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The Big-Screen Scene Los Angeles Daily News 1-6-1998 by Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith The big-screen scene: It sounds as if Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan'' goes further--much further--than super-sized war epics of the past in bringing gigantic battles to life. "Just the massive scope of the production was the most amazing thing I've ever seen,'' reports actor Leland Orser, who's featured in the recently wrapped film with Tom Hanks, Ted Danson, Ed Burns and Matt Damon. On the London set, "They rebuilt an entire French town that had been bombed out in the war. There were hundreds of extras dressed as war refugees, dead people, American GIs and German soldiers.'' Orser plays a glider pilot in the World War II action drama about a troop that undertakes an unusual mission to save one private trapped behind enemy lines during the Allied invasion of Europe. "My character was actually based on somebody in real life,'' says Orser. "I went and spoke to the guy in Van Nuys who was a glider pilot and is now retired from the armed forces. When I got over there, I was looking at Tom Hanks and all these other guys in uniforms, bodies covered in tarps, parachutes hanging from trees. ... I felt both an honor and an intense responsibility to the past.'' /back |