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(Credits: Far Out \/ DreamWorks Pictures)<\/p>\n
Tue 17 June 2025 0:30, UK <\/p>\n
These days, movie fans are used to hearing about actors putting themselves through rigorous training regimes and researching their parts for months before filming. After all, the drive is for everything to look as authentic as possible, and it\u2019s no longer the done thing to simply rock up on day one to \u2018act\u2019 like you know what you\u2019re doing. However, this wasn\u2019t always the case, and the notorious boot camp that Steven Spielberg put his Saving Private Ryan<\/a> through could be credited with helping popularise the trend.<\/p>\n From the start, Spielberg wanted Saving Private Ryan to be the most harrowingly realistic depiction of war that had ever been put to screen, because he felt that was the only way to truly honour the real soldiers who lost their lives during World War II. So, to ensure his cast gained as much firsthand experience of the physical and mental toll of war as he could safely subject them to, Spielberg hired Marine veteran Dale Dye as a technical advisor on the project, and he organised a six-day boot camp to put the pampered thespians through their paces.<\/p>\n Soon, Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, and the rest of the film\u2019s stars were simulating attacking manoeuvres while in-character, running for five miles at a time with heavy military backpacks on, executing weapons training, and being forced to do push-ups if they made any mistakes. For the entire boot camp, they were running on three hours of sleep, and were made as cold, wet, and miserable as possible \u2013 and some of the younger stars wanted to walk away from the punishing experience. <\/p>\n However, Hanks \u2013 a history buff and World War II obsessive \u2013 took it upon himself to convince his castmates that the boot camp would be worth it in the end, as it would strengthen their performances and bring them together as a unit. They all wound up staying<\/a>, and in 2018, Dye marvelled at Hanks\u2019 commitment to the cause. He said the iconic star \u201creally is a true believer\u201d and revealed, \u201cWe had some people who did not want to do what I was putting them through. And we had this absolutely horsecrap British weather\u2014cold, misting rain all the time. Everybody was soaked, they were living in the mud.\u201d<\/p>\n