When Spielberg sent his cast through a week of basic training, only Hanks knew what they were in store for.

"I'd worked with (Marine drill sergeant) Dale Dye in 'Forrest Gump'; he trained me for the Vietnam sequences. I went in knowing that it would be a full-blown experience and Dye was not going to compromise for a moment. The other guys, I think, were anticipating camping in the woods and maybe learning a couple of things and sitting around the campfire.

"By the time the third day came around, it was cold and miserable and people began to get sick and they just didn't understand how getting yelled at by this gray-haired guy was going to make them better actors. But in the course of this meeting we had, I said, 'Look, this is our rehearsal. Never again on this movie will we have it all to ourselves; we've got our characters, we've got the equipment, we've got stuff to learn and it's not about dialogue. It's about our own individual motivations and monologues.'

"And Dale Dye said, 'You guys aren't just actors putting on some uniform and running around on the beach saying pow, pow, I got you. You're embodying the lives and uniforms of men who did something for real, and you're not going to do them dishonor.' He said this while we're all standing in the freezing rain, and there was no arguing with that."

Perhaps as a result, the ensemble acting in "Saving Private Ryan" is seamless and convincing, and the actors project a weariness and an underlying despair: It is good to know you're doing the right thing but no comfort to know you'll quite possibly get killed.

One of the film's technical advisers was Stephen Ambrose, whose books about the landings in France paint a different picture than the glory in the old Hollywood movies. What made Ambrose mad, Hanks said, is the notion that soldiers "never knew what hit them." There was nothing about suffering terrible wounds and waiting in the mud, wet and cold for hours with your blood draining out.

"I've never even seen movies where guys threw up on the landing craft," he said. "In Ambrose's books, you learn these guys were ankle-deep in seawater and vomit. They'd been out there for four hours in flat-bottomed landing craft in heavy seas. And they were told that Omaha Beach would be a lunar wasteland by the time they got there. The B-17 bombers were going to pulverize the defensive position so badly that the physical landmarks weren't even gonna be there. "But in reality, the B-17s dropped their bombs deep inside France and might have killed some cows and that's about it. So everything went wrong from the very first moment. "The first day of shooting the D-Day sequences, I was in the back of the landing craft, and that ramp went down and I saw the first 1-2-3-4 rows of guys just getting blown to bits. In my head, of course, I knew it was special effects, but I still wasn't prepared for how tactile it was. The air literally went pink and the noise was deafening and there's bits and pieces of stuff falling all on top of you and it was horrifying."

Maybe the first third of the movie is what makes the final third so compelling. Knowing what they'd been through, knowing what they were surely going to go through again, Captain Miller and his men don't choose the easy way out. Their war had gone too far to justify, any longer, a public relations gesture.