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The official Car Park is at N52.23 306 W006.21. There is also room for 1 car somewhat closer to the cache - at N52.23 110 W006.22.037 - just dont block the driveway!
When interviewed shortly after the launch of the film, Spielberg said that he was unflinching in his desire to depict the Omaha landing as it really happened. "Omaha Beach was a slaughter," the director recounted. "It was a complete foul-up, rom the expeditionary forces, to the reconnaissance forces, to the saturation bombing that missed most of its primary targets. Given that, I didn't want to glamorize it, so I tried to be as brutally honest as I could."
"The adrenaline rush was like nothing I had ever experienced on any other movie, because it was chaos as soon as you stepped out there," Tom Hanks remembers. "There were people falling and explosions going off around you, and it was not hard to imagine that the carnage was real, that it was caused by bullets and mortars and shells. There's terror in our eyes in some of those scenes, and rightly so, because we were genuinely scared... and we knew that it was all fake."
Edward Burns adds, "I'm really glad we shot the D-Day invasion at the beginning of the schedule because it changed the way we looked at every scene that followed it. Nobody was prepared for how horrific it really was, and you really got a sense of what those guys went through."
The filming of the Omaha Beach scene that forms the opening 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan were filmed during the Summer of 1997 using over 800 Irish Army soldiers and FCA members (FCA = Reserves - equivalent of the Territorial Army (UK) or the National Guard (USA)). The entire film was due to have been made in England but production of the landing scene moved to Curracloe when the British MOD refused to allow soldiers to act as extras.
The first problem encountered by the producers was where to shoot. Line producer Ian Bryce scouted locations in Europe, specifically France before zeroing in on England, where a disused aviation factory adapted perfectly to a makeshift studio. After its owner, British Aerospace, showed reluctance, Bryce convinced Britain's Ministry of Defence that the production would bring needed revenue into the Hatfield area, depressed by the facility's closure.
The one problem with Britain was that no beaches were entirely suitable for the D-day landing sequence. "You'd find a great-looking beach," recalls production designer Tom Sanders, "and there'd be no access by roads. Or the nearest harbour for landing craft would be 15 miles away." Then the Defence Ministry refused to allow soldiers to be used as extras, so the producers compromised, filming the landings in Ireland. Their decision was helped by the Irish government providing several hundred reserve soldiers as extras - and some of these men were already experienced film extras, many having taken part in the Braveheart battle scenes, filmed on the Curragh of Kildare.
Ireland also had climate in its favour. D-Day-(June 6, 1944)-was overcast, and, says Sanders, "I thought we should definitely have cloudiness. Sunshine would make it look like a picnic. Ireland offered the best chance of cloudy days. As it turned out we had loads!
Yet a storm that blew in a week before shooting started destroyed two-thirds of the production's beach dressings. The crew had buried enormous logs in the sand, like those designed by Rommel to which the Germans at Normandy had attached mines. But the storm ripped them from their concrete moorings and they had to be reset twice as securely. Apart from the extras, who were housed under canvas on the grounds of a Wexford college, a total of 500 cast and crew worked on the film, taking up almost all available accommodation for miles around. Filming also took it's toll on some of the soldiers, with several experiencing hypothermia during the filming in the cold water.
There are many still frames from the filming of "Saving Private Ryan" in a pub in Kilmuckridge, about 10 miles away.
