Saving Private Ryan

The opening twenty-four minutes are a reconstruction of the Omaha Beach landing on 6 June 1944, and they changed how war is filmed: shutter angle, desaturation, handheld cameras at the water line, and sound mixed so that a man underwater cannot hear the war he is in. Spielberg worked with Stephen Ambrose and used Dale Dye to put the cast through military training first. The mission itself comes from the Niland brothers, a real family from which the surviving son was pulled out of combat under the sole-survivor policy. Everything after the beach is invented around that documented policy, which is the film's structure: a true rule, and a fiction built to test what the rule costs.