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Saving Private Ryan

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Building his sound mix from hundreds of audio tracks with a virtuosity that makes Puff Daddy look like a piker, Rydstrom drew on an astonishingly precise library of sounds. He used the Internet to locate caches of working weaponry and equipment all over the country, then traveled to record them (the Browning automatic rifles, for instance, were found in Georgia). Why do the bullets ripping into human flesh seem so sickeningly vivid? Because it was flesh: It's the sound of working WWII guns firing into animal carcasses and butcher-cut slabs of pork.

Spielberg was so set on not using the movie cliché of echoey ricochets that he "called many, many times about it," Rydstrom says. Chasing that same sense of authenticity, Rydstrom talked to many war vets. "What they mentioned again and again," he recalls, "is that German machine guns sounded more ferocious than ours. A German MG-42 shot 1,100 rounds per minute, about twice as many as the comparable American gun. That sound became very distinctive and very scary to GIs because the bullets came so fast, they were just a blur of chdddddt."

As a result of some exceptional filmmaking and collaboration, audiences have come closer to feeling what it was like to be in the crossfire of those weapons than any civilians in history.

Originally posted Aug 21, 1998 Published in issue #446-447 Aug 21, 1998 Order article reprints

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