops. He is drinking a cup of hot tea.
Spielberg has assembled a company of new kids for this ensemble—Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Ed Burns, fresh off his breakthrough film, The Brothers McMullen. But Diesel is a new kid among new kids. Those guys had some credits already. Diesel? He made a 20-minute short film a couple of years ago, starring himself. Spielberg saw it and put the guy in his movie.
It’s a complicated sequence, Caparzo’s death. Spielberg is taking his time, building the tension. Hanks’s character, the captain, grabs the girl from Caparzo and gives her back to her family (“We’re here to follow fucking orders!”), and everyone’s shouting, and Caparzo’s pleading that they should try to help the girl when pop! He’s hit, falls forward onto a piano in the street rubble of a war-torn town, then tumbles to the muddy gravel.
In the next three minutes and 16 seconds of film, there are 40 cuts. We see the intersection from every angle. Dolly shots from the ground looking up at Caparzo’s face, blood and rain splattering the camera. Third assistant director Andrew Ward remembers the use of a snorkel system, a periscope-like tube attached to a remote camera that allows for intense,
