Saving Private Ryan took 59 days to make, the first 25 of which were spent filming the $12 million, 23-minute opening sequence, shot in Curraghloe on Ireland’s southeast coast, depicting the Allied assault on the beaches of Normandy.
Approximately 400 crew members, 1,000 Irish Army reservists, and dozens of extras, including an amputee who played a soldier who had his limbs blown off on D-Day, came together to make the film a reality.
“We had to build a lot of side roads from scratch just to get the trucks in with all the hardware, we had to build breastworks, bunkers, vantage points of attack. It was the biggest logistics project of the whole movie,” associate producer Mark Huffam told the Irish Independent in 2006. “In total, we strung out about a kilometer of electrical wire on the beach for this scene. Stephen has a way of making these work. I’m sure he’ll find a way.”
Director Spielberg also filmed the film underwater, using a crane camera mounted on a 40-foot flatbed trailer backed into the water, to determine how many soldiers had died before landing.
“The first day we shot the D-Day scenes, I was in the back of the lander and I saw that ramp come down and the first rows of 1-2-3-4 were blown to pieces,” Hanks told Roger Ebert in 1998. A piece of something fell on you and it was scary. ”
