Random Movie Trivia - Saving Private Ryan

Here is the next edition in our weekly Random Movie Trivia post.  Enjoy:

Saving Private Ryan

• The Omaha Beach scene cost $11 million dollars, used 40 barrels of fake blood, and cast 1,000 extras, some of whom were amputees to be used in the gorier parts of the scene.
• The Department of Veteran Affairs set up a special 800 number to help with veterans who were traumatized by the opening scene.
• The part of Caparzo was written specifically for Vin Diesel after Steven Spielberg saw him in some crappy movie that no one has ever heard of, but still pretty impressive when one of the greatest directors of his generation writes a part for you especially when that person is Vin Diesel.
• Spielberg said that had the movie received an NC-17 rating due to the violence, he would have released the movie un-cut anyways.
• A young Nathan Fillion (pre-Firefly) makes a cameo as the wrong Private Ryan found early on in the movie.
• In the scene where Edward Burns reads the names on the dog tags of soldiers who have died, all of the names he reads are friends of his.
• When the movie was being dubbed into German, one of the voice actors had actually been at the Invasion of Normandy and when he saw the scene, he couldn't deal with it emotionally and didn't finish his part.
• If you remember the film at all, after the Invasion of Normandy, Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his group load up on ammunition and get a jeep, however, the next time you see them, they are on foot and 'lost most of their ammo'.  The reason for the sudden change is that there is a scene that shows how they lost both that was cut from the final cut of the movie.
• In any scene that involved an explosion, Spielberg had attached drills to his cameras that he turned on to create the effect.  Later he was told that there is a special lens that will create the same effect and what he thought was a new filming technique was in fact already old news.
• Tom Hanks was inducted into the Army Ranger Hall of Fame as a honorary inductee because of his portrayal of Captain Miller in the film.
• Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford were considered for the part of Captain Miller and Neil Patrick Harris was considered for the part of Private Ryan
• Matt Damon ad-libbed the story about spying on his brother hooking up with an ugly chick in his family's barn and Spielberg liked it so much, he left it in.
• Tom Sizemore (Sergeant Horvath) was battling drug addiction during production and Spielberg required daily blood tests to make sure he was clean and told Sizemore that if he failed one test, even on the last day of filming, he would fire him, re-cast, and re-shoot the entire movie.
• All of the principle actors except for Matt Damon, aka Private Ryan, went through several days of grueling army training because Spielberg wanted those actors to actually dislike Damon when they finally met his character late in the movie.

"He's smiling because he didn't just have to go through a week of sleeping on the ground and eating terrible food like the rest of the cast."