(Credits: Far Out / DreamWorks Pictures / Paramount Pictures)
Sat 10 January 2026 9:29, UK
The bromance between Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks has been going strong for almost 40 years, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always see eye to eye. The two men can be attributed with creating some of the more beloved movies of their careers. But one picture stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Saving Private Ryan is the kind of picture that will outlive everybody who starred in it. A bona fide war classic that focused so intently on the horror and humanity of war that it reportedly left veterans in tears and revisiting shock, the movie has gone on to assert itself as one of the defining depictions of World War II. However, it was also the scene of one of the biggest disputes between Spielberg and Hanks.
Actors and directors have disagreements all the time, and while it’s undoubtedly beneficial for close friends and regular collaborators like Spielberg and Hanks to develop a shorthand that brings them ever closer to becoming a hive mind, they’re not going to bend to the other’s every whim.
The duo have collaborated on The Money Pit, Joe Versus the Volcano, Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, The Post, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Masters of the Air in various capacities as performers, producers, writers, and directors, so they obviously know each other inside out.
However, Spielberg ended up making a mistake when he forgot to separate the artist from the art during the shooting of their World War II classic, after convincing himself that Hanks’ ‘Mr Nice Guy’ mythology should have a bearing on the direction of the schoolteacher-turned-soldier character he was playing in the film.
One of the heartbreaking moments from ‘Saving Private Ryan’. (Credits: Far Out / DreamWorks Pictures/ Paramount Pictures)
John Miller might have been granted extra heft, gravitas, and relatability by the fact he was being played by one of the most popular and likeable stars in the industry, but at the end of the day, he was a soldier who’d been deployed on the battlefield to survive at all costs and retrieve Matt Damon’s title character, and eliminating enemy forces was an unavoidable part of the deal.
Spielberg wasn’t sold on the prospect of handing Hanks a weapon and having him gun down more people in a single film than he ever had in his entire career, but the two-time Academy Award winner put his foot down and flat-out refused to shoot the scene if it wasn’t going to be true to the character.
“On Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg said, ‘I don’t think I want to see John Miller fire his gun and kill Germans,’” Hanks told The New York Times. “I told him: ‘I’m sorry, Steven. You’re not going to get me all the way over here and turn me into some other guy just because you don’t want Tom Hanks to kill soldiers.”
The filmmaker may have been trepidatious about depicting Hanks as a killer, but that’s what soldiers had to do. The star had also put in the work during the arduous boot camps that whipped the ensemble into shape, and the fact that he was regarded as a beacon of wholesomeness and positivity hardly factored into the way he approached the part.
It almost did for Spielberg, though, and when Hanks informed him that he wasn’t going to shoot the scene using any other method than the one presented in the script, the director quickly abandoned his notion of giving Hanks’ Miller a more pacifist slant.
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