How filming Saving Private Ryan shook an Irish beach

"Most of the explosive charges on that beach were real, so when they went off the beach shook."

In 1997, the usually peaceful Curracloe Beach in County Wexford was transformed into a scene of bloodshed and horror as Steven Spielberg recreated D-Day in Ireland.

Saving Private Ryan was released to critical and veterans' acclaim for how it depicted the American assault on Omaha Beach.

The story followed the mission of t John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, who was tasked with locating James Francis Ryan, a private whose three brothers had been killed in action.

Northern Ireland filmmaker Mark Huffam was Saving Private Ryan’s unit production manager and associate producer.

He said the sights and sound of that iconic beach scene, more than 20 minutes in length, were "terrifying" to witness.

"The brief from the get-go was: 'We want to make this look real'," Huffam told BBC News NI.

"We’re not out to glamorise war, we want it to look like what those soldiers and men really went through when they hit that beach."

This meant only three special effects were used in the sequence, with real explosions and fire.

Some eight cameras were rolling at once, capturing the emotions of Hanks’ character as he watched the deaths of comrades unfold in a barrage of machine gun bullets, shells and sniper fire.

Normandy was considered as a filming location but quickly ruled out, Huffam explained, due to post-war development along the coast.

Instead, after an extensive search, Curracloe was chosen as its beach gradient allowed the landing craft to come ashore.

Huffam said much of the planning for the film, which took less than 60 days to shoot, was in Spielberg’s mind.

Meeting him for the first time on board a minibus, he said the crew was “always running to keep up with him”.

"We used to every night fax him about 150 questions and you’d come in the next morning and there would be a succinct answer to every single one of them," he explained.

"All the departments would collate the questions they needed answers on: how many soldiers were we going to have in this scene, are they going to be Airborne Division or are they going to be paratroopers, how many Germans are there going to be":[]}