"It was interesting to do a completely fictional piece. You know, Saving Private Ryan was not a fictional piece! So the challenge was: How do you incorporate real emotions? How do you incorporate aspects that people are going to be able to identify with?"
About this Quote
His questions aren’t just craft talk; they’re anxiety in the form of process. “How do you incorporate real emotions?” is really: How do you prevent genre from turning people into avatars and plot into spectacle? Coming from Diesel - a star whose brand has often leaned on speed, bodies, and franchise physics - the line reads like a self-aware negotiation with his own public image. He knows audiences are trained to dismiss certain kinds of movies as synthetic, and he’s describing the labor of pushing against that reflex.
The subtext is also about identification as a contract. He isn’t chasing “accuracy” so much as recognizability: the small human signals that let viewers plug their own experiences into an invented world. That’s a canny cultural read of post-’90s Hollywood, where legitimacy is policed by proximity to “based on a true story,” and actors in pop machinery have to smuggle sincerity through the gears.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Diesel, Vin. (2026, January 16). It was interesting to do a completely fictional piece. You know, Saving Private Ryan was not a fictional piece! So the challenge was: How do you incorporate real emotions? How do you incorporate aspects that people are going to be able to identify with? FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-was-interesting-to-do-a-completely-fictional-98006/
Chicago Style
Diesel, Vin. "It was interesting to do a completely fictional piece. You know, Saving Private Ryan was not a fictional piece! So the challenge was: How do you incorporate real emotions? How do you incorporate aspects that people are going to be able to identify with?" FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-was-interesting-to-do-a-completely-fictional-98006/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It was interesting to do a completely fictional piece. You know, Saving Private Ryan was not a fictional piece! So the challenge was: How do you incorporate real emotions? How do you incorporate aspects that people are going to be able to identify with?" FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-was-interesting-to-do-a-completely-fictional-98006/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.



