Spielberg won the toss, giving DreamWorks the favored North American distribution rights and Paramount the international rights. Earnings were held collectively and split evenly between the studios. In exchange, Paramount received the North American distribution rights to DreamWorks' Deep Impact (1998). To keep the budget low, Spielberg and Hanks took minimal upfront salaries in exchange for a guaranteed 17.5% of the gross profits, equivalent to 35 cents of every dollar earned. Rewrite Spielberg's initial concept for Saving Private Ryan was a Boys' Own-style adventure film in which the search for Ryan was a public relations effort by the war department. However, after interviewing WWII veterans for research he found this idea inappropriate, and decided to embed the story within a realistic portrayal of actual events, while portraying the conflicted morality of sending men into life-threatening situations to save one man. He said, "I cannot tell you how many veterans came up to me... and said: 'Please be honest about it. Please don't make another Hollywood movie about WWII. Please tell our stories.' To a person, they said: 'We'll support you if you support us and at least show people—if you've got the guts to do it—how it actually happened. The Nilands were interviewed, and the story was further influenced by other substantial family war losses, including the five Sullivan brothers killed during WWII, and the Bixby brothers during the American Civil War; the resulting letter by Abraham Lincoln is quoted in the film. Spielberg described existing WWII films as "sanitized" and sentimentalized, focused on depicting honor and the glory of service in a manner that was "very safe and wholly untrue". He said, "I remember one of the [veterans] telling me the entire charge up the beach was a blur—not a blur to his memory, because he still remembered every single grain of sand when he had his face buried in it from that fusillade raining down on them from above. But he described how everything was not in focus for him. And he described the sounds, and he described the vibrations of every concussion of every 88 shell that hit the beach, which gave some of them bloody noses, rattled their ears. The ground would come up and slam into their faces from the concussions." Spielberg said he wanted to reflect the courage of the soldiers in the face of "palpable terror, almost blind terror." Ambrose served as a