7 The scene where Matt Damon tells the story about him spying on his brother in the barn with an ugly was ad-libbed by the actor. Steven Spielberg liked it so much that he kept it in the movie. 

8 The Omaha Beach battle scene was filmed in sequence one shot after the other every day for four weeks. Spielberg said that he did not storyboard any part of the scene before filming it because he wanted the reactions to be spontaneous. 

9 The two “German” soldiers who get shot while trying to surrender were actually speaking Czech and saying, “Please don’t shoot me, I am not a German, I am a Czech, I didn’t kill anyone!” They were taken prisoners of war when the Germans invaded eastern European countries forced into a German army called Ost (East) Battalion. 

10 The speech Tom Hanks’ character gives the rest of the unit about what he does for a living back home was originally much longer in the script. But he wanted to shorten it because he felt his character wouldn’t have talked so much about himself and Spielberg agreed to it. 

11 Steven Spielberg used drills that were turned on when required to shake the camera to simulate the impact of explosions. While shooting using that effect, the crew’s photographer told him that there was a shaker lens for cameras that could do the same. Later he told in an interview that he thought he invented a great new technique to film such scenes before that.

12 The spare ammunition that the actors carried in the first battle scenes at the sea were made of wood because metal was too heavy to carry.