“I made it too tough”: the iconic movie Steven Spielberg didn’t think anybody wanted to see

Few filmmakers have been able to find the sheer cinematic success that Steven Spielberg has achieved in the past few decades. After rising to prominence in 1975 with Jaws, helping to pioneer the modern blockbuster, Spielberg went on to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was another hit.

It didn’t take long for Spielberg to be considered Hollywood royalty. He consistently released films that became box-office sensations that fared well with critics, like the Indiana Jones series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List. As a result, he has become the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time – you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t watched at least one of his movies at some point in their lives.

The ‘90s was a particularly successful time for the director, and as the decade drew to a close, Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan, which is now considered one of the greatest war movies ever made. Yet, Spielberg didn’t have faith in the film to become the worldwide smash that it inevitably became, partly because he didn’t have the best experience with the test screenings.

While test screenings are designed to see how audiences react to a film before it comes out, sometimes the actual reception of the movie ends up being much better. For Spielberg, the popularity of Saving Private Ryan felt unbelievable after the feedback he received from some of the people who attended a test screening. “I didn’t anticipate the success of the movie,” he told The Los Angeles Times.

The movie was another starring role for Tom Hanks, who was basically inescapable during the ‘90s. In the film, his character, Captain John Miller, leads a rescue team of soldiers who set out to find Matt Damon’s titular character. The movie truly captured the horrors of war, a reality for countless soldiers who must traverse dangerous landscapes and fight for their lives. Spielberg didn’t hold back in showing how war affects soldiers and the moral dilemmas they’re often faced with in combat, which was subsequently praised by critics.

However, several people at an early screening were concerned that Spielberg had made the movie “too tough.” The filmmaker knew that he wanted to show the brutalities of war, even if it was a testing watch for viewers. “In very early screenings, certain associates and other people in my life were saying that I made it too tough. I feared that almost nobody would see it because the word of mouth would spread quickly after the first 25 minutes.”

Luckily, the film proved to be a huge success, and thanks to Spielberg’s life-long obsession with World War Two, having grown up surrounded by veterans, including his father, he used his knowledge to make a blindingly powerful film. “I became absolutely obsessed with the Second World War, based on my father’s stories, recollections and also based on all the World War II movies that eventually began playing on American television,” he explained.

Saving Private Ryan is often regarded as one of his greatest films, and it has proved to be incredibly influential, too. It scooped up various Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Director’ for Spielberg.

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